Please Welcome
Our Distinguished Guests
We are grateful for their support of our efforts to prevent hate and to elevate underserved communities.
Bio Brief & Event Participation
Alice Wairimu Nderitu
Under Secretary General
Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide
Town Hall | Gala Keynote
Bio Brief
Alice Wairimu Nderitu is the United Nations Under-Secretary-General and the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, as of 2020. Ms. Nderitu is a recognized voice in the field of peacebuilding and violence prevention, having led as mediator and senior adviser in reconciliation processes. She served as Commissioner of the National Cohesion and Integration Commission in Kenya, as well as Founding Member and co-Chair of the Uwiano Platform for Peace, a prevention agency linking early warning to early response. She was also one of the founders of Community Voices for Peace and Pluralism, a network of African women professionals preventing, transforming and solving violent, ethnic, racial and religious conflicts worldwide. Widely published, she is the recipient of awards recognizing her commitment to peaceful conflict transformation throughout Africa and her innovative approach to mediation.
Dr. Jelani Cobb
Columbia University Dean of Journalism MSNBC Contributor
Friday Keynote | Town Hall | Gala
Bio Brief
Dr. Jelani Cobb joined the Columbia University Journalism School faculty in 2016 and became Dean in 2022. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2015. He received a Peabody Award for his 2020 PBS Frontline film Whose Vote Counts?and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary in 2018. He has also been a political analyst for MSNBC since 2019.
He is the author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress and To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic. He is the editor or co-editor of several volumes including The Matter of Black Lives, a collection of The New Yorker’s writings on race and The Essential Kerner Commission Report. He is producer or co-producer on a number of documentaries including Lincoln’s Dilemma, Obama: A More Perfect Union and Policing the Police.
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Jericka Duncan
CBS Weekend News Anchor National Correspondent
Town Hall Moderator | Gala
Bio Brief
Jericka Duncan is a national correspondent and anchor of the Sunday edition of the "CBS Weekend News." She's based in New York City.
Duncan, who has been a CBS News correspondent since 2013, has reported such significant stories as accusations against R Kelly, Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein; the shooting deaths of four Marines and a Navy sailor in Chattanooga; the 70th anniversary of D-Day and Normandy; as well as a variety of national breaking news stories. In 2018, she spent time in Washington D.C. covering the White House.
Duncan is an Emmy-nominated journalist who has received several awards for her reporting, including two National Edward R. Murrow Awards from the Radio Television Digital News Association and honors from the Associated Press and the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, which named her Journalist of the Year in 2012.
Benjamin Lloyd Crump
Attorney For the People
Saturday Keynote | Town Hall
Bio Brief
Listed amongst the Most Influential People of 2021 by TIME100, Ebony Magazine’s Power 100 Most Influential African Americans, The National Trial Lawyers Top 100 Lawyers, and the 2014 NNPA Newsmaker of the Year, civil rights and personal injury Attorney Ben Crump is referred to as “Black America’s Attorney General.” Benjamin Crump has established himself as one of the nation’s foremost lawyers and advocates for social justice, winning a number of record settlements and verdicts for victims and families that have faced injustice. He has worked on some of the most high-profile cases in the U.S., representing the families of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, the residents of Flint, Michigan and the Whitfield family amongst others in the Buffalo NY, massacre. During the consequential year after George Floyd was murdered, Netflix documentary film crews chronicled Crump’s work in the award-winning documentary, “Civil.” Attorney Crump became the first practicing Black attorney to have a law school named after him when St. Thomas University renamed their law school the Benjamin L. Crump College of Law in 2023. He is the founder and principal owner of Ben Crump Law.
Dr. Eddie Glaude Jr.
Princeton University Dean of Africana Studies MSNBC Contributor
Gala
Bio Brief
Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor and chair of African American Studies at Princeton University. He is the former president of the American Academy of Religion, the largest professional organization of scholars of religion in the world. Glaude is the author of several important books including Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul, which has been described as “one of the most imaginative, daring books of the twenty-first century.” His most recent book, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, was released on June 30, 2020. Imani Perry describes the book as “precisely the witness we need for our treacherous times. Glaude is also a columnist for Time magazine and a regular contributor on MSNBC. He hails from Moss Point, Mississippi, a small town on the Gulf Coast, and is a graduate of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.
Fatima Morrell, Ed.D.
Chief for Culturally & Linguistically Responsive Initiatives, Buffalo Public Schools
Panelist
Don't Hate, Educate | WHITEWASHED!
Bio Brief
Born and raised in Buffalo, Dr. Morrell is a, a former Spanish and English Teacher, Assistant Principal, Principal, Supervising Principal, Assistant Superintendent for Instruction and Curriculum, Associate Superintendent for Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Initiatives, and a New York State certified Outside Educational Expert (OEE) for school and district improvement. Dr. Morrell has recently been recognized as a national leader on anti-racist curriculum and pedagogy, as she has been named a Time Magazine Innovative Teacher of the Year 2022, for her implementation of the Emancipation Curriculum. She is also a National School Boards Association Magna Award recipient, 2023. Dr. Morrell considers herself the “Guardian of Equity” in Buffalo Schools, as she leads the district wide initiatives on Anti-racist teaching, culturally relevant pedagogy, dismantling disproportionality in Special Education enrollments and the school-to prison pipeline, and she administers the federally funded “My Brother’s Keeper Male Academy” program.
