James M. Lawson Jr. is a Methodist minister who taught nonviolent theory and practice to help launch the 1960s Nashville lunch counter sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the Memphis sanitation strike, and worker and immigrant rights movements in Los Angeles. He continues to energize leaders and activists and inspire social change movements in the United States today.

Michael K. Honey is Haley Professor of Humanities at the University of Washington Tacoma. He is the author of five award-winning books on labor, the freedom movement, and Martin Luther King; the editor of King's labor speeches; the past president of the Labor and Working-Class History Association; and a former civil liberties and community organizer in the South.

Kent Wong is director of the UCLA Labor Center, a union attorney, and a labor activist. He has taught a course on nonviolence with Rev. James Lawson Jr. for the past twenty years and has published books on the labor movement, immigrant rights, and the Asian American community.

Angela Y. Davis is a philosopher, antiracist, feminist scholar and activist, former political prisoner, and author of numerous pathbreaking studies. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita of the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Bryan Stevenson is the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative and has won major legal cases before the US Supreme Court to challenge unfair and abusive treatment of the incarcerated. He has created nationally acclaimed cultural sites in Montgomery, Alabama, and is a professor at New York University School of Law.