James N. Gregory is a history professor at the University of Washington and director of the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project. Among books he has written is The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (The University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

Charlyn M. Singleton is president of God’s Woman Conferences, based in Rialto, Calif. She is a motivational and revival speaker, working with youth, women and men at conferences, marriage events, retreats, workshops and worship services.

Cecil Williams has been the pastor of the 7,000-member Glide Memorial United Methodist Church, in San Francisco’s gritty Tenderloin district since 1963. He is a spiritual, political and social force in the Bay Area, and the church is a leading voice in promoting diversity of all sorts, social activism and community programs.

Paul Harvey is a professor of American history at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. He wrote Freedom’s Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South From the Civil War Through the Civil Rights Era and co-edited (with Philip Goff) The Columbia Documentary History of Religion in America Since 1945. Harvey is working on a history of […]

Reginald A. Bruce is associate professor of management at the University of Louisville’s College of Business. He has done much research on pastoral leadership, including a 2005 paper titled “Leadership in High Performing Congregations: Uncovering the Secrets of Success.”

Maisha Itia Handy is a womanist scholar and assistant professor of Christian education at the Interdenominational Theological Seminary in Atlanta. She is also minister of Christian education at First Iconium Baptist Church in Atlanta.

Hans A. Baer is a professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He wrote The Black Spiritual Movement: A Religious Response to Racism (University of Tennessee Press, 2001) and African American Religion: Varieties of Protest and Accommodation (University of Tennessee Press, 2002).

Read a Guttmacher Institute study published May 28, 2013.

Stacey Floyd-Thomas is an associate professor of ethics and black church studies at Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. She is founder and executive director of the Black Religious Scholars Group and a second-generation womanist scholar.