Aram Goudsouzian is professor and chair of the department of history at the University of Memphis. His books include Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon, King of the Court: Bill Russell and the Basketball Revolution, and Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear.

Charles W. McKinney Jr. is the Neville Frierson Bryan Chair of Africana Studies and associate professor of history at Rhodes College. An expert on the history of grassroots struggles for civil rights, he is the author of Greater Freedom: The Evolution of the Civil Rights Struggle in Wilson, North Carolina.