Seeking Freedom: The Underground Railroad in the Mid-Atlantic

Spencer R. Crew has worked in public history institutions for more than thirty years. He is currently the Clarence J. Robinson Professor of History at George Mason University and Emeritus Director of the National Museum of African American History and the National Museum of American History. Previous to Mason he served as president of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center for six years and worked at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution for twenty years. Nine of those years, he served as the director of NMAH. He most recently served as the interim Director at the National Museum of African American History and Culture until January of 2021. At each of those institutions, he sought to make history accessible to the public through innovative and inclusive exhibitions and public programs. Crew has published extensively in the areas of African American and Public History. He also has curated numerous exhibitions the most recent one at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. He is a graduate of Brown University and holds a master's degree and a doctorate from Rutgers University. His most recent publication is Thurgood Marshall A Life in American History.

Nafeesa Muhammad is an assistant professor of history at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Her areas of interests are 19th and 20th century United States, African American, Transnational, and African Diasporic history. She specializes in the history of the Nation of Islam (NOI) and the movement of Black Nationalism in America. Nafeesa earned her B.A. from Spelman College. She also has a M.A. in African American Studies and a Ph.D. in history from Georgia State University. Her current book project focuses on the economic endeavors of the NOI. Her forthcoming article “Forging Heaven: The Nation of Islam’s Transnational Connection in the Creation of its Economic Program, 1950-1975” examines the NOI’s alliances with communities in Africa and Central America.

Gregory Thompson is a scholar, writer, artist, and producer who works at the intersection of moral imagination and social change. Focusing on matters of race and democracy in the United States, Gregory currently serves as Executive Director of Voices Underground, an initiative to build a national memorial to the Underground Railroad outside of Philadelphia, and as a James Lawson Fellow for Faith and Justice at Historic Clayborn Temple in Memphis, Tennessee, the site of the Sanitation Worker’s Strike of 1968, Martin Luther King Jr.’s last campaign. In addition to this, he is the Co-Creator (with the acclaimed artist Sho Baraka), Producer and Co-Writer of Union: The Musical, a soul and hip-hop based musical that tells the story of the 1968 Sanitation Workers’ Strike, and Co-Author (with Reverend Duke Kwon) of the forthcoming book, Reparations: A Christian Call to Repentance and Repair (Brazos, April 2021.) He holds an M.Div from Covenant Theological Seminary, and an M.A. and PhD from the University of Virginia, where he wrote his dissertation on Martin Luther King Jr.

Paul Finkelman, the president of Gratz College, is the author of more than 100 law review articles, 100 other scholarly articles, and more than fifty books. He is a specialist on slavery, civil rights, and race relations, African American history and has written extensively on Fugitive Slaves Laws and the relationship to slavery and the U.S. Constitution. He has also written on American Constitutional and legal history, the American Civil War, religious liberty, and the history of religion in the U.S., American Jewish history, and legal issues surrounding baseball. His recent book, Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court (Harvard University Press, 2018) explored how the key justice on the Supreme Court handles slavery cases and cases involving the Fugitive Slave Laws. This book also provided heretofore unknown information about Chief Justice John Marshall’s extensive slaveholding, his lifetime of buying and sometimes selling slaves, and how this affected his decision-making on the court. The United States Supreme Court has quoted and cited Finkelman’s work in five decisions as has numerous other federal and state courts. He has lectured on human trafficking and on human rights issues at the United Nations, throughout the United States, and in more than a dozen other countries. He is ranked in the top 10% of all scholars for downloads on SSRN. He was an expert witness in several cases including the lawsuit over the ownership of Barry Bonds’ 73rd home run ball (Popov v. Hayashi). In 2012 he held the John Hope Franklin Chair in Legal History at Duke Law School and in 2017 he held the Fulbright Chair in Human Rights and Social Justice at the University of Ottawa.