Book A Speaker

Dr. Bedour Alagraa is Assistant professor of Political and Social Thought in the Department of African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin. A self-described ‘wayward political theorist’, she received her Ph.D. from the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University in the Spring of 2019, where she was an Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Fellow. She also holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Toronto, and a Masters in Race, Ethnicity, and Post-Colonial Studies from the London School of Economics.

Bunmi Samuel is a multi-faceted activist, organizer, and storyteller. Born in New York to a family of theater professionals and community activists, he inherited a work ethic and sense of purpose. He is an alumnus of Temple University, where he began a career as a school developer, working to build infrastructure and advocacy networks.

More recently, Samuel has focused his energy on raising awareness for infrastructural issues faced by individuals using wheelchairs. He is also the founder of ABLEWORLD, a hospitality and travel group working to normalize independence and access. Additionally, he is a writer and consultant.

For two years (1963-1964) Bruce Hartford was a full-time activist in the L.A. Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Non-Violent Action Committee (N-VAC). In 1965 he became a field secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Alabama and Mississippi. He worked on the Selma voting rights campaign and the March to Montgomery, and was later project director for Crenshaw County Alabama voter registration.

Charles E. Cobb Jr., is a retired senior analyst for allAfrica.com, the world’s largest electronic provider of news and information from Africa. He is also a visiting professor at Brown University where he conducts an undergraduate seminar titled The Organizing Tradition of the Southern Civil Rights Movement. He was a SNCC field secretary in Mississippi from 1962-67.

While a Howard University student, Courtland Cox became a member of NAG and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1963 he served as the SNCC representative on the Steering Committee for the March on Washington. In 1964, he was a SNCC organizer of the 1964 Freedom Summer Project in the Mississippi Delta. Later that year he served as Program Secretary of SNCC.

Dr. Felicia Denaud is a writer and professor from Cincinnati, Ohio. Her work preserves and advances a radical history of ideas about political life and power. Denaud’s current book project Western Fundamentalism | Abolition War makes the case for a reconceptualization of warfare based on the multi-century Black struggle against state and master power.

Born in Alabama, Jennifer Lawson first marched for civil rights in 1963 in what became known as the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, AL. She attended Tuskegee University and left to work full-time with SNCC in Lowndes County, Alabama where she drew billboards, comics, booklets, and leaflets in support of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, publicizing the work of the people of Lowndes County and their political party’s symbol, the black panther.

John B. Gartrell serves as director of the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University. Mr. Gartrell has served in this position since 2012, and has been a professional archivist for over two decades. His primary responsibilities within the Franklin Research Center include: the acquisition of rare book and manuscript collections, the promotion of use of the collections, development of public programing and events, curating exhibitions, and management of research services requests.

Dr. Joshua M. Myers is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University and a board member of the SNCC Legacy Project. He is the author of We Are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Protest of 1989 (NYU Press, 2019), Cedric Robinson (Polity Press, 2021), Of Black Study (Pluto, 2023), and Holy Ghost Key (2024), as well as the editor of A Gathering Together: Literary Journal.

Judy Richardson was on SNCC staff in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama (1963-66). Her experiences in SNCC continue to ground both her film and education work. She is currently co-directing the new visitor center film for the National Park Service’s Frederick Douglass House in Washington, D.C.

Tiffany D. Loftin, Founding Member of Freedom Side, former Director of NAACP Youth & College Division, and presently a National Labor and Education Organizer and host of the “How We Get Free” Podcast.

Wesley Hogan is Research Professor at the Franklin Humanities Institute and History at Duke University. She writes and teaches the history of youth social movements, human rights, documentary studies, and oral history. Her most recent book, On the Freedom Side, draws a portrait of young people organizing in the spirit of Ella Baker since 1960. In July 2021, her and Paul Ortiz’s co-edited, People Power: History, Organizing, and Larry Goodwyn’s Democratic Vision in the Twenty-First Century, came out from the University of Florida Press.