Clarice Thomas is an Assistant Professor at Saint Louis University in the Department of African American Studies and School of Education who will act as the K-12 education expert throughout this project. Dr. Thomas’s education includes a Ph.D. in Teaching and Learning from Georgia State University and dual degrees in History and Political Science from Grand Valley State University. She is director of the Teaching Well Institute for School Transformation (TWIST) and faculty in the Graduate Education Studies program.

Thomas is an instructor for the university’s Prison Education Program and former alternative education instructor and certified Social Studies teacher for grades 6-12. Her research areas include Black Studies approaches to teacher education, Disrupting the school-to-prison nexus, Examining the carceral state and multi-generational incarceration, Critical narrative inquiry and Autoethnography, Historical archival research.

Geoff Ward is Professor of African and African-American Studies and faculty affiliate in the Department of Sociology and American Culture Studies Program at Washington University in St. Louis. He is director of the WashU & Slavery Project, a university initiative based in the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity (CRE2), in partnership with the consortium of Universities Studying Slavery.

His scholarship examines histories and legacies of racialized violence and their reparative implications. This work has been generously supported by institutions including the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Justice, the Ford Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. In addition to numerous research articles and essays, he is the author of The Black Child-Savers: Racial Democracy and Juvenile Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2012), an award-winning book on the contested history and haunting remnants of Jim Crow juvenile justice.

Dr. Priscilla A. Dowden-White is Associate Professor of History at the University of Missouri where she currently serves as Undergraduate Advisor and teaches a variety of courses on African American history, United States history since 1865, and the history of St. Louis. She holds a B.A. in History from the University of Missouri – St. Louis, a M.P.S. in Africana Studies from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and a Ph.D. in History from Indiana University – Bloomington. Her scholarly interests include social welfare and civic activism among African Americans during the interwar period of WWI and WWII.

Dr. Dowden-White is the author of Groping toward Democracy: African American Social Welfare Reform in St. Louis, 1910-1949 (University of Missouri Press, 2011). Prof. Dowden-White has been a featured scholar in several historical documentaries, among them are: “Sing It, Tell It,” a documentary exploring the African-American musical heritage of Missouri, “Decades,” a series on the history of St. Louis since the 1904 World’s Fair, and “Made in the U.S.A.: East St. Louis.”

Bernie Hayes is a former professor at Webster University and has 63 years of experience as a print and broadcast journalist, radio, and television announcer, columnist, recording artist, and producer. As the curator of the Don and Heide Wolff Jazz Institute and the National Black Radio Hall of Fame at Harris-Stowe State University, he brings his mission to honor and commemorate the achievements, contributions, and triumphs of “Soul Radio” and the many African American personalities that contributed so much to the industry.

Hayes once recorded with Stax records and interviewed a variety of social and cultural luminaries on his popular Black radio program throughout the 1960s and 1970s, including James Brown and Jesse Jackson.

Lois D. Conley is the founder, president, and CEO of St. Louis’s Griot Museum of Black History, the first cultural institution in St. Louis that is solely dedicated to revealing the broad scope of Black History and culture. Conley has dedicated many years toward researching African-American history, with particular emphasis on the Underground Railroad and Westward Expansion. Conley was a consultant to the National Park Services study which documented the trails of hundreds of enslaved Blacks that used it to secure their freedom via the Underground Railroad. She has also lectured across the nation at various schools, churches, universities, and has conducted tours to Black historic sites.

A graduate of Saint Louis University, Conley earned her bachelor’s degree in Communications and master’s degree in Education. She also earned a Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Missouri-St. Louis as an E. Desmond Lee Scholar. Ms. Conley grew up in St. Louis’ Millcreek Neighborhood and graduated from Vashon High School.

Lauren Parks is president, CEO, and co-founder of the House of Miles East St. Louis (HOME). Parks led the charge to refurbish the childhood home of East St. Louisan, trumpeter, and world-shifting composer Miles Davis, which had been unoccupied for the last 15 years and was slated for demolition.

As a non-profit organization, HOME now hosts educational opportunities for students and community members, guided tours of the house, and a variety of educational resources for the community of East. St. Louis, Illinois. The home and its grounds now boast a music lab for students, a butterfly garden, STEAM initiative, beekeeping courses, fitness and healthy eating programs, music lessons, and a variety of other after school and summer activities for young people growing up in the East St. Louis area. The house is now recognized by the St. Clair County Historical Society and has been declared a historically significant landmark.

Vivian Gibson, memoirist and author of The Last Children of Mill Creek, was raised on Bernard Street in Mill Creek Valley and has lived in New York City and Liberia, West Africa. After retiring, she wrote short stories about her childhood memories in a segregated St. Louis community.

The Missouri Humanities Council honored her with a Literary Achievement Award in 2020. The Missouri Library Association named her 2022 Author of the Year, and The Library of Congress recognized Vivian Gibson's The Last Children of Mill Creek to represent the state of Missouri's literary heritage at the 2023 National Book Festival in Washington, DC.

The Last Children of Mill Creek is an essential book for anyone interested in urban development, race, and community history―or for anyone who was once a child.

The Last Children of Mill Creek has almost single-handedly forced St. Louis to remember a chapter it had chosen to forget - the forced destruction of a once-thriving Black community in the name of "urban renewal.”

—Sarah Fenske, NPR radio host, editor and columnist

Lauren Eldridge Stewart is an Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology in the Department of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research interests include the cultural uses of classical music, folklore, and material culture across the African diaspora, as well as sampling and interpolation across genres and cultural boundaries.

She is currently writing a book about the contemporary practice of classical music in Haiti, and has been published in journals such as Music and Politics, Women & Music, and Twentieth-Century Music. Her next book continues the work of assessing the function of classical music in contemporary society by examining the community relations and educational outreach programs of US orchestras and the efficacy of their claims toward social justice. She also cohosts the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra broadcasts on St. Louis Public Radio.

William J. Maxwell is the Fannie Hurst Professor of American Literature at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches classes in modern American and African American literatures.

He is the author of the books F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (Princeton University Press, 2015), which won the American Book Award, and New Negro, Old Left: African American Writing and Communism between the Wars (Columbia University Press, 1999). He is the editor of James Baldwin: The FBI File (Arcade-Simon and Schuster, 2017); of Claude McKay’s Complete Poems (University of Illinois Press, 2004); and, with Gary Holcomb, of Claude McKay’s previously unpublished novel Romance in Marseille (Penguin Classics, 2020). His book in progress, James Baldwinism Now: The Baldwin Revival and Twenty-First Century Memory, has been contracted by Princeton University Press. He is the former president of the international Modernist Studies Association (MSA) and serves on the editorial boards of PMLA, American Literary History, and James Baldwin Review.