Tremper Longman III is the Robert H. Gundry Professor of Biblical Studies at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, Calif. He has been active in Bible translation and is a member of the committee that produced the New Living Translation.

The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has an online exhibit about Malcolm X.

Lori Anne Ferrell is a professor of early modern history and literature at Claremont Graduate University in California. She wrote The Bible and the People.

Robert Alter is the Class of 1937 Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught for more than 30 years. He has translated books of the Bible and written extensively on the literary aspects of the Bible, most recently Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible.

Read a Feb. 12, 2013, StarTribune article about the growing African-American Muslim community and a bit about its history.

Hannibal Hamlin is an associate professor of English at Ohio State University, Columbus. A specialist in Renaissance literature and culture, he co-edited The King James Bible After 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic and Cultural Influences. Hamlin organized a 2011 conference at OSU on the literary and cultural influence of the KJV.

Read an outline of African-American Muslim history from On Common Ground: World Religions in America (Columbia University Press, 2002). It’s reprinted on the Pluralism Project’s website.

Steven M. Sheeley is a former professor of religion at Shorter College in Rome, Ga., and currently vice president with the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. He co-authored two books on English Bible translation.

Allen P. Ross is Beeson Professor of Old Testament and Hebrew at Beeson Divinity School at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala. He was a member of the team that reviewed the ESV Bible translation.