Ray Arsenault is the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History and co-director of the Florida Studies Program at the University of South Florida. A specialist in the political, social, and environmental history of the American South, he has served as a consultant for numerous museums and public institutions, including the National Park Service, the National Civil Rights Museum, the Rosa Parks Museum, the Florida Humanities Council, and the United States Information Agency. He is the author, most recently of the prize winning “Freedom Riders 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice" (Oxford, 2006).
Linda Docherty is Associate Professor of Art History at Bowdoin College. A specialist in American art, her research addresses issues of art and identity with particular emphasis on portraiture and photography. She has published on Winslow Homer’s paintings of African Americans during Reconstruction.
Patrick Rael is Associate Professor of History at Bowdoin College. He is a specialist in the history of race in American culture, from colonial slavery through the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. He is the author of “Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North" (North Carolina, 2002).
Michael West is Associate Professor of History at College of the Holy Cross, where he teaches African American history, African American intellectual history and the Civil Rights Movement. He is a former Research Fellow at the Du Bois Institute, Harvard University, and the author of “Booker T. Washington: American Democracy and the Idea of Race Relations" (Columbia, 2006).