Contributors
- Contributors
Muhammad Ahmad is a civil rights activist and was a founder of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), a Black Power organization active during the 1960s. Born in 1941 in Philadelphia, he graduated from West Philadelphia High School and attended Central State College in Wilberforce, Ohio from 1960 to 1962. After working for decades in the Black Liberation Struggle, Ahmad returned to college, earned a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Massachusetts in 1976, and a master of arts from Atlanta University in 1986. Ahmad gained his PhD from Union Institute and University in 1992. Most recently, Ahmad taught courses in African American history at Temple University in Philadelphia.
Keisha N. Blain is an assistant professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. She is an historian of the twentieth-century United States with broad interdisciplinary interests and specializations in African American history, the modern African diaspora, and women's and gender studies. She completed a BA in history and Africana studies from Binghamton University (SUNY) and a PhD in history from Princeton University in 2014. She is the author of Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom, which uncovers the crucial role women played in building black nationalist and internationalist protest movements in the United States and other parts of the African diaspora during the twentieth century. Her articles have appeared in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society and the Journal of Social History, among others. She writes regularly for several popular outlets, including the Huffington Post, Timeline, and The Conversation.
Courtney S. Cain is an assistant professor in history and African American studies at Lake Forest College. Her research interests include modern US history, African American history, women and gender studies, and African diaspora studies. Her dissertation, entitled "Ou Ayisyen?: The Making of a Haitian Diasporic Community in Chicago, 1933–2010," explores the unique [End Page 195] connections between Haiti and Chicago and the development of a Haitian diaspora in the city during the twentieth century.
Ashley D. Farmer is an assistant professor of history and African and Diaspora studies at the University of Texas-Austin. Her research interests include women's history, gender history, radical politics, intellectual history, and black feminism. She earned a BA in French from Spelman College and a PhD in African American Studies from Harvard University. Her first book, Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era, analyzes black women's intellectual production to uncover how they shaped gender constructs and political organizing in the Black Power movement. Farmer's scholarship has appeared in numerous venues, including The Black Scholar, The Black Diaspora Review, and The Journal of African American History.
Amaziah Zuri Finley is a doctoral student in anthropology with a specialization in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her pedagogical interests include the social aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the creative responses of black women and mothers of the Central City neighborhood in post-Katrina New Orleans to an everincreasing state-sanctioned "culture of oppression."
Shafeah M'Balia is a radical activist based in North Carolina. Born and raised in the African American communities of South Jamaica and Amityville, New York, M'Balia was part of the black liberation movement from an early age. She was an anti-Vietnam War activist, a member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the African People's Party in the 1960s and 1970s. Currently, M'Balia is engaged in labor and civil rights organizing in the Raleigh-Durham area.
Erik S. McDuffie is an associate professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research and teaching interests include African diaspora history, black feminism, black queer theory, black radicalism, black urban history, and black masculinity. He is the author of the book Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism. The book received the 2012 Wesley-Logan Prize from the American Historical Association and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, as well as the 2011 Letitia Woods Brown Book Prize from the Association of Black...
