Sam Anderson (S.E. Anderson), a veteran activist/educator, has been in the Black Liberation Movement on many levels. He was not only a mathematics professor, a senior editor (NOBO: Journal of African Dialogue), a founding member of the Network of Black Organizers, and of the African Heritage Studies Association, but he is also an essayist on a variety of topics related to Black culture and liberation, as well as science and technology. His political and cultural activism in his native New York City ranges from helping to fund the New York City Algebra Project to being a founding member of the New York City Coalition For Excellence In Black Education. As a young activist, Mr. Anderson helped found an iteration of the Black Panther Party, which was focused on education, in Harlem in 1966. He has been active in the African Liberation Support Movement since 1964 and participated in the historic Black student/community struggle against Columbia University’s encroachment into Harlem in 1968. Ironically, almost twenty years later, he became a Columbia University Revson Fellow (1986-7). In addition, he has taught mathematics, science, and Black Studies at Queens College. Mr. Anderson became one of the first Black Studies chairs, when, in 1969, he accepted the challenge at Sarah Lawrence College to create a department that included mathematics and the natural sciences as part of a Black Studies Curriculum.
Vinnie Bagwell is an American sculptor. A representational-figurative artist, Ms. Bagwell uses traditional bas-relief techniques as visual narratives to expand her storytelling. She casts in bronze and bronze resin. She has won numerous public-art commissions and awards around the United States. She was born in Yonkers, New York, grew up in the Town of Greenburgh. She displayed a remarkable gift for drawing at an early age and developed a passion for painting in high school. A Morgan State University alumna, she is an untutored artist and began sculpting in 1993.
Ms. Bagwell co-authored the book, A Study of African-American Life in Yonkers From the Turn of the Century, with Harold A. Esannason in 1992. In the mid-90s, many followed her compelling articles in her weekly column for Gannett Suburban Newspapers/The Herald Statesman. She was also a contributing writer for The Harlem Times.
Ms. Bagwell is credited with reframing public art to include historic Black images. Her first public artwork, “The First Lady of Jazz” at the Yonkers Metro-North/Amtrak train station was commissioned by the City of Yonkers. It is the first public artwork of a contemporary African American woman to be commissioned by a municipality in the United States. “Walter ‘Doc’ Hurley”, a 7-foot bronze of a Hartford local legend is the first public artwork of a contemporary African American in the state of Connecticut.
Following unanimous conceptual approval by the city of New York, Ms. Bagwell will begin creating “Victory...” an 18’ angel, which pays homage to enslaved women that Marion Sims, MD performed gynecological surgery on with no anesthesia. It will be placed outside of Central Park on Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street. In fall 2021, she completed “The Enslaved Africans’ Rain Garden,”an urban-heritage public-art project featuring five life-sized bronzes, for the city of Yonkers, to commemorate the legacy of the first enslaved Africans to be manumitted by law in the United States, sixty-four years before the Emancipation Proclamation. In 2020, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation commissioned the 7-foot “Sojourner Truth” to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment and the Women’s Suffrage Movement for the Walkway Over the Hudson in Highland.
The District of Columbia Department of General Services commissioned “What’s Going On!,” music-icon Marvin Gaye, “The Man in the Arena” (Theodore Roosevelt), “Contraband”, and “The Immortals.” The City of Memphis commissioned “Legacies” at Chickasaw Heritage Park, and Hofstra University commissioned “Frederick Douglass Circle,” the 24-inch maquette is the centerpiece for the Frederick Douglass Museum and Cultural Center in Highland Beach, Maryland.
Director Ruben Santiago-Hudson sought Ms. Bagwell out to create the piano artwork for August Wilson’s play, “The Piano Lesson” for the Signature Theatre in New York City. “Liberté,” a 22-inch high bronze was exhibited in the inaugural, year-long exhibition to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides at the new Freedom Rides Museum in Montgomery.
The creative genius of Vinnie Bagwell’s work gives voice to our stories and meaning to our legacies.
Playthell George Benjamin, noted blogger and journalist, is the producer of “Commentaries On the Times,” which he writes and delivers on WBAI. Mr. Benjamin is an award-winning journalist, who has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in two different categories. His byline has also appeared in the Guardian Observer of London, the Sunday Times of London, High Times, the Village Voice, and others. He was on the founding faculty of the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Herb Boyd is a professor, journalist, and author, who has written or edited twenty-two books, including, Three Centuries of African American History as Told by Those Whole Lived It (oral histories); Civil Rights: Yesterday and Today; Baldwin’s Harlem, a biography of James Baldwin (finalist for NAACP Image Award); Brotherman—The Odyssey of Black Men in America (an anthology) (with Robert Allen, received American Book Award); We Shall Overcome (used in classrooms internationally); Autobiography of a People; and The Harlem Reader. He has scripted several documentaries on cold cases of martyrs from the Civil Rights era.
Valerie Jo Bradley is co-founder and president of Save Harlem Now! —an award-winning nonprofit advocacy organization formed to preserve historic buildings and landscapes reflecting important African American history from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She was featured in the 2016 New York Times article “Much to Save in Harlem, but Historic Preservation Lags, a Critic Says,” about Save Harlem Now’s founding.
A staunch community activist, she is president and co-founder of the Marcus Garvey Park Alliance (MGPA). Along with other stakeholders, MGPA worked to restore the landmark Harlem Fire Watchtower—the only surviving cast-iron, post-and-lintel tower that was used to spot fires in New York City in the mid 1800s. That restoration project received an Excellence in Historic Preservation Award from the League in 2020.
Ms. Bradley operated The Bradley Group, a public relations and event planning firm for twenty-eight years before she closed it in 2022. She earned a B.A. degree at Indiana University and completed graduate studies at the University of California Berkeley School of Journalism. In 1977, she moved from San Francisco to New York to serve as deputy counselor for press and public affairs at the United States Mission to the United Nations, where she was a spokesperson for Ambassadors Andrew Young and Donald McHenry. Ms. Bradley also held positions in the State Division of Housing & Community Renewal and the New York City Department of Housing Preservation & Development before launching her business.
Her interest in Harlem began in 1980, when she purchased and restored an 1898 brownstone townhouse. What began as a real estate venture quickly evolved into her assuming an activist role in promoting and campaigning for the preservation of Harlem’s architectural treasures, cultural history, and economic growth. As she said in a 2021 Veranda magazine article, “We realized we’ve got to be organized and proactive to deal with the fact that only 3.7 percent of Harlem’s buildings are landmarked compared to 66 percent of Greenwich Village and 50 percent of the Upper West and Upper East sides.”
She is co-author of Harlem Travel Guide, the first tour book to focus exclusively on Harlem. Having once operated a community-based tour company, she created a course at City College's School of Continuing Education to help Harlem residents conduct tours in their neighborhoods and become licensed tour guides.
Ms. Bradley uses her time and talents to highlight, preserve, and promote her beloved Harlem. She has worked for more than fifty years as a journalist and publicist. A native of Indianapolis, Indiana, she calls Harlem home. Her commitment to protecting Harlem’s architectural and cultural heritage makes her a true pillar of New York.
Ansley Erickson is an associate professor of history and education policy at Teachers College (TC), co-director of the TC Center on History and Education, and co-editor of Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community.
Steven G. Fullwood is an archivist, writer, and cultural documentarian committed to preserving the histories of people of African descent. A Toledo, Ohio native, Steven’s career spans over thirty years, including more than nineteen years at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where he founded the In the Life Archive, the largest collection of materials by and about LGBTQ people of African descent. In 2004, Mr. Fullwood founded Vintage Entity Press, where he published works of poetry, fiction, and anthologies, including Black Gay Genius: Answering Joseph Beam’s Call and Carry the Word: A Bibliography of Black LGBTQ Books with RedBone Press (2007). His work has earned recognition from The New York Times and the New York Public Library, but his greatest honor is being in service to the global Black community, past, present, and future.
LaShawn Harris is a native New Yorker. She is an associate professor of History at Michigan State University and assistant editor for The Journal of African American History. Her area of expertise includes twentieth century United States and African American histories. Dr. Harris’s scholarly articles have appeared in The Journal of African American History, Journal of Social History, Journal of Urban History, and the Journal for the Study of Radicalism. Her first monograph Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy, explores how a diverse group of African American women carved out unique niches for themselves within New York City's expansive underground economy. In 2017, Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners won the Organization of American Historians’ Darlene Clark Hine Book Award for the best book in African American women's history, and the Philip Taft Labor Prize in Labor and Working-Class History for the best book in labor history. Her recent publication, which appears in SOULS: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, examines the less familiar life of 1984 police shooting victim and Bronx resident Eleanor Bumpurs. Her book, Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs & the Police Killing That Galvanized New York City, was released in August.
Lennox S. Hinds is a professor emeritus of law and former chair of the Administration of Justice Program, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. A graduate of The City College of New York and Rutgers Law School, he was awarded the law school’s J. Skelly Wright Award for contribution to civil rights.
He was a Charles H. Revson Fellow, Center for Legal Education and Urban Policy, City College of New York 1979-80. In addition to his practice as a criminal defense and international human rights lawyer, he was Nelson Mandela’s US attorney and counsel in the US to the government of South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa and the South West African Peoples Organization (SWAPO) of Namibia. He is the permanent representative to the United Nations for the International Association of Democratic Lawyers.
Before joining Stevens, Hinds and White, PC, as its senior partner, with law offices in New York, New Jersey, Great Britain, and Johannesburg, Hinds served for many years as national director of the National Conference of Black Lawyers of the US and Canada. He has represented a number of politically unpopular clients, including Assata Shakur (Joanne Chesimard), the New York 8, and victims of police brutality and other governmental lawlessness including the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO).
Hinds has traveled, written, and lectures extensively in Africa, Europe, Asia, and North America on international human rights issues and on the impact of racism on the operation of the law, particularly the criminal justice systems of the US. He has published and taught about crimes against humanity under international law for more than two decades and has presented expert testimony on the Crimes Against Humanity of the Apartheid Regime before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Johannesburg, South Africa presided over by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
He is admitted to practice before the Unites States Supreme Court, the International Criminal Court for Rwanda (ICTR), the International Criminal Court for Yugoslavia (ICTY), the Permanent International Criminal Court in The Hague and the Special Court for Sierra Leone.
Most recently, Hinds has been appointed by the UN as lead counsel to represent the interest of defendants accused by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) of genocide, crimes against humanity, and other serious violations of international humanitarian law.
He is one of the few US attorneys appointed to the panel of defense lawyers by the United Nations. He has served on International Commissions of Inquiries and worked for the release of political prisoners in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. He assisted in drafting the Luanda Convention on Mercenaries in Luanda, Angola in 1976.
Janice Jenkins was born in Brooklyn, New York. She received a B.A. in Dramatic Arts and Speech from Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. After graduating, she took acting classes with Maxwell Glanville, and joined the 127th Street Repertory Company of the Afro American Studio, under the direction of Ernie McClintock.
A founding member of the H.A.D.L.E.Y. Players under the artistic direction of Ms. Gertrude Jeannette, Ms. Jenkins has functioned as its beginning acting instructor, house manager, and, finally, as its artistic director for four years.
Ms. Jenkins has received two AUDELCO Awards for acting: in 1995, she won in the Best One Person Performance category for In Pursuit of Justice by Wendy Jones, directed by Bruce Edwin Jenkins; and in 1998, she won in the Lead Actress category for A Bolt From the Blue, written and directed by Gertrude Jeannette.
During her tenure as artistic director, The H.A.D.L.E.Y. Players received the 2008 AUDELCO Award for Dramatic Production of the Year for The Guest of Central Park West, by Levy Simon, directed by Bruce Edwin Jenkins.
Akemi Kochiyama is the granddaughter of human rights activist, Yuri Kochiyama. Akemi is co-editor of Passing It On: A Memoir, by Yuri Kochiyama, and co-director of the Yuri Kochiyama Solidarity Project. She is a Harlem-based scholar-activist, community builder, and fundraising professional with more than twenty years of experience in the nonprofit sector. The Yuri Kochiyama Solidarity Project’s (YKSP) mission is to carry on Yuri’s legacy—her passion for justice and lifelong commitment to connecting people, communities, and movements to each other. A graduate of Spelman College, Akemi is a doctoral candidate in the Ph.D. Program in Cultural Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Bibi Esperanza “Espe” Martell is an Afro/Boricua/Puerto Rican human rights peace educator, organizer, healer, coach, mother, and poet/artist. Since the late 60s she has worked with a class, race, gender lens on varied social justice issues such as the independence of Puerto Rico, peace, political prisoners, women of color, housing, education, health, police, and male violence. The focus of her work is developing community-of-color leadership, training and mentoring anti-capitalist educators/organizers using Paulo Freire and Franz Fanon’s Marxist methodology for liberation, organizing, and healing in community.
As an artist, Esperanza’s Ceramic Sculpture de Terra y Mar has allowed her to find new ways to express her ideas about life, her African/Taino heritage, women's culture, freedom, peace, and spirituality. She has exhibited in many community venues.
She is a retired City University of New York (CUNY) professor and advisor from the Hunter College Silberman School of Social Work. A graduate of the City College of New York (CCNY), Hunter College School of Social Work, as well as a 2003-04 Revson Fellow (Columbia University).
Her publications include:
Her papers are available at:
The Bronx County Historical Society www.bronxhistoricalsociety.org
The Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College, NY
https://centropr.hunter.cuny.eduCentroPR | Center for Puerto Rican Studies
Minkah Makalani is associate professor and director of the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He is also the author of In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939, which examines Caribbean radicals’ encounter with organized Marxism in Harlem and London, during the early twentieth century. He considers how these activist-intellectuals combined their experiences of racial oppression, colonial domination, and diasporic interactions with western radical thought to articulate a Black internationalist, independent politics. He is also co-editor of Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem, with Davarian Baldwin. This collection gathers together works from the leading scholars of early twentieth century Black political, organizational, and literary production that is most popularly known as the Harlem Renaissance, to consider the national and global parameters of the New Negro Movement.
He is currently at work on two book projects. The first, Calypso Conquered the World: C. L. R. James and the Politically Unimaginable in Trinidad, examines C.L.R. James’s return to Trinidad from 1958 to 1962, when he worked in Eric Williams’s People’s National Movement as editor of its newspaper, The Nation. In this period, James put forward his most developed thinking about democracy, the arts, political leadership, and the challenges facing postcolonial societies, particularly the problems confronting Caribbean independence given the historical roots in. The second, Words Past the Margin: Black Thought and the Impossible, is a collection of essays on Black radical thought as it appears in Black politics and popular culture, including the 2014 Ferguson uprising, the cinema of Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene, the Five Percent Nation of Gods and Earths, and freedom in hip-hop sampling.
His scholarly articles have appeared in such journals as Small Axe, Social Text, South Atlantic Quarterly, Souls, The Journal of African American History, and Women, Gender, and Families of Color. He has also written for The New Yorker, New York Times, Slate, Ebony, and the African American Intellectual History Society’s Black Perspectives blog.
Rosemari Mealy has taught as an adjunct professor at several City University of New York (CUNY) schools. Over the years she taught numerous courses including The Color Line, Labor History, and Women In International Liberation Movements. She is the author of Fidel and Malcolm X: Memories of a Meeting. Rosemari holds a Ph.D. from Capella University and a J.D. from the City University of New York School of Law.
Ruth Messinger has made the Hebrew phrase, “Tikkun Olam,” repairing the world, the active force of her personal and professional life.
Ms. Messinger is, perhaps, best known in New York for the twelve years she spent on the City Council followed by her tenure as Manhattan Borough President from 1990 to 1997. She was a strong advocate for children, public education, campaign finance reform, gay rights, community policing, neighborhoods, and small businesses.
Today, as director of the American Jewish World Service, she has extended her “tikkun olam” from metropolitan New York to the rest of the world.
A third generation New Yorker, Ms. Messinger grew up on the Upper West Side, went to the Brearley School, graduated from Radcliffe College, and received a masters degree in social work from the University of Oklahoma. She began her social service at the age of fourteen when she decided to work at the Settlement House Camp, instead of just putting some of her allowance in the “pushke” (charity box). She insists that her mother, Marjorie Wyler, was the first pioneer in the family. After receiving her B.A. and her M.A. in philosophy at Bryn Mawr College, her mother worked for fifty years at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, where she created the Department of Public Information and became the executive director of The Eternal Light on radio and television. However, family service began with her grandfather who became the first executive director of Jewish Federation in 1915.
Mark Naison is a professor of History and African American Studies at Fordham University, and was a collaborator on the Bronx African American History Project. He conducted more than 150 interviews with African American professionals, community activists, and musicians who grew up in the Bronx. The first product of this research, It Takes a Village to Raise a Child: Growing Up in the Patterson Houses in the 1950s was published in the Bronx County Historical Journal. He is also the author of the award-winning Communists In Harlem During the Depression. Mark earned a Ph.D. in American History from Columbia University, and a B.A. and M.A.—both in American History—also from Columbia University.
Ademola Olugebefola is an educator, activist, and multi-talented artist. The versatility of his practice encompasses graphic design, illustration, theater set design, printmaking, oil painting, drawing, sculpture, and murals, among other artistic forms. Born in the United States Virgin Islands as Bedwick Loyola Thomas, he was just four years old when his family moved to New York City. Having found success as a jazz musician, he began painting in 1963 in a Brooklyn garage. He was drawn to Harlem where he joined other pioneering artists and musicians working in the community at that time and soon formed the Weusi Artists Collective, which took its name from the Swahili word for Blackness. He became a member and eventually an elder of Harlem’s Yoruba Temple, and in 1965, was given the name Ademola Olugebefola by its founder, Oba Oseijeman Adefunmi.
Olugebefola’s imagery has long built on cosmology and the belief that the origins of people lay beyond the earth, specifically situating Africa’s origins among the stars. The faces, pyramid shapes, and vibrant colors in his paintings anchor the works as though journeying across space and millennia. Olugebefola played an important role in Harlem’s Black Arts Movement beginning in the mid 1960s and has continued to occupy a significant place in the community’s cultural networks since.
Marina J. Ortiz was born and raised in East Harlem/El Barrio. She also lived in the South Bronx. Ms. Ortiz has drawn fromher background to create a versatile body of work that includes broadcast, print and web journalism, photography, video,spoken word, and other forms of cultural and political expression that highlight her experience as a Puerto Rican activist inNew York City. During the 1990s, Ms. Ortiz produced public affairs, news, and cultural programming at Pacifica-WBAIRadio and was active in the Nuyorican spoken word poetry community. In 2012, her poems and essays were published inBreaking Ground: Anthology of Puerto Rican Women Writers in New York 1980-2012. Ms. Ortiz still performs(occasionally) at community venues. She has also been an avid documentarian of the Puerto Rican and East Harlemcommunity for over twenty-five years. By her own estimation, she has taken hundreds of thousands photographs andvideos that capture historic moments often ignored by the mainstream media. In 2014, her Lost and Found Murals of EastHarlem exhibition at the East Harlem Café was featured on NY 1.
In 2004, Ms. Ortiz founded Virtual Boricua—a multi-media outlet that chronicles stateside Puerto Rican history andcultural traditions and champions the independence of Puerto Rico. She is a member of several New York City solidaritygroups that support island-based campaigns against economic austerity, university tuition increases, political repression,and environmental injustices in Puerto Rico and Vieques. In 2017, Ms. Ortiz co-led a community relief effort in EastHarlem to support families devastated by Hurricane Maria. She is also the founder of East Harlem Preservation (EHP), agrassroots volunteer organization that works to preserve and promote local history and culture, while combatinggentrification, police brutality, and other social injustices. EHP led a successful campaign to remove the statue of J.Marion Sims (a white southern doctor who experimented on Black female slaves and their infants without anesthesia),and vociferously fought the 2017 up-zoning of East Harlem. EHP provides free news and information about neighborhoodprograms and upcoming events through its popular social media accounts, website, and email alerts. The organization hasalso worked with community artists to create and/or restore four outdoor murals honoring political and cultural icons andhas been involved in several street co-naming campaigns, including a 2025-26 campaign paying tribute to the late DylciaPagan.
Ms. Ortiz has partnered with many local artists and organizations such as the Annual Brides March, Beyond Sims: Committee to Empower Voices for Healing and Equity, Black Youth Project 100 (NYC), East Harlem/El Barrio CommunityLand Trust, El Museo Del Barrio, FSUMC/The People’s Church, Harlem African Burial Ground Task Force, Harlem-Palestine Peace Walk for Justice and Liberation, Historic Districts Council, Hunter College East Harlem Art Gallery,Juneteenth Block Party, La Marqueta, Landmark East Harlem, Manhattan Neighborhood Network, the Justice Center in ElBarrio, the Lyric Lab, Union Settlement, and others.
Byron C. Saunders wears many hats. He is an arts management consultant, actor, director, producer, dramaturge, historian, radio and podcast personality, and civil rights activist. His highlights and many credits include helping artists and arts organizations with grants administration, fund development, marketing, public relations, box office management, house management, event planning, and fundraising development.
Based in Winston Salem, North Carolina, most recently, he has worked with the Frank Silvera Writers’ Workshop as a consultant and director of several of their scheduled readings as part of their 50th Anniversary Season of New Play Readings. He produced and directed: I Got the Last Laugh (inspired by the life and times of Jackie “Moms” Mabley), at the International Black Theater Festival 2024 in Winston Salem; Elders Igniting: Many More Stories To Tell and three one-act plays in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2024; Superheroes & Other Men, in New York City, in 2024; It Takes A Village, atthe National Black Theater Festival, in 2022; Lambs To Slaughter, at the Negro Ensemble Company, in New York City, in 2022. Mr. Saunders served as producer of a theatrical/film short, Simon Says, which was a finalist for the 1st Annual Playbill Virtual Theater Festival 2020. He was stage manager and associate producer for Eve of Beltane, an Irish musical love story, as part of the Broadway Bound Theater Festival, in 2019-20. Mr. Saunders also directed The Fannie Lou Hamer Story, an award-winning theatrical production starring Mzuri Moyo Aimbaye. He also was the acting assistant director at the Louis Armstrong House Museum, located in Corona, New York.
From 2011 to 2016, Mr. Saunders was blessed with his own radio show, The BCS Experience: History-Arts-Culture-Politics in Review and Discussion that was heard every Wednesday from 5-6 pm (EST) on www.goproradio.com network. This internet radio talk show took a look at the rich history—African American History—of known and unknown facts and present-day events, and how they definitely shaped the future of African Americans in this country and around the world. His show was the new “Underground Railroad Express.”
He returned to New York City in 2009 as the executive director for the Wyckoff Association/Wyckoff Farmhouse Museum. The Wyckoff Farmhouse Museum is New York City’s and the state’s oldest historic landmark that was built in 1652. It is also one of the ten oldest wooden structures in the United States and is listed on the National Register of Historic landmarks. It was an honor to protect one of our country’s historic treasures.
Other recent credits include working as director of the Best Play of the 2016 One Festival, Marlene Goes to Hollywood. He played Mohandas K. Gandhi in the production of Peace Speaks; and Dr. A.C. Jackson in the production of Black Wall Street: The Story of the 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma Race Riots. In Harlem, he was the executive director of the Frank Silvera Writer’s Workshop, which, on his watch, won an Obie Award for Playwriting Development. For eight years, he was the executive director for the Queens Historical Society, preserving the history of 2.5 million people living in the borough of Queens, New York City.
Mr. Saunders was the first general manager for Black Spectrum Theater in Jamaica, Queens. Upon his return to Atlanta (2001), he worked as the production manager for Theater of the Stars Broadway Summer Series at the Fox Theater; development director for 7 Stages Theater and was the executive director/artistic Ddrector for Jomandi Productions.
Mr. Saunders is no stranger to the Atlanta arts scene. He was the executive director for the DeKalb Council for the Arts, Inc. He ran Just Us Theater Company for ten years and was a member of the Georgia Film Commission for seven.
His awards also include: QPTV/CAPA Award for Best Documentary for Historic Movie Palaces of Queens; Borough of Queens Preservation Award; NAACP/Flushing Branch, Community Service Award; and a KOOL Achiever Arts Award from Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation.
William Seraile is professor emeritus of Lehman College. He joined Lehman’s faculty in 1971 and was one of the nation’s pioneers in teaching African American history in an academic department. He received a B.A. from Central Washington University; an M.S. in Education from Teachers College, Columbia University; and a doctorate from the City University of New York. Bill’s honors include the Unsung Historian Award from the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History; and the William Leo Hansberry Award for Contributions in History. He is the author of many articles, monographs, and books, including Angels of Mercy: White Women and the History of New York’s Colored Orphan Asylum; and Bruce Grit: The Black Nationalist Writings of John Edward Bruce.
Karen D. Taylor is the founding director of While We Are Still Here (WWSH). She is driven by her passion to bring the cultural history of Harlem to the forefront of now, and to keep it relevant for generations to come. Inspired by the national discussion on “gentrification,” she is moved to steward the creation of programming that wraps the arts and humanities in a package that is a gift to the future. She formerly consulted as the director of public history for Columbia University/Teachers College's Harlem Education History Project. WWSH partnered with CHE on a cohort of an NEH Summer Institute, and sharing the history of the Modern School.
Ms. Taylor has served as interim director for the Roundtable of Institutions of Color, housed at the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service, New York University, a research arm of the school that was devoted to assessing the state of African American and Latino communities. She has also served as managing editor for Scholastic Books and Amistad Press. As a fundraising development professional, she worked for the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Feminist Press at the City University of New York (CUNY), and the Brecht Forum.
She has also conceptualized and produced academic conferences, concerts, and workshops for institutions that include the Apollo; Teachers College; Barnard; the CUNY Graduate Center’s Office of Continuing Education and Public Programming; New York University; and the Center for Law and Social Justice at Medgar Evers College. These events ranged from “Women of Color: The Forgotten Members of the City,” to “Pops: Celebrating the Centennial of Louis Armstrong,” to “If You Live In Harlem, Please Don’t Breathe Deeply,” regarding air pollution in urban environments. While at the Feminist Press, she conceptualized and developed a fully funded educational program that used the Press's publications to develop curriculum for incarcerated women at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility.
Ms. Taylor has also curated/co-curated art exhibits, including "After the Flypaper: Harlem In Words and Images (1955-2018)," "The Harrises of Harlem: Eight Generations—The Mildred Harris Collection" and "Jazz Notes: A Tribute to an African American Art Form."
She is also a multi-genre artist, who has appeared as a vocalist and poet at the Schomburg’s Women In Jazz series; and at Transart’s Jazz In the Valley, she premiered a spoken-word/ music tribute to Jayne Cortez, "A Jazz Fan Looks Back." Ms. Taylor has also performed as a playwright in the New York International Fringe Festival. She received a commission from Harlem Stage’s Fund for New Work; and grant support from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
She also worked in various editorial capacities for the University of North Carolina, Audubon, and Taylor & Francis-an academic and scientific publisher, as well as others. As an adjunct professor of English at the College of New Rochelle, she taught writing and composition. Her essay, "Still Occupied: My Report on the Safety of My Sons," published in Transition Magazine was cited in the Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction Category, in 2016 Best American Essays, edited by Jonathon Franzen. Her piece, “The Adult Movie,” was also published in Transition Magazine.
She holds an M.F.A. in Writing (Creative Nonfiction) from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and a B.S. in African American Literature from the State University of New York, Empire State College.
She has been a Harlem resident for more than thirty years.
Shirley C. Taylor started her professional journey as an arts administrator at the New York Foundation for the Arts and has since built a career leading a variety of arts and cultural education programs throughout New York City: associate director for Visual Arts Programs at ArtsConnection, Inc.; director of arts programs at University Settlement Society; deputy director of programs, education for the Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning; and director of education and public programs at the Noguchi Museum. Ms. Taylor has provided consulting services for a number of education and cultural organizations including the Partnership for After School Education, Artmakers, Inc., Center for Bronx Nonprofits, and Yaffa Cultural Arts.
While at ArtsConnection, she established the Student Arts Program, a competitive exhibition series that awarded scholarships and art supplies to over two hundred New York City middle and high school students during her tenure.
In 2006, Ms. Taylor helped establish the Apollo Theater’s Education Department, which provides arts-in-education, media, and humanities programming. She created professional- and career-development programs for teens and young adults including Apollo’s internship and Saturday workshops, which provide high school students with hands-on career exposure in arts-and-entertainment administration and technical stage production. She also created School Day Live, a live performance series for young audiences; the Oral History Project, which engages students in recording the stories of those in their communities; and digital- and distance-learning programs that have expanded Apollo’s reach to school- and out-of-school-time audiences. As creator and lead curator of Apollo Live Wire, she has provided public programming centering the performing arts for a variety of audiences.
She is a recipient of the New York City School Art League Charles Robertson Memorial Award and the National Association of Negro Business & Professional Women’s Club, Inc. Professional Award; and has served as a member of the New York City Department of Education’s advisory board for arts education and on the board of directors for One World Arts. She is presently on the board of directors of Willie Mae Rock Camp, a nonprofit organization providing music education to girls and gender-expansive youth. Ms. Taylor is an assistant adjunct professor, Africana Studies, at Barnard College.
A visual artist, she holds an M.F.A. in painting from the City University of New York and certifications from the Columbia Business School Institute in Harlem for Not-for-Profit Management, the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS), and the American Express Leadership Academy.
Susan Watson Turner, filmmaker, scholar, producer, director, and writer, began her theatre career at the Karamu Theatre in Cleveland, Ohio. She has directed and produced for community, regional, and off–Broadway theatre. Ben Brantley, New York Times reviewer, referred to her directorial skill as “elegant choreography” in the play North 17th Street, by Clay Goss. Ms. Watson Turner served at the Negro Ensemble Company as general manager, producing director, and board member. She has directed and produced numerous short films and documentaries, including The Mattress Hustle, Journey of Seven Guitars, Buffalo Hero: The Story of Wayne Miner, and many others. Her article, Why Theatre, Mr. Baldwin? was published in James Baldwin: Challenging Authors in 2015. She has served as a board member for the New Federal Theatre and is a full professor of multi-media theatre at Lehman College. For more details, please visit www.swatsonturnerfilms.com
Dr. Vanessa Valdés is an independent writer and scholar whose work focuses on the literatures, visual arts, and histories of Black peoples throughout the Western hemisphere. An engaging speaker, she worked as a professor and administrator at the City University of New York for seventeen years, from 2007-2024, earning the rank of full professor. In addition to being a professor, she served as the director of the Black Studies Program and the Associate Provost for Community Engagement at CUNY's flagship school, The City College of New York. She is the author of three books: Oshun's Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas; Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg; and, with David Pullins, Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter in the Age of Velázquez. Together, she and Dr. Pullins co-curated Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter, an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is the editor of four books: Let Spirit Speak! Cultural Journeys through the African Diaspora; The Future Is Now: A New Look at African Diaspora Studies; Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean; and, with Earl E. Fitz, Machado de Assis, Blackness, and the Americas. She is the series editor of Afro-Latinx Futures at State University of New York (SUNY) Press and series co-editor of Global Black Writers in Translation at Vanderbilt University Press.
José Vilson, Ph.D., is executive director of EduColor, a nonprofit that supports educators of color in NYC and nationally. He is also a member of the Histories of Education Action and Learning (HEAL ) Collaborative with EduColor and the TC Center on History and Education.
Roger Wareham has been a lawyer and political activist for more than five decades. He is a member of the December 12th Movement, an organization of African people, which organizes in the Black and Latino community around human rights violations. Mr. Wareham was a lead attorney in the historic lawsuits filed in the United States Federal District Courts in 2002 suing private corporations for reparations due the descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States. He was co-counsel representing three of the five young Black and Latino men who successfully had their wrongful convictions overturned and sued New York City in the Central Park Jogger case of 1989. He has also represented Black political prisoners in various federal lawsuits around the country.
In June 2012 and again in September 2014, he led a delegation of the Pan African Solidarity Hague Committee, which presented a petition to the International Criminal Court charging NATO members with war crimes and crimes against humanity in their interventions in Libya, Haiti, and Cote d’Ivoire. He is the international secretary-general of the International Association Against Torture (AICT), a non-governmental organization in consultative status before the United Nations. Since 1989, he has annually presented evidence of human rights violations facing people of color in the United States and other parts of the world at assemblies of the United Nations's Human Rights Council (formerly the Commission on Human Rights) and its other bodies that meet in Geneva, Switzerland. Mr. Wareham was an active organizer of and a leading participant in the 2001 United Nations's World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa, which recognized that the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery were crimes against humanity for which reparations are due. He has also been an international observer at Zimbabwe’s Parliamentary Elections in 2005, 2008 and 2018.
Mr. Wareham has taught undergraduate courses on law at the City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice and at the College of New Rochelle, School of New Resources.
Deborah Gray White is Emeritus Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. She was born and raised in the New York neighborhood once known as San Juan Hill. She attended Harpur College of Binghamton University where she helped establish the Africana Studies Department and a special admissions program that evolved into the Binghamton Educational Opportunity Program. She is author of Ar’n’t I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South; Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994; several K-12 textbooks on United States history, and Let My People Go, African Americans 1804-1860. In 2008, she published an edited work entitled Telling Histories: Black Women in the Ivory Tower, a collection of personal narratives written by African American women historians that chronicle the entry of Black women into the modern historical profession and the development of the field of Black women’s history. Freedom On My Mind: A History of African Americans, a co-authored college text, is in its third edition. As a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and as a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, White conducted research on Lost in the USA: American Identity from the Promise Keepers to the Million Mom March. She holds the Carter G. Woodson Medallion and the Frederick Douglass Medal for excellence in African American history, and, in 2019, was awarded the Stephen A. Ambrose Oral History Award. From 2016-2021 she co-directed the Scarlet and Black Project, which investigates Native Americans and African Americans in the history of Rutgers University, and is co-editor of the three-part Scarlet and Black series that explores this history, including the establishment of the Rutgers Africana Studies Department. She is currently at work on an autobiography, tentatively titled Fighting Against Ugly: A Black Female’s History from the ‘Generation that Could.’
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