Biographies of Keynote Presenters

AWARDS DINNER & KEYNOTE ADDRESS 

Featuring Dr. Ibram X. Kendi

IBRAM X. KENDI is one of America’s foremost historians and leading antiracist scholars. He is a National Book Award-winning and #1 New York Times bestselling author of six books for adults and four books for children. Dr. Kendi is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and the Founding Director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. Dr. Kendi is a contributor writer at The Atlantic and a CBS News Racial Justice Contributor. He is the host of new action podcast Be Antiracist. In 2020, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He was awarded a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the “Genius Grant.”

Dr. Kendi is the author of The Black Campus Movement, which won the W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize, and Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2016. At 34 years old, Dr. Kendi was the youngest ever winner of the NBA for Nonfiction. He grew up dreaming about playing in the NBA (National Basketball Association), and ironically, he ended up joining the other NBA.

Dr. Kendi also has produced five #1 New York Times bestsellers. How to Be an Antiracist, an international bestseller that has been translated in several languages. It made several Best Books of 2019 lists and was described in the New York Times as “the most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind.” Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, co-authored with Jason Reynolds, is a young adult remix of Stamped from the Beginning. Stamped Jr.—as we call it—won the GoodReads Choice Award and was a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Book of the Year, Jane Addams Children’s Book Award, the Kirkus Prize, and a NAACP Image Award. Antiracist Baby, illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky, was published as a board book and picture book. Most recently, Dr. Kendi edited with Dr. Keisha N. Blain, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019. And, Dr. Sonja Cherry-Paul adapted Stamped Jr. into Stamped for Kids, a book for middle graders that Kirkus found to be "exhilarating, excellent, necessary." Dr. Kendi’s two latest books, published in June 2022, were instant New York Times bestsellers: How to Raise an Antiracist and Goodnight Racism, a picture book illustrated by Cbabi Bayoc.

Dr. Kendi was born in 1982 to parents who came of age during the Black power movement in New York City. They were activist Christians inspired by Black liberation theology. While Dr. Kendi was in high school, his family moved from Jamaica, Queens, to Manassas, Virginia. He traveled further south and attended Florida A&M University, where he majored in journalism. He initially aspired for a career in sports journalism, freelancing for several Florida newspapers, and interning at USA Today Sports Weekly, as well as in the sports sections of the Mobile Register and Atlanta Journal-Constitution. By the end of his tenure at FAMU, he had become alienated from sports journalism and increasingly became interested in engaging in racial justice work. He picked up a second major in African American Studies and graduated in 2004.

Dr. Kendi has been visiting professor at Brown University, a 2013 National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow, and postdoctoral fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. He has also resided at The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress as the American Historical Association’s 2010-2011 J. Franklin Jameson Fellow in American History. In the summer of 2011, he lived in Chicago as a short-term fellow in African American Studies through the Black Metropolis Research Consortium. He has received research fellowships, grants, and visiting appointments from a variety of other universities, foundations, professional associations, and libraries, including the Lyndon B. Johnson Library & Museum, University of Chicago, Wayne State University, Emory University, Duke University, Princeton University, UCLA, Washington University, Wake Forest University, and the historical societies of Kentucky and Southern California. He was also the 2020-2021 Frances B. Cashin Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for the Advanced Study at Harvard University.

In 2021, The Root 100 listed him as the tenth most influential African American between the ages of 25 and 45 and the most influential college professor. Dr. Kendi was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019. And this year, he was elected to the prestigious Society of American Historians and named a 2021 Young Global Leader, the World Economic Forum's annual class of the most promising leaders around the globe under the age of 40.

His next book, Magnolia Flower, a picture book illustrated by Loveis Wise, is coming out on September 6, 2022. Adapted from a short story by Zora Neale Hurston, Magnolia Flower follows a young Afro-Indigenous girl who longs from freedom. On January 31, 2023, How to Be a (Young) Antiracist will be released. Co-authored with Nic Stone, it is a young adult remix of How to Be an Antiracist.

Kendi lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Pre-order a signed copy of Stamped From The Beginning 

Friday, October 21; 12:30-1:30pm

Lunchtime Keynote

Featuring Mehrsa Baradaran

"The Color of Money" 

Mehrsa Baradaran a professor of law, University of California, Irvine, writes about banking law, financial inclusion, inequality, and the racial wealth gap. Her book, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap, was named the Best Book of the Year by the Urban Affairs Association. In 2017, her article, "The New Deal with Black America," was presented  at the Stanford/Harvard/Yale Junior Faculty Forum. Other articles by Baradaran include "Jim Crow Credit," Irvine Law Review; "Banking and the Social Contract," Notre Dame Law Review; and "How the Poor Got Cut Out of Banking," Emory Law Journal.  Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Slate, American Banker, the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times; on National Public Radio’s “Marketplace,” C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” and Public Broadcasting Service’s “NewsHour.”Saturday, October 23; 12:00-1:00pm

Saturday, October 22; 12:00-1:00pm

Lunchtime Keynote

Featuring Theo Wilson

Theo Wilson began his speaking career in the N.A.A.C.P. at the age of 15, and has always had a passion for social justice.  He attended Florida A&M University, where he obtained his B.A. in Theater Performance.  Theo returned to Denver and is now the Executive Director of Shop Talk Live, inc.  The organization uses the barber shop as a staging ground for community dialogue and healing.  After viral video success beginning in 2015, Theo grew his social media following to well over 70,000 people.  Due to audience demand, he published his first book in 2017, “The Law of Action.” The book addresses some of the misconceptions about the law of attraction, and the role direct action plays into manifestation. It can be found on Amazon.com, or his website, TheoWilson.net. In 2017, his TED Talk entitled, “A Black Man Goes Undercover in the Alt Right,” was seen world wide, amassing a total of over 17 million views.

Theo is the host of The History Channel’s hit series, “I Was There.”  He has been featured on Good Morning America, BuzzFeed, CNN, Good Day Canada, and TV One.

Biographies of Special Presenters

Richard Rothstein is a Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Policy Institute and a Senior Fellow (emeritus) at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He is the author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, an exploration of how federal, state, and local policy explicitly segregated metropolitan areas nationwide, creating racially homogenous neighborhoods in patterns that violate the Constitution. He is also the author of  Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black–White Achievement Gapand Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right. Many of his articles on race and education may be found at http://www.epi.org/people/richard-rothstein/  He welcomes questions and comments at riroth@epi.org