Freedom on My Mind

Deborah Gray White (Ph.D., University of Illinois at Chicago) is Emeritus Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University. She is the author of many works including Lost in the USA: American Identity from the Promise Keepers to the Million Mom March; Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994; Let My People Go: African-Americans, 1804–1860; Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South; and the edited volume Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower. She is a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and the Woodrow Wilson International Center Fellowship. She holds the Carter G. Woodson Medallion and the Frederick Douglass Medal for excellence in African American history. She is a recipient of the Stephen A. Ambrose Oral History Award, and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Living Legacy Award. As co-editor of the three-volume Scarlet and Black series, White led the investigation of the three-century history of Native Americans and African Americans at Rutgers University.

Mia Bay (Ph.D., Yale University) is the Paul A. Mellon Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge. Her publications include the Bancroft Prize-winning Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance; To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells; The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830–1925; and the edited volume Ida B. Wells, The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader. She is a recipient of the Alphonse Fletcher Sr. Fellowship and the National Humanities Center Fellowship. An Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer, Bay is a member of the executive board of the Society of American Historians, serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of African American History, Modern Intellectual History, and the African American Intellectual History Society's Black Perspectives blog, and is on the Scholarly Advisory Board of the Gilder Lehrman Institute. Currently, she is at work on a study of African American views on Thomas Jefferson.

Waldo E. Martin Jr. is the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of American History and Citizenship at the University of California, Berkeley. The principal focus of his scholarship and teaching is the Modern African American Freedom Struggle. With Joshua Bloom, he co-authored Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (2013, rev. 2016). With Jetta Grace Martin and Joshua Bloom, he coauthored a Young Adult history of the party: Freedom! The Story of the Black Panther Party (Levine Querido, 2022). The second edition of his Brown v. Board of Education: A Brief History with Documents was published in 2020. His first book, The Mind of Frederick Douglass, was published in 1985. His book of essays No Coward Soldiers: Black Cultural Politics in Postwar America came out in 2005. With Deborah Gray White and Mia Bay, he is the coauthor of Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans with Documents (2017). With Patricia A. Sullivan, he is the coeditor of Civil Rights in the US: An Encyclopedia (2 vols., 2000). His current book project is A Change Is Gonna Come, an analysis of the cultural politics of the modern African American freedom struggle.