James D. Anderson is Gutsgell Professor and Head of the Department of Educational Policy Studies, and Professor in the Department of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research and teaching interests focus on the history of American education in general and African American education in particular. He won the Outstanding Book Award from the American Education Research Association in 1990 for the publication of The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935.

John Baugh is the Margaret Bush Wilson Professor of Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis in affiliation with the departments of Psychology, Anthropology, Education, and English. He is also Director of African and African American Studies. Professor Baugh is the author of Out of the Mouths of Slaves: African American Language and Educational Malpractice (1999) and Beyond Ebonics: Linguistic Pride and Racial Prejudice (2000). He has published extensively about linguistic equity and discrimination in the United States and South Africa. His research on linguistic profiling against members of non-dominant linguistic groups was prominently featured in a 2005 PBS documentary titled Do You Speak American?.

Robert Brown is Assistant Dean for Undergraduate Education at Emory University. He was an Assistant Professor of Political Science and African American Studies at Emory from 1996 to 2003. His publications include “Separate Tables: The Two Attitudinal Dimensions of Black Nationalism,” co-authored with Todd Shaw (Journal of Politics, February 2002), and “The Color Line of American Politics: The Vying Ideologies of Blacks and Whites” (Journal of African American Studies, August 2004). He is currently completing a manuscript entitled “Black Cities, American Dilemmas: Race and Representation in Urban America.”

James R. Elliott is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Tulane University. His most recent publications include “Race, Gender and Workplace Power” with Ryan A. Smith in American Sociological Review (2004); “The Work of Cities: Underemployment and Urban Change in Late-Century America” in Cityscape (2004); “Framing the Urban: Struggles over HOPE VI and the New Urbanism in an Historic City” with Kevin Fox Gotham and Melinda J. Milligan in City and Community (2004); and “The Effects of Race and Family Structure on Women's Spatial Relationship to the Labor Market” with Marilyn S. Joyce in Sociological Inquiry. He has also published recently on racial and ethnic inequality in Social Forces, Social Problems, Social Science Research, and Social Science Quarterly.

Mary J. Fischer is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut. She has several recent and forthcoming publications in City and Community, Sociological Perspectives, Urban Affairs Review, and Ethnic and Racial Studies. She is also co-author of the Source of the River: The Social Origins of Freshmen at America's Selective Colleges and Universities (2003) with Douglas S. Massey, Camille Z. Charles, and Garvey Lundy and is co-author of a chapter entitled “Redrawing Spatial Color Lines: Hispanic Metropolitan Dispersal, Segregation, and Economic Opportunity” with Marta Tienda that is forthcoming in a National Academy of Sciences volume on Hispanics in the United States.

Crystal Marie Fleming is a first year graduate student in the Sociology Ph.D. program at Harvard University. Ms. Fleming received her B.A. in French and Sociology (honors) from Wellesley College and studied abroad at the Université de Provence in France. Her senior honors thesis concerned the sociological dimensions of the spoken word/slam poetry movement. Conducting in-depth interviews with African American performance poets and using participant-observation at poetry venues in Boston and New York, her work focused on the symbolic boundaries of race and class within this aesthetic community. Her current research considers how African Americans use Black professional networks to construct social capital and confront issues of (in)visibility in the workplace.

Nathan Glazer is Professor of Sociology Emeritus, Harvard University, and is the author of, among other books, Beyond the Melting Pot (with Daniel P. Moynihan, 1963, 1970); Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy (1975, 1987); Ethnic Dilemmas: 1964–1982 (1983); The Limits of Social Policy (1988); and We Are All Multiculturalists Now (1997). He has written widely on racial and ethnic issues, in journals such as Commentary, Encounter, The New Republic, and The Public Interest, where he served as co-editor from 1973 to 2003. Most recently, he edited, with John Montgomery, Sovereignty Under Challenge: How Governments Respond (2002).

Kenneth Janken is Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of Rayford W. Logan and the Dilemma of the African-American Intellectual (1993) and WHITE: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP (2003). Professor Janken is currently researching a history of the Wilmington Ten.

Michèle Lamont is Professor of Sociology at Harvard University and Fellow and Program Director at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. She is author of the prize-winning book The Dignity of the Working Man: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (2000) and the editor of The Cultural Territories of Race: Black and White Boundaries (1999). Her work on symbolic boundaries, cultural membership, antiracism, and racial and class identity has appeared in a number of journals including Annual Review of Sociology and Ethnic and Racial Studies. She is completing a book on definitions of excellence in the social sciences and the humanities and is beginning a new comparative study of the equalization strategies of stigmatized groups.

Douglas S. Massey is Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He has two books forthcoming in the spring of 2005, including Return of the “L” Word: A Liberal Vision for the New Century (Princeton University Press) and Strangers in a Strange Land: Humans in an Urbanizing World (W. W. Norton & Co.). His recent book, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Age of Economic Integration (co-authored with Jorge Durand and Nolan Malone and published by Russell Sage) won the Otis Dudley Duncan Award from the Population Section of the American Sociological Association.

Paula D. McClain is Professor of Political Science, and Professor of Law, Public Policy, and African and African American Studies at Duke University. She also directs the American Political Science Association's Ralph Bunche Summer Institute hosted by Duke University, funded by the National Science Foundation and Duke University. A Howard University Ph.D., her primary research interests are in racial minority group politics, particularly inter-minority political and social competition, and urban politics, especially public policy and urban crime. Her articles have appeared in numerous journals, including the Journal of Politics, American Political Science Review, Urban Affairs Review, and American Politics Quarterly. Westview Press will publish the fourth edition of her most recent book, “Can We All Get Along?”: Racial and Ethnic Minorities in American Politics, co-authored with Joseph Stewart, Jr., in late 2005. She is currently president of the Southern Political Science Association.

Barbara Ransby is an Associate Professor in the departments of African American Studies and History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is author of the award-winning biography, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (University of North Carolina Press, 2003). Professor Ransby is also a free-lance writer whose essays have been published in a variety of newspapers and magazines nationwide. She is currently working on two projects: a study of African American feminist organizations in the 1970s and a political biography of Eslanda Robeson. Barbara Ransby is also a longtime community activist.

Todd C. Shaw is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and African-American Studies at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. He has co-authored with Robert Brown the article “Separate nations: Two Dimensions of Black Nationalism” (2002) in the Journal of Politics. He has co-authored with Lester Spence the article “Race and Representation in Detroit's Community Development Coalitions” (2004) in the Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Science, and is completing a book manuscript entitled “Now Is The Time!: Detroit Black Politics and Grassroots Activism,” which is under contract with Duke University Press.

Ryan A. Smith is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Affairs, Baruch College, City University of New York, and a former Scholar in Residence at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. His articles on race and gender stratification in workplace authority have appeared in the Annual Review of Sociology, Work and Occupations, Social Problems, and Sociological Quarterly and, with James R. Elliott, in Social Forces and the American Sociological Review. A forthcoming article on the impact of workplace diversity on promotion outcomes will be published in the American Behavioral Scientist, and he is currently working on a book (with James Elliott) titled “Power at Work: Race, Gender and Job Authority” to be published by the Russell Sage Foundation. He serves as an organizational change consultant to public and private organizations.

Lester K. Spence is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Afro-American Studies at Washington University in Saint Louis. He specializes in race and politics, black politics, urban politics, and political behavior. He was named a Kellogg Scholar in Health Disparities and will spend the next two years in Baltimore at Morgan State University working on a book that examines the impact of urban life on the political attitudes of youth.