William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, socialist, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community. After completing graduate work at the Friedrich Wilhelm University and Harvard University, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate, he became a professor of history, sociology, and economics at Atlanta University. Du Bois was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.
William Julius Wilson is an American sociologist. He is a professor at Harvard University and author of works on urban sociology, race and class issues. Laureate of the National Medal of Science, he served as the 80th President of the American Sociological Association, was a member of numerous national boards and commissions. He identified the importance of neighborhood effects and demonstrated how limited employment opportunities and weakened institutional resources exacerbated poverty within American inner-city neighborhoods.
The African American National Biography Project is a joint project of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University and Oxford University Press. The object of the project is to publish and maintain a database of African Americans similar in scope to the American National Biography.
William Shield McFeely was an American historian known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1981 biography of Ulysses S. Grant, as well as his contributions to a reevaluation of the Reconstruction era, and for advancing the field of African-American history. He retired as the Abraham Baldwin Professor of the Humanities emeritus at the University of Georgia in 1997, and was affiliated with Harvard University since 2006.
Peter John Gomes was an American preacher and theologian, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard Divinity School and Pusey Minister at Harvard's Memorial Church — in the words of Harvard's president "one of the great preachers of our generation, and a living symbol of courage and conviction."
David Levering Lewis is an American historian, a Julius Silver University Professor, and a professor of history at New York University. He is twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, for part one and part two of his biography of W. E. B. Du Bois. He is the first author to win Pulitzer Prizes for biography for two successive volumes on the same subject.
Nellie Yvonne McKay was an American academic and author who was the Evjue-Bascom Professor of American and African-American Literature at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she also taught in English and women's studies, and is best known as the co-editor of the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature.
Nathan Irvin Huggins was a distinguished American historian, author and educator. As a leading scholar in the field of African American studies, he was W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of History and of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University as well as director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, aged 62.
The All-African People's Revolutionary Party (A-APRP) is a socialist political party founded by Kwame Nkrumah and organized in Conakry, Guinea in 1968. The party expanded to the United States in 1972 and claims to have recruited members from 33 countries. According to the party, global membership in the party is "in the hundreds".
Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience edited by Henry Louis Gates and Anthony Appiah is a compendium of Africana studies including African studies and the "Pan-African diaspora" inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois' project of an Encyclopedia Africana. Du Bois envisioned "an Encyclopedia Africana," which was to be "unashamedly Afro-Centric but not indifferent to the impact of the outside world."
Brian Kelly is an American historian and a lecturer in US history, teaching at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland. His work is concerned mainly with labor and race in the American South, although much of his most recent scholarship focuses on the formative struggles around slave emancipation during the American Civil War and the Reconstruction Era that followed.
The American Negro Academy (ANA), founded in Washington, DC in 1897, was the first organization in the United States to support African-American academic scholarship. It operated until 1928, and encouraged African Americans to undertake classical academic studies and liberal arts.
Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong is a professor of history and African and African American studies, and the Oppenheimer Faculty Director of the Harvard University Center for African Studies at Harvard University. He is a faculty associate for the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, a previous board member of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, and has also previously held a prestigious Harvard College Professorship.
Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. is an American literary critic, professor, historian, and filmmaker who serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. He rediscovered the earliest known African-American novels, long forgotten, and has published extensively on appreciating African-American literature as part of the Western canon.
Damon Sajnani, better known by his stage name Professor D or ProfessorD.us is a Canadian rapper and assistant professor based in the United States. He is the lead vocalist of The Dope Poet Society and professor of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin - Madison where he teaches courses on Hip Hop and Politics in Africa and around the world. He was the inaugural Nasir Jones Hip Hop Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University in 2014-15. He is known for rapping about social issues and global politics with sophisticated rhyme structures and "tongue twisting flows." Marcyliena Morgan, Executive Director of Harvard's Hiphop Archive, says Professor D's work "represents the innovations and creativity of hiphop at its best." Professor D has released several critically acclaimed albums and published numerous scholarly articles.
Aldon Douglas Morris is a professor of sociology and an award-winning scholar, with interests including social movements, civil rights, and social inequality. He is the 2021 president of the American Sociological Association.
C. Riley Snorton is an American scholar, author, and activist whose work focuses on historical perspectives of gender and race, specifically Black transgender identities. His publications include Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. Snorton is currently Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. In 2014 BET listed him as one of their "18 Transgender People You Should Know".
Donald Yacovone is an American researcher, writer and academic who primarily specializes in African American History. In 2013, he co-authored with Henry Louis Gates Jr the book based on the PBS television series The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross.
The Dictionary of African Biography is a six-volume biographical dictionary, published by Oxford University Press. Published in 2012, the editors-in-chief are Emmanuel K. Akyeampong and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., both of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute of Harvard University.
The Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, also known as the Hutchins Center, is affiliated with Harvard University. The Center supports scholarly research on the history and culture of people of African descent around the world, facilitates collaboration and aims to increase public awareness of the subject. It was established as the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute in May 1975, making it the oldest research center focused on the study of the history, culture, and society of Africans and African Americans, with the rebranding as the Hutchins Center occurring in 2013.
