Jonathan C. Smith is an assistant professor of American studies at St. Louis University and is researching African-American funerary customs.  

Christopher Leevy Johnson is a funeral director and was an African-American studies professor at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, S.C. He researches the role of African-American funeral directors in the black church, politics and community affairs.

Karla Holloway is a professor of English at Duke University in Durham, N.C., and author of Passed On: African American Mourning Stories (Duke University Press, 2002), in which she examines African-American burial and embalming rituals, funeral services and the undertaking industry.

Charlton McIlwain is Associate Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. He is the author of Death in Black and White: Death, Ritual and Family Ecology (Hampton Press, 2003), which examines African-American funeral practices.

Read an essay by Melissa Harris Lacewell ( Harris-Perry)posted on the Martin Marty Center website about African-American religion and its relationship to politics and voting.

Melissa Harris-Perry is a professor of political science at Tulane University in New Orleans, host of MSNBC’s “Melissa Harris-Perry” and author of Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2004).

Theodore Walker Jr. is associate professor of ethics and society at the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He wrote the book Empower the People: Social Ethics for the African-American Church, about African-American resources for a more inclusive liberation theology.