Bryan Stevenson is the founder and executive director of The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a human rights organization in Montgomery, Alabama. Under his leadership, EJI has won major legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent death row prisoners, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill, and aiding children prosecuted as adults. Among numerous awards, he is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a National Humanities Medal, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Non-Fiction for his acclaimed book “Just Mercy.” He led the creation of EJI’s highly acclaimed Legacy Sites, including the Legacy Museum, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and Freedom Monument Sculpture Park. These national landmark institutions chronicle the legacy of slavery, lynching, and racial segregation, and the connection to mass incarceration and contemporary issues of racial bias.

Ellen Barry is the Founder of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children. She has been lead counsel or co-counsel on a number of lawsuits brought on behalf of incarcerated women, pregnant women prisoners, prisoners, and parolees. She has written extensively on the unique issues faced by incarcerated women. Articles by Barry have appeared in Criminal Justice, the Harvard Women’s Law Journal, and The Prison Journal. She is a co-founder of Critical Resistance, an organization that seeks to create sustainable alternatives to punishment and imprisonment. Since leaving LSPC in 2001, Barry has worked in private practice.

Dr. Darity, a foremost expert on Reparations and the racial wealth gap understands the history, construction and maintenance costs, budgeted out of state/taxpayer coffers, of our growing carceral enterprise. He leads us along the money trail—from the loophole in the 13th amendment to the coffers of companies that in 2025 pay incarcerated workers little or nothing—to help us see what is hidden in plain sight: slavery by another name.

Kirsten Mullen is a folklorist and the founder of Artefactual, an arts-consulting practice, and Carolina Circuit Writers, a literary consortium that brings expressive writers of color to the Carolinas. She was a member of the Freelon Adjaye Bond concept development team that was awarded the Smithsonian Institution’s commission to design the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Under the auspices of the North Carolina Arts Council she worked to expand the Coastal Folklife Survey. As a faculty member with the Community Folklife Documentation Institute, she trained students to research and document the state’s African American music heritage.

Benjamin (Ben) Moynihan is Executive Director of the Algebra Project, Inc. Ben joined the project in 1992, fostering collaborations among mathematicians, math educators, and researchers, and gathering input from students, teachers, school system administrators, parents, and community organizations. His work in these diverse contexts builds on a BA in non-Western music at Dartmouth College (1987), Ed.M. in educational technology from Harvard Graduate School of Education (1999), training in group facilitation under Hay Group, Boston, and experiences in West Africa, Europe, and the U.S. He also is co-developer of the Algebra Project’s African Drums & Ratios Curriculum materials for late elementary grades (1992-2000).

Moynihan worked closely with Algebra Project Founder and late President Bob Moses for 29 years. Moses used the organizing approaches he and COFO colleagues learned in the Mississippi Theatre of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement to inform effective strategies for mathematics instruction in underserved public schools so that all students can graduate from high school prepared for college and career mathematics studies. The Algebra Project team continues Moses’ work today with school communities around the country. The Algebra Project collaborates with students, teachers, schools and communities, and is launching a 10-year Math Makes Movement (M3) national math literacy campaign.

Tasseli McKay is Assistant Professor of Social Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and core faculty in the Center for Thriving Communities. Her book, Stolen Wealth, Hidden Power: The Case for Reparations for Mass Incarceration, makes a meticulous accounting of mass incarceration's multi-trillion-dollar costs to Black communities and argues for federal reparations. 

Dr. Terrence L. (Kojo) Johnson joined Candler in August 2026 as the Mary Lee Hardin Willard Dean. An internationally recognized scholar, academic leader, and ordained itinerant elder in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, he previously served as the director of Religion and Public Life and Charles G. Adams Professor of African American Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School. Prior to this, he held faculty and administrative leadership positions at Haverford College and Georgetown University.

A distinguished scholar of African American religion, ethics, and politics, Johnson examines the moral foundations of public life and the responsibilities of religious and educational institutions in a pluralistic society. His interdisciplinary work brings African American religious thought into conversation with political theory and American history, with particular attention to justice, freedom, and law.