Isabel Wilkerson is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration. She also won the Pulitzer Prize for her work as Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times in 1994, making her the first black woman in the history of American journalism to do so. Wilkerson has taught narrative nonfiction at several universities.

Dr. Yohuru Williams is Dean of Arts and Sciences and Professor of History at St. Thomas University in Minnesota, and an education activist. He is the author of Black Politics/White Power: Civil Rights Black Power and Black Panthers in New Haven. His forthcoming work is Six Degrees of Segregation: Lynching, Capital Punishment and Jim Crow Justice, 1865-1930.