Sandra Gunning is Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of Race, Rape and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature (1996) and co-editor of ‘The Marrow of Tradition’ (2002).

Tera W. Hunter is Associate Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the author of To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (1997) and co-editor of African American Urban Studies: Perspectives from the Colonial Period to the Present (2004).

Michele Mitchell is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of The Nation Reproduced: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (2004).