Our Consultants

MARTHA BIONDI, Professor of African American Studies and History at Northwestern University, is the author of, Black Revolution on Campus and To Stand and To Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Post-war New York City.

NOLIWE M. ROOKS, The W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of Literature at Cornell University, is the author of Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education which won an award for non-fiction from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, and White Money/Black Power: African American Studies and the Crises of Race in Higher Education.

CHARLES M. PAYNE, Distinguished Professor of African American Studies and Director of the Joseph Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Research at Rutgers University. He is the author of So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools and Debating the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1968.

GLORIA LADSON-BILLINGS, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Education at the University of Wisconsin, is the author of The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children and Crossing Over to Canaan: The Journey of New Teachers in Diverse Classrooms, as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters. She is President of the National Academy of Education, a Fellow of The American Academy of Arts & Sciences and a Fellow of The American Educational Research Association.

JAMES TRAUB, Professor of American Foreign Policy is a Senior Fellow at New York University's Center on International Cooperation (CIC)at New York University,’s Abu Dhabi campus; and is the author of City on a Hill: Testing the American Dream at City College.

PENIEL JOSEPH holds a joint professorship appointment at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the History Department in the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin. His most recent book is The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. He also wrote the Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America, and Stokely: A Life.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS OPIE, Professor of History at Babson College, is the author of Upsetting the Apple Cart: Black-Latino Coalitions in New York City From Protest to Public Office.