Bob Moses Conference
April 27-28, 2024
updated 1.24.23
Speakers & Bios
Khalil Gibran Muhammad
Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School
Khalil Gibran Muhammad is the Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. He directs the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project and is the former Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library and the world’s leading library and archive of global black history.
Before leading the Schomburg Center, Khalil was....
Douglas A. Blackmon
Author
Douglas A. Blackmon is the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, and co-executive producer of the acclaimed PBS documentary of the same name. His is also a contributing correspondent to the Washington Post and chair and host of Forum, a public affairs program produced by the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and aired on more than 100 PBS affiliates across the U.S. ...
Kelly Lytle Hernandez
Professor & Thomas E. Lifka Chair of History, UCLA
Kelly Lytle Hernandez is a professor of History, African American Studies, and Urban Planning at UCLA where she holds The Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History and is the director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. One of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration, Professor Lytle Hernandez is the author of the award-winning books, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010)...
A. Kirsten Mullen
Artefactual, Founder
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, A. Kirsten Mullen 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; ...
Michelle Alexander
Student, Union Theological Seminary
Michelle Alexander is a former visiting professor at Union Theological Seminary, as well as former associate professor at Stanford Law School and The Ohio State University, where she held a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. In 2010, Alexander published The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, a best-selling book described by The Chronicle of Higher Education as “one of the most influential books of the past 20 years.”...
William Darity Jr.
Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, Duke University
William A. (“Sandy”) Darity Jr. is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics and the director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. Darity’s research focuses on inequality by race, class and ethnicity, schooling and the racial achievement gap, North-South theories of trade and development, skin shade and labor market outcomes, the economics of reparations, the Atlantic slave trade and the Industrial Revolution, the history of economics, ...
Vince Warren
Executive Director, The Center for Constitutional Rights
Vincent Warren is a leading expert on racial injustice and discriminatory policing and is the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He oversees CCR's groundbreaking litigation and advocacy work, using international and domestic law to challenge human rights abuses, including racial, gender and LGBT injustice. Under his leadership, CCR successfully challenged the NYPD’s Stop-and-Frisk policy and profiling of Muslims, ended long-term solitary confinement in California’s Pelican Bay Prison, and the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison...
Tasseli McKay is a National Science Foundation fellow at Duke University. Her work on the Multi-site Family Study of Incarceration, Parenting, and Partnering culminated in her first book, Holding On: Family and Fatherhood During Incarceration and Reentry (2019) with Comfort, Lindquist, and Bir. Her new book, Stolen Wealth, Hidden Power: The Case for Reparations for Mass Incarceration (2022), argues for $7.16 trillion in reparations to Black communities for the vast harms of mass incarceration, many of which have been kept out of sight by women’s invisible labor. She holds a doctorate in social policy from the London School of Economics.
Tasseli McKay
Postdoctoral Fellow, Duke University
Justice Goodwin Liu is an Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court. Nominated by Governor Jerry Brown, Justice Liu was unanimously confirmed by the Commission on Judicial Appointments and sworn into office on September 1, 2011. He was retained by the electorate in 2014. Before joining the state’s highest court, Justice Liu was Professor of Law and Associate Dean at the UC Berkeley School of Law. His primary areas of expertise are constitutional law, education law and policy, and diversity in the legal profession...
Goodwin Liu
Associate Justice, California Supreme Court
Danny Glover is a legendary actor, producer, and humanitarian activist. His coming-of-age story is rooted in the many campaigns for human rights here, in the civil rights Movement of the 1960’s, and abroad most notably in the anti-apartheid war for South African independence. He has been on The Algebra Project Board of Directors for 22 years. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his brilliance in theater and film. This year, the academy of motion picture arts and sciences is honoring Danny Glover at the 12th annual Governors Award. He is the recipient of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award given to an individual in the motion picture arts...
Danny Glover
Actor, Producer, Humanitarian Activist
Lawrence Watson, is a soulful messenger for the millennium and has been described as a modern-day Paul Robeson. As a professor at Berklee College of Music, he teaches the History and Music of Motown, Stage Performance Technique courses, The Foundations of Singing with Soul, African American Music, Culture and History, private vocal instruction and a freshman seminar on Artistry, Creativity, Inquiry and Music.
He currently serves as the Resident Artist at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. In that capacity...
Lawrence Watson
Professor at Berklee College of Music and Resident Artist at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice
Adrian Walker writes a twice-weekly column, focusing on politics and local news. A native of Miami, he joined the Globe in 1989 as a general assignment reporter, after three years at the Miami News. He was the Globe’s City Hall bureau chief, State House reporter and deputy political editor before becoming a Metro columnist in 1998. Walker was a member of the Globe Spotlight Team that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting in 2018 for the series “Boston. Race. Image. Reality.” He was named an associate editor of the Globe in 2021.
Adrian Walker
(Moderator),
Columnist, Associate Editor, The Boston Globe
Since 1991 my work with the Algebra Project (AP) and then Young People’s Project (YPP) has focused on broadening the participation of groups underrepresented in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology. From 1991 – 1995 I worked for the Algebra Project in Oakland CA with the math department of a local junior high school, where I provided classroom support for students and teachers, instructional guidance in the use of the AP Transition Curriculum, and helped to lead efforts to establish an Algebra for all policy in the school. In 1993 ....
Maisha Moses
(Moderator),
Executive Director, The Young People’s Project
Mark Rosenbaum
Robins Kaplan Director, Opportunity Under Law
Mark Rosenbaum is director of Public Counsel Opportunity Under Law, which aims to eliminate economic injustice...Rosenbaum has been principal counsel in landmark cases in the areas of K-12 public and higher education, voting rights, poverty law and homelessness, racial, gender, class and sexual orientation discrimination, health care, immigrants’ rights, foster care and criminal defendants’ rights.
...
Rahsaan Hall
A champion for civil rights, former Director of the Racial Justice Program of the ACLU of Massachusetts and ordained reverend, Rahsaan has been at the forefront of local and national issues that call for reimagining a public safety system that prioritizes restoration, transformation, and healing for people who have experienced harm and accountability for people who have caused harm. When Rahsaan served as an ADA for the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office, he worked in the DA’s Safe Neighborhood Initiative and Senior Trial Units...
Director of the Racial Justice Program of the ACLU of Massachusetts
Margaret A. Burnham
University Distinguished Professor of Law; Director, Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project; Faculty Co-Director, Center for Law, Equity and Race (CLEAR)
Professor Burnham is an internationally recognized expert on civil and human rights, comparative constitutional rights, and international criminal law. She is the faculty co-director of the law school’s Center for Law, Equity and Race (CLEAR) and founded and directs the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ), which investigates racial violence in the Jim Crow era and other historical failures of the criminal justice system. CRRJ serves as a resource for scholars, policymakers and organizers involved in various initiatives seeking justice for these crimes...
Desmond Meade
Executive Director, Florida Rights Restoration Coalition
Desmond Meade is a formerly homeless returning citizen who overcame many obstacles to eventually become the President of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC), Chair of Floridians for a Fair Democracy, a graduate of Miami Dade College, Florida International University College of Law, a Ford Global Fellow, and a 2021 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. As President and Executive Director of FRRC, which is recognized for its work on voting and criminal justice reform issues,...
Nicholas Lemann
Professor/Dean Emeritus, Columbia Journalism School
Nicholas Lemann is a veteran journalist and nonfiction author. Born and raised in New Orleans, he began his career there at an alternative weekly newspaper called the Vieux Carre Courier. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker for the past 24 years, and a professor at Columbia Journalism School for the past 20 years. He was dean there from 2003 to 2013. At the confernece he will be speaking abut his 2006 book, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War.
James Forman
Professor, Yale School of Law
James Forman, Jr. is a professor at Yale Law School and the faculty director of the Yale Law and Racial Justice Center. Professor Forman worked for six years as a public defender in Washington, D.C. He is also the co-founder of the Maya Angelou School in D.C., an alternative school for youth who have previously been arrested or who have struggled in school. He is the author of Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, the winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction. His parents, James Forman and Constancia Romilly, worked in SNCC with Bob Moses.
Chesa Boudin
former San Francisco District Attorney
Chesa Boudin is the former elected district attorney of San Francisco. A Rhodes Scholar and a Yale law school graduate, his parents served a combined 62 years in prison. Chesa worked as a public defender before winning an election to the office of district attorney on an explicitly anti-racist and decarceral platform. Because he was delivering on his campaign promises he faced an unprecedented, Republican-funded onslaught of attacks and recalls, which ultimately removed him from office. Chesa remains steadfast in his commitment to creating a more just and equitable criminal legal system and ensuring equal enforcement of the law.
![Mowatt[Photo_1].JPG](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/5fdc3f_ea0c22c4e32a4c0fae08312a7282b84a~mv2.jpg/v1/crop/x_0,y_102,w_512,h_563/fill/w_93,h_102,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,blur_2,enc_auto/Mowatt%5BPhoto_1%5D_JPG.jpg)
Rasul A. Mowatt, PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Currently, the Department Head of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism Management in the College of Natural Resources at North Carolina State University. Formally, Professor in the Departments of American Studies and Geography in the College of Arts + Science at Indiana University. Primary areas of research: Geographies of Race, Geographies of Violence/Threat, The Animation of Public Space, and Critical Leisure Studies. Most recent publication: The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence: The City and State Between Us.
Rasul Mowatt
Department Head and Professor, North Carolina State University
Dr. Anderson is the Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor of Education at Illinois and is an affiliate professor of history there. He is considered a leading authority on the history of African American education in the South, the history of higher education desegregation, the history of public school desegregation, and the history of African American school achievement in the 20th century.
He joined the faculty as an assistant professor in educational policy studies in 1974 and has been at the University of Illinois for the last 44 years...
Dr James D. Anderson
Dean of the College of Education, the Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor of Education, and affiliate professor of History, African American Studies, and Law at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Ron has appeared with a wide array of performers including jazz masters: James Moody, Clark Terry, Curtis Fuller, Joe Zawinul and the Czech Brno Philharmonic Orchestra, Mulgrew Miller, Cyrus Chestnut, Nnenna Freelon, Vanessa Rubin, tap dancers Jimmy Slyde, Dianne Walker, Sean Fielder, Sarah Reich, and Buster Brown, trumpeters Cecil Bridgewater, Wallace Rooney, Art Farmer, Clark Terry, vocalist Marlena Shaw, Sam Rivers, bluesman Albert King, Gary Bartz, James Williams, Marian McPartland, Cecilia Smith, Lionel Hampton, Michele Camilio, Johnny Griffin, Steve Nelson, John Medeski, Christian McBride, Sean Jones, Bill Pierce, ...
Ron Savage
Vice President and Executive Director at Berklee College of Music
Ben Moynihan is Interim Executive Director of the Algebra Project, Inc., and has been coordinating the work of the late Robert P. (Bob) Moses in various roles with the project since 1992. Moses used the organizing approach he learned in the Mississippi Theatre of the Civil Rights Movement to reform mathematics instruction in underserved public schools so that all students can graduate from high school prepared for college and career mathematics studies...
Benjamin Moynihan
(Moderator),
Interim Executive Director, The Algebra Project, Inc.
Joan T. Wynne, Ph.D. is the Co-Founder of the Bob Moses Research Center for Math Literacy Through Public Education at Florida International University, and currently its Acting Director. She is a former Associate Director of two Urban Centers, one at GSU in Atlanta and one in Miami at FIU, where she was a professor in Educational Leadership. She has published research studies in professional journals and books; her recent book is: "Reckoning with our Roots: Unearthing injustice to find our way home." In 2000, she received the “Martin Luther King Jr. Peace Award” for work in anti-racism, ...
Joan T. Wynne
(Moderator), Co-Founder of the Bob Moses Research Center for Math Literacy Through Public Education, Florida International University
Rachel Williams -Giordano is a high school social science teacher at Cambridge Rindge and Latin. Since joining the staff in 2019, she has taught primarily AP United States History, AP United States Government and Politics and just recently launched the new AP African American Studies Pilot. Prior to working at CRLS, Rachel worked at Melrose High School as a history teacher as well as a student government co-advisor. Given her prior experience in leadership through the Army ROTC, Rachel decided to pursue a second graduate degree in education administration...
Rachel Williams-Giordano
Teacher, Cambridge Rindge and Latin