Kirsten Mullen
Kirsten Mullen is a folklorist and the founder of Artefactual, an arts-consulting practice, and Carolina Circuit Writers, a literary consortium that brings expressive writers of color to the Carolinas. She was a member of the Freelon Adjaye Bond concept development team that was awarded the Smithsonian Institution’s commission to design the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Under the auspices of the North Carolina Arts Council she worked to expand the Coastal Folklife Survey. As a faculty member with the Community Folklife Documentation Institute, she trained students to research and record the state’s African American music heritage. Kirsten was a consultant on the North Carolina Museum of History’s “North Carolina Legends” and “Civil Rights” exhibition projects. Her writing in museum catalogs, journals, and in commercial media includes “Queen Mother,” a profile of black nationalist and reparations advocate “Queen Mother” Audley Moore (Vanity Fair Magazine) and “Black Culture and History Matter” (The American Prospect), which examines the politics of funding black cultural institutions. She and William A. Darity, Jr. are co-editors with Lucas Hubbard of The Reparations Project: A Handbook for Racial Justice (University of California Press, 2023) and the authors of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-first Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).
From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st Century is the recipient of the inaugural 2021 book prize from the Association of African American Life and History, the 2021 Lillian Smith book prize, the 2021 American Book Fest award for Social Change, and the 2020 Ragan Old North State award for nonfiction from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association. The Black Reparations Project: A Handbook for Racial Justice is the 2023 recipient of the Phillis Wheatley Book Award in the Historical, Current Events, Nonfiction Category.
William A. (“Sandy”) Darity Jr.
William A. (“Sandy”) Darity Jr. is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics and the director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. Darity’s research focuses on inequality by race, class and ethnicity, schooling and the racial achievement gap, North-South theories of trade and development, skin shade and labor market outcomes, the economics of reparations, the Atlantic slave trade and the Industrial Revolution, the history of economics, and the social psychological effects of exposure to unemployment. In 2005, he launched the subspecialty of stratification economics. Darity is the 2022 W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and he became a Fellow of the National Academy of Social Insurance in 2021. He received the Samuel Z. Westerfield Award from the National Economic Association in 2012. He and A. Kirsten Mullen are co-editors with Lucas Hubbard of The Black Reparations Project: A Handbook for Racial Justice (2023) and coauthors of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century (2020). From Here to Equality is the recipient of the inaugural 2021 book prize from the Association of African American Life and History, the 2021 Lillian Smith book prize, the 2021 American Book Fest award for Social Change, and the 2020 Ragan Old North State award for nonfiction from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association. The Black Reparations Project is the recipient of the 2023 Phillis Wheatley Book Award in the Historical, Current Events, Nonfiction Category. He also coedited the 2022 publication, The Pandemic Divide: How COVID-19 Increased Inequality in America with Gwendolyn Wright and Lucas Hubbard.
Tiffany T. Crutcher
Tiffany T. Crutcher is a native of Tulsa, Oklahoma, who was thrust into the national spotlight following the death of her twin brother Terence Crutcher, who was shot by a police officer in Tulsa while holding his hands in the air. The murder of her brother compelled Tiffany to speak out against police brutality, particularly the killing of unarmed black men. She has chosen to turn her personal tragedy into an opportunity to bridge fear and mistrust and help transform a justice system that has perpetuated injustice dating back to the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, when white rioters burned down her great-grandmother’s prosperous community of Black Wall Street. Dr. Crutcher has remained committed to organizing coalitions throughout the country that promote the interests of minority communities. Dr. Crutcher is the founder of the Terence Crutcher Foundation (TCF), whose primary focus is criminal justice and policing reform, providing scholarships to African-American students, community and youth development, and policy advocacy.