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Nancy Bercaw is a history and southern studies professor at the University of Mississippi. She has written a book about the transition from slavery to freedom in the Mississippi Delta called Gendered Freedoms: Race, Rights and the Politics of Household in the Mississippi Delta. She teaches courses on slavery, southern history, and what “the South” means today.

Lecia Brooks serves as the Education Director at the Civil Rights Memorial Center in Montgomery, AL. Prior to moving down South, Lecia taught 5th grade in South Central Los Angeles and conducted workshops for students, teachers and law enforcement professionals at the Museum of Tolerance.

James T. Campbell is an associate professor of American Civilization, Africana Studies and History at Brown University. He is also the chair of Brown's University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, a body appointed by Brown's president to examine the university's historical relationship to slavery and the slave trade. His most recent book is Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005, published this Spring by The Penguin Press.

John Dittmer is Professor Emeritus of History at DePauw University. He was a member of the faculty at Tougaloo College from 1967-1979, and he taught history at Brown University and at MIT in the 1980s. He is the author of Black Georgia in the Progressive Era and Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi, which received the Bancroft Prize, the Lillian Smith Book Award, and the McLemore Prize. He is currently working on a book on health care and civil rights.

Maggie Nolan Donovan worked for SNCC from 1963-1967 as a director of the Boston office and the New England Campus Coordinator. In these roles she recruited people, money, supplies, and support for SNCC's work in the South and for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She often worked with Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, arranging her Boston trips and bringing supplies to Mississippi. She has been a teacher of young children and of teachers for more than 30 years. She sees teaching for social justice, especially through accurate Movement history, as the focus of her professional life.

Charles M. Dunagin retired as Editor and Publisher of the McComb Enterprise-Journal in December 2000 after working at the newspaper for 37 years. Presently, he is a consultant for Emmerich Newspapers, Inc., and is on the Corporation's Board of Directors. Dunagin is president of the McComb School Board, a past president of the Mississippi Press Association, the McComb Rotary Club, the Chamber of Commerce, the Pike County United Way, the Pike County Arts Council, and the Mississippi-Louisiana Associated Press Association. He has served on the board of directors of the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association, as well as a mentor in the McComb Public Schools.

Jennifer Jones-Clark is a Senior Associate and Director of Special Projects for Facing History and Ourselves. Jennifer designs and facilitates historical-based social justice workshops, institutes, and other professional development programs for educators, students, corporations and community organizations throughout the United States and South Africa. Facing History and Ourselves is a non-profit national and international educational and professional development organization whose mission is to engage students of diverse backgrounds in an examination of racism, prejudice, and anti-Semitism in order to promote the development of a more humane and informed citizenry.

Adrienne Kupper is Director of Education for the New York Historical Society.

Deborah Menkart is the executive director of the Washington DC-based organization Teaching for Change. In her 15 years as executive director, Menkart has developed a catalog that over 40,000 educators from across the country rely on for progressive teaching materials, and she has served as coeditor of Beyond Heroes and Holidays: A Practical Guide to K–12 Anti-Racist, Multicultural Education and Staff Development and Putting the Movement Back into Civil Rights Teaching (www.civilrightsteaching.org).

Jennifer Stollman is Chair of the Department of History and Political Science at Salem College in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She is an intellectual historian specializing in the historical constructions of the self, race, sexuality, ethnicity, religion and national identity. She has published on racial, regional, and religious identities and is currently working on a project that examines the interconnections between race, religion, sexuality and gender in the 18th-century Moravian community of Salem.

Alex Thomas is the Heritage and Cultural Manager for the Mississippi Development Authority (MDA), Division of Tourism. His recent accomplishments include 2003 Southern Living Rising Star Award, Travel Marketing Professional (TMP) certification from Southeast Tourism Society, and 2002 Recipient of Jackson Hometown Hero "Shining Example" Award.

Jenice L. View is the Senior Professional Development Specialist with Teaching for Change and is on the faculty of The George Mason University Initiatives in Educational Transformation (IET). For more than 20 years, she has worked with a variety of nongovernmental organizations, including the Rural Coalition, the Association for Community Based Education, and LISTEN, Inc., to create space for the voices that are often excluded from public policy considerations: women, people of color, poor urban and rural community residents, and especially youth. She is co-editor of Putting the Movement Back into Civil Rights Teaching (www.civilrightsteaching.org).

Hollis Watkins is the Co-founder and President of Southern Echo, Inc., a leadership development, education, training, and technical assistance organization dedicated to empowering local residents throughout Mississippi and the Southern region to make political, economic, educational, and environmental systems accountable to the needs and interests of the African-American community. The twelfth child born to sharecroppers in Lincoln County, Mississippi, Hollis has spent a lifetime in pursuit of racial justice in his home state. He was nineteen when he became the first Mississippi student to join the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as a voting rights organizer. During the years that he worked as an organizer for SNCC, he was repeatedly arrested and jailed. Later he served as the director of the Organic and Sustainable Agriculture Program of the Mississippi Association of Cooperatives before founding Southern Echo in 1990. Hollis is the proud father of eight children who, with his many grandchildren, live in the Southeast and Alaska.

Nan Woodruff is a professor of African American and Twentieth Century US History at Pennsylvania State University. She recently published a book entitled American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta. She is currently working on a book on violence and African American Memory and efforts to achieve truth and reconciliation around these issues. She is the National Coordinator of the UNESCO Transatlantic Slave Trade Education Project, which seeks to provide teachers with ways to teach the slave trade and its legacy, with the goal of achieving understanding and reconciliation.