Actor, producer and humanitarian Danny Glover has been a commanding presence on screen, stage and television for more than 25 years.  He attended SF State University in the late 1960’s and received an honorary degree from the school in 1997.

Involved with civil rights groups as a teen, Glover got involved in the dramatic arts as a way to spread the message. Glover trained at the Black Actors' Workshop of the American Conservatory Theater. It was his Broadway debut in Athol Fugard's Master Harold...and the Boys, which brought him to national recognition. Glover has starred in several Best Picture nominees: Places in the Heart; (1984); The Color Purple (1984) and  Witness(1985). In 1987, Glover partnered with Mel Gibson in the first Lethal Weapon film and went on to star in three hugely successful Lethal Weapon sequels. Glover has also invested his talents in more personal projects, including the award-winning To Sleep With Anger, which he executive produced and for which he won an Independent Spirit Award for Best Actor, Glover won an Image Award and a Cable ACE Award and earned an Emmy nomination for his performance in the title role of the HBO movie Mandela. He has also received Emmy nominations for his work in the acclaimed miniseries Lonesome Dove and the telefilm Freedom Song. 

Glover has also gained respect for his wide-reaching community activism and philanthropic efforts, with a particular emphasis on advocacy for economic justice, and access to health care and education programs in the United States and Africa. For these efforts, Glover received a 2006 DGA Honor. Internationally, Glover has served as a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Development Program from 1998-2004, focusing on issues of poverty, disease, and economic development in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, and serves as UNICEF Ambassador.

In 2005, Glover co-founded Louverture Films dedicated to the development and production of films of historical relevance, social purpose, commercial value and artistic integrity. The New York based company has a slate of progressive features and documentaries including Trouble the Water, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. 

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Photo CR: Brian Bowen Smith/FOX

HARRY EDWARDS

 Harry Edwards was born in St. Louis but grew up in East St. Louis, Illinois.  After an outstanding career at East St. Louis High, he graduated in 1960 and was awarded an athletic scholarship to San Jose State University from which he graduated in 1964 with high honors.  He subsequently was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and a University Fellowship to Cornell University where he completed a M.A. and a Ph.D. in sociology.  He was on the faculty of California at Berkeley from 1970 – 2001 and currently is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology.

From 1992 through 2001, Dr. Edwards was a consulting inmate counselor at the San Francisco County Jail at San Bruno, California and periodically worked with inmate programs at California’s San Quentin State Prison.  From 2001 through 2003, Dr. Edwards was Director of the Department of Parks and Recreation for the City of Oakland, California.

Dr. Edwards also has a long and storied history of activism focused upon developments at the interface of sport, race, and society.  The combination of his experiences as an African-American, as an athlete in the 1960’s, and his training in the discipline of sociology led Harry to propose that by the late 1960’s America had become very complacent about the issue of race in sports. He ultimately called for a Black athlete boycott of the United States 1968 Olympic team in large part to dramatize the racial inequities and barriers confronting Blacks in sport and society.  The movement resulted in demonstrations by Black athletes across the nation and ultimately at the Mexico City games – a movement commemorated by a 24-foot high statue on the campus at San Jose State University. 

Years later, Dr. Edwards was to become a consultant on issues of diversity for all three major sports.  He was hired by the Commissioner of Major League Baseball in 1987 to help with efforts to increase front office representation of minorities and women in baseball.  He also was with the Golden State Warriors of the NBA from 1987 through 1995, specializing in player personnel recruitment and counseling.  In 1986, he began work with the San Francisco 49ers in the area of player personnel counseling and programs.  The programs and methods that he developed for handling player personnel issues were adopted by the entire NFL in 1992, as was the Minority Coaches’ Internship Program developed by he and Coach Bill Walsh to increase opportunities for minority coaches in the NFL.

Over his career, Harry Edwards has persisted in efforts to compel the sports establishment to confront and to effectively address issues pertaining to diversity and equal opportunity within its ranks.  Edwards, a scholar-activist who became spokesperson for what amounted to a revolution in sports, is now considered the leading authority on developments at the interface of race, sport, and society and was a pioneering scholar in the founding of the sociology of sport as an academic discipline.

Dr. Edwards has been a consultant with producers of sports related programs for numerous television and film productions in the United States and abroad over the last 40 years.  He has received dozens of awards and honors, including several honorary doctorate degrees and has been honored by the University of Texas which has established the “Dr. Harry Edwards Lectures”, a permanent series of invited lectures on themes related to sport and society.  He has written scores of articles and four books:  The Struggle That Must Be, Sociology of Sports, Black Students, The Revolt of the Black Athlete.

Ibram X. Kendi is an assistant professor of African American history at the University of Florida. He engaged in student activism as a graduate student at Temple University and now studies racist and antiracist ideas and movements. He is the author of the award-winning book, The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965-1972 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), the first national study of Black student activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He has published essays on the Black Campus Movement.

Dr. Kendi has earned research fellowships, grants, or appointments from the American Historical Association, Library of Congress, National Academy of Education, Spencer Foundation, Chicago’s Black Metropolis Research Consortium, Lyndon B. Johnson Library & Museum, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, Brown University, Princeton University, Emory University, Duke University, and University of Chicago. He is currently finishing Stamped from the Beginning: A Narrative History of Racist Ideas in America, forthcoming from Nation Books in 2016. 

Charlayne Hunter-Gault is an award-winning journalist with more than 40 years in the industry.

She is the author of four books—the most recent, “Corrective Rape;” To the Mountaintop:  My Journey Through the Civil Rights Movement,”  a historical narrative for young readers grade nine through young adult.   Her other two books are New News Out of Africa: Uncovering the African Renaissance, Oxford University Press and In My Place,  a memoir of the Civil Rights Movement, fashioned around her experiences as the first black woman to attend the University of Georgia.

In 2005, she returned to NPR as a Special Correspondent after six years as CNN's Johannesburg bureau chief and correspondent.  She joined CNN in April 1999 from National Public Radio, where she worked as the network's chief correspondent in Africa and was awarded a Peabody  in 1998  for her coverage of the continent. 

Hunter-Gault joined NPR in 1997 after 20 years with PBS, where she worked as a national correspondent for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.  She began her journalism career as a reporter for The New Yorker; then worked as a local news anchor for WRC-TV in Washington, D.C.; and as the Harlem bureau chief for The New York Times. She is also frequent contributor to The New Yorker and  The Root. 

Her numerous honors include two Emmy awards and two  other Peabody awards—the first for her work on "Apartheid's People," a NewsHour series about  South African life during apartheid. She has received awards and citations from  the National Association of Black Journalists, including for her  CNN series on Zimabawe; the Sidney Hillman  Foundation , the American Women in Radio and Television , and Amnesty International for her Human Rights reporting, especially her PBS Series, Rights and Wrongs, a Human Rights Television magazine. In August, 2005, she was inducted in the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame. In 2010, she received the D. C.  Choral Arts Society Humanitarian award  and  in  2011, she  was honored  with  both  the Fred Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award and the W. Haywood Burns award from New York’s Neighborhood Defender Service.  

   In 2014, she received the International Feeedom Award from the National Civil Rights Museum at the historic Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated.  And in 2015, she was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Washington Press Club Foundation. 

Hunter-Gault is a sought after public speaker and  holds some three dozen  honorary degrees. She serves on the boards of  The Carter Center, the Peabody Awards, and The Committee to Protect Journalists.  

Hunter-Gault is married to businessman Ronald T. Gault, with whom she produces Passages Wine from South Africa .   They have  two adult children, Suesan, an artist  and  singer  and Chuma, an actor.        Hunter–Gault divides her time between two homes—Martha’s Vineyard and Sarasota,  Florida.

Zachary W. Carter is the 78th Corporation Counsel of the City of New York. As the chief legal officer of the City, Mr. Carter oversees the Law Department with over 700 attorneys, who represent the City’s interest in thousands of legal matters facing the City. 

As a key legal advisor to the Mayor and his City agencies, Mr. Carter is primarily focused on advancing the City’s interests, with a commitment to justice and fair outcomes for individuals. Throughout his career, Mr. Carter has used the law to level the playing field for those seeking equal access to justice and opportunity, free from the burden of discrimination based on race, national origin, gender, sexual preference or economic class. 

In 1993 he was appointed by President Bill Clinton as the United States Attorney for the Eastern District, the first African-American to hold that office. His office prosecuted the full range of federal criminal cases, including major narcotics, securities fraud and human trafficking. Most notably, Mr. Carter oversaw civil rights prosecutions against police officers in the Abner Louima torture case and against rioters who killed Yankel Rosenbaum during the City’s Crown Heights riots in 1991. 

Prior to becoming the Corporation Counsel, Mr. Carter was a partner in the firm Dorsey & Whitney. He oversaw the Trial Group at the firm’s New York office and was co-chair of the firm’s White Collar Crime and Civil Fraud practice. 

Mr. Carter has served as a magistrate judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York and as a judge of the New York City Criminal Court. He has served as chairman of the New York City Mayor’s Committee on the Judiciary from 2002 through 2013. Mr. Carter has received the Public Interest Law & Society Award from the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest and the Emory Buckner Medal from the Federal Bar Council. 

He graduated from Cornell University in 1972 and New York University School of Law in 1975. In the past two years, Mr. Carter has overseen the settlements in the stop and frisk case, Floyd v. New York, and the Central Park 5 case in which the five men, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana Jr. and Kharey Wise each received approximately $1 million for each year of imprisonment as part of the $41 million settlement.

The power and magic of words, especially words-in-motion, still inspires Irene Smalls and has been the genesis of most of her endeavors as an award-winning writer, thinker, performer, and literacy-based entrepreneur. 

Irene Smalls is an internationally known writer, and performer. Smalls is using the books she has created to develop installations, performance art and events. She conducts classes and workshops to help parents, teachers, and students to understand the importance and complexities of writing and the importance of incorporating literature into a myriad of settings. She also works with budding and established writers of children’s literature to help them hone their storytelling skills and expand those skills to access additional markets for their written works