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 Rev. Dr. Bernard LaFayette, Jr. has been a Civil Rights Movement activist, minister, educator, lecturer, and is an authority on the strategy on nonviolent social change. From the time he co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960, he was a leader of the Nashville Movement, the Freedom Rides, and Selma Movement. An ordained minister, Dr. LaFayette earned his B.A. from the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee, and his Ed.M. and Ed.D from Harvard University. Dr. LaFayette is currently a Distinguished-Scholar-in-Residence and Director of the Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies at the University of Rhode Island. He is the chairperson for the International Nonviolence Executive Planning Board. He has been re-appointed by Rhode Island Governor Donald Carcieri as the chairman for the Rhode Island Select Commission on Race and Police-Community Relations. He is a native of Tampa, Florida.
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 Prof. Omara-Otunnu is the first and to date the only holder of a UNESCO Chair in Human Rights in the United States of America and Coordinator of UNESCO Chairs in Human Rights in the region that comprises Israel, Western Europe and North America. He is the founder and Executive Director of the Institute of Comparative Human Rights at the University of Connecticut. In addition to his tenured position teaching history at the University of Connecticut, he also serves as Executive Director of the UConn-ANC Partnership, which consists of three projects: comparative human rights, oral history, and archives, and has received funding from the Mellon Foundation; and he leads the University of Connecticut-University of Fort Hare (South Africa) international linkage, as its director. |
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 Prof. Haile Gerima came to the US to study acting and directing at The Goodman Theater in Chicago. He later transferred to the Theater Department at UCLA where he completed the Master's Program in Film. Afterwards, he relocated to Washington, D.C. to teach at Howard University's Department of Radio, Television, and Film where he has influenced young filmmakers for over twenty-five years. Influenced by UCLA classmate & filmmaker Charles Burnett, and by the celebrated Black poet and educator Sterling Brown, Gerima's films are noted for their exploration of the issues and history pertinent to members of the African Diaspora from the continent itself to the Americas and Western Hemisphere.
Often corrective of Hollywood versions of slave stories, his films comment on the physical, cultural, and psychological dislocation of Black peoples during and after slavery. |
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 Prof. Donald N. Levine is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Sociology and former dean of the College at the University of Chicago. For nearly half a century he has been devoted to Ethiopia–as a scholar, in university teaching, in providing expert assistance to various government bodies, and in community service on behalf of Ethiopians at home and abroad.
Levine's publications on Ethiopia include dozens of articles, parts of The Flight from Ambiguity: Essays in Social and Cultural Theory (1985), and two books, Wax and Gold: Tradition and Innovation in Ethiopian Culture (1965), now reprinted by Tsehai Publishers and Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multiethnic Society (1974), a second edition of which, with a new preface was published, in 2001. An Amharic translation of this book (Tiliqitu Etyopya) was published in 2001 by the Addis Ababa University Press. Other publications include Visions of the Sociological Tradition (1995) and, most recently, Powers of the Mind: The Reinvention of Liberal Learning. |
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