Michael O. Emerson is a professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has written several books on race and religion, including People of the Dream: Multiracial Congregations in the United States and Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America.

David A. Bositis is a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a think tank in Washington, D.C., that focuses on public policy issues of concern to African-Americans. He runs the center’s National Opinion Poll, which samples African-Americans as well as the general population. He is a source for statistics […]

Michael Leo Owens is an associate professor of political science at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga. specializing in urban politics; state and local politics; political penology; governance and public policy processes; religion and politics; and African American politics. He is the author of the 2007 book God and Government in the Ghetto: The Politics of […]

Pelonomi Khumoetsile-Taylor is director of diversity and inclusion at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston, Mass. She wrote “Access to Higher Education for African Americans.”

Listen to an April 3, 2006, Talk of the Nation program on National Public Radio about the contentious issues of African-Americans, immigration and social justice.

Read a June 13, 2007, New York Times story about an African-American congregation in Mamaroneck, N.Y., that serves as an official hiring site for largely Hispanic day laborers. One expert says very few of the nation’s hiring sites are associated with African-American churches.

Read a March 21, 2010, Huffington Post column on whether the black church supports immigration reform.

Luke A. Powery is assistant professor of homiletics at Princeton Theological Seminary and the author of Spirit Speech: Lament and Celebration in Preaching (2009).

Juan M. Floyd-Thomas is associate professor of African-American religious history at Vanderbilt University’s Divinity School and a member of the cultural resources team for the African American Lectionary. He is also an expert on religion and protest music and black religious experience in America.