We Count & Contest Speakers

Rev. Willie Bodrick, II, J.D., M. Div. is the talented, enthusiastic, and anointed Senior Pastor of the Historic Twelfth Baptist Church in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, MA. Rev. Bodrick leads with dynamic preaching, insightful teaching, and gospel-driven social engagement in the community and throughout the country. Rev. Bodrick is the church’s fourteenth senior pastor, celebrating 185 years (1840) as a congregation and 220 years (1805) since the founding of the First African Baptist Church, also known as the African Meeting House. 

Rev. Bodrick successfully led the 185-year-old church through profound challenges created by the pandemic, partnering with Boston Medical Center to establish a vaccination clinic at TBC that vaccinated 2,500 people and leading efforts to feed over 15,000 residents yearly through the continuing services of the church’s food pantry and other special programming. During this season, TBC was able to continue our ministries and services, as well as increase their viewership and engagement to over a thousand weekly viewers from across the country and the world. Rev. Bodrick and TBC also led vaccine education efforts, donated more than $375,000 to community members and organizations. Rev. Bodrick also brought in a $1 million gift from King Boston (now Embrace Boston) – the largest gift ever made to the Twelfth Baptist Church.

Rev. Bodrick serves as the President of the SAMH Corporation, overseeing the church’s housing ministry, thrift shop, peace walks, and after-school and summer enrichment programs.

​In 2025, the church completed a major Restoration and Renewal Project, restoring its historic edifice in Roxbury while revitalizing its spiritual, cultural, and social mission. This restoration symbolizes not only the preservation of a building but the renewal of a calling, ensuring that the church remains a beacon for future generations. On October 17, 2025, under the leadership of Pastor Bodrick, the church commemorated the 220th anniversary of the founding of the First African Baptist Church (1805) and the 185th anniversary of Twelfth Baptist Church. Marking its first gala in more than thirty years, the congregation gathered for a historic celebration themed “Built to Last.”

​Prior to becoming Senior Pastor, Rev. Bodrick served on the ministerial staff for nine years, first as Youth and Young Adult Minister, then as Young Adult and College Minister, Assistant Pastor, and ultimately as Associate Pastor. He also served as the Director of the Afterschool Program and Summer Enrichment Program, successfully managing both programs and maintaining student and family engagement. ​

​Rev. Willie Bodrick, II was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, and is the eldest son (Brothers: Winston “Skip” Bodrick and Weldon T. Bodrick) of Rev. Willie Bodrick and Anna Bodrick. Pastor Bodrick is a proud product of Atlanta Public Schools Rev. Bodrick holds a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) degree from Georgetown University, a Master of Divinity (M.Div.) degree from Harvard Divinity School, and a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from Northeastern University School of Law. In May 2022, Rev. Bodrick received an honorary Doctorate of Community Service from Northeastern University.

​Concurrently, Rev. Bodrick is the President & CEO of The American City Coalition (TACC). He brings extensive executive leadership and a personal and professional commitment to social and economic justice in the Roxbury community. Under his leadership, TACC launched Roxbury Worx. This workforce development model will bring the untapped talent of Roxbury’s hidden workers and middle-skills workers into the talent pipeline in three industries: Bio-Tech/Life Sciences, Healthcare, and Green/Blue Tech. Prior to joining TACC, Rev. Bodrick worked in the Corporate Group at the law firm Brown Rudnick, LLP.

​​Actively engaged in the community of Roxbury, the City of Boston, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Rev. Bodrick holds multiple leadership positions including member of the Board of Trustees of Boston Medical Center, YMCA of Greater Boston General Board of Directors, ABCD Board of Directors, Massachusetts Advocates for Children Board of Directors, SRGE Board of Directors, Boston Public Schools Opportunity and Achievement Gap Taskforce, Building Bridges Board of Trustees, United Negro College Fund (UNCF) New England Leadership Council, a member of Harvard Divinity School Society for Promoting Theological Education, and appointed by Governor Maura Healey to serve on the Governor’s Advisory Council for Black Empowerment.

​Rev. Bodrick has received numerous awards and honors including 2025 Golf Fights Cancer Heroes Award, 2025 Greater Boston Morehouse College Alumni Association Legacy of Light Lux, 2025 Roxbury Unity Parade Pillar of the Community Award, 2024 Martin L. King, Jr. International Chapel College of Ministers and Laity Board of Preachers Inductee, 2023 Boston Magazine 150 Most Influential Bostonians, 2023 Get Konnected Boston’s Most Influential Men of Color, 2023 Bloomberg-Harvard City Leadership Initiative Fellow, 2022 Harvard Business School Young American Leaders Program Fellow, 2021 Boston Business Journal (BBJ) 40 Under 40 Award, 2021 Boston Chamber of Commerce and City Awake Ten Outstanding Young Leaders Award, The Boston Foundation 20 Leaders of the 2020s, 2020 Eta Phi Chapter of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc. Citizen of the Year Award, 2020 First District of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc. Citizen of the Year Award, 2019 Fletcher “Flash” Wiley Massachusetts Black Lawyers Association Legacy Award, and the 2019 Citizens for Public Schools Champion for Education Justice Award.

​Rev. Bodrick is a member of the Boston Branch of the NAACP, the Massachusetts Black Lawyers Association, the Boston Black Golf Association, the Georgetown University Alumni Club of Greater Boston, and the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc. 

Dr. Karilyn Crockett’s research focuses on large-scale land use changes in twentieth century American cities and examines the social and geographic implications of structural poverty, racial formations and memory. Karilyn’s book “People before Highways: Boston Activists, Urban Planners, and a New Movement for City Making” (UMASS Press 2018) investigates a 1960s era grassroots movement to halt urban extension of the U.S. interstate highway system and the geographic and political changes in Boston that resulted. In 2019 this book was named one of the “ten best books about Boston of the decade” by the Boston Public Library’s librarians. Previously Karilyn co-founded Multicultural Youth Tour of What’s Now (MYTOWN), an award-winning education & tourism organization based in Boston. MYTOWN hired public high school students to research their local and family histories to produce youth-led walking tours for sale to public audiences. During its nearly 15 years of operation, MYTOWN created jobs for more than 300 low and moderate-income teenagers, who in turn led public walking tours for more than 14,000 visitors and residents. In a White House ceremony, the National Endowment for the Humanities cited MYTOWN as “One of ten best Youth Humanities Programs in America.”

Karilyn holds a PhD from the American Studies program at Yale University, a Master of Science in Geography from the London School of Economics, and a Master of Arts and Religion from Yale Divinity School. She has served in several executive leadership roles in Boston city government; including Director of Economic Policy & Research in the Mayor’s Office of Economic Development, Director of Small Business Development; and later as the City of Boston’s first Chief of Equity, a Cabinet-level position with a mandate to embed equity and racial justice into all City planning, operations and regulations. She holds a faculty appointment as professor of urban history, public policy and planning in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies & Planning. And, she is a recent recipient of the following honors: the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative’s Bob Haas 2024 Community Builder Award, Harvard Divinity School’s Religion & Public Life Fellowship, Walk Massachusetts Golden Shoe Award and Yale Divinity School’s William Sloane Coffin Award for Peace & Justice. She is a 2024 Boston Preservation Alliance Libations for Preservation honoree. She is also the 2025 recipient of the 2025 Paul Gray Award for public service granted to an MIT faculty member who exemplifies building “a better world” through their teaching, research, advising, and service. She is the founder and principal investigator for “Hacking the Archive,” a collective research and action project which explores past social movement histories, actions and resident memories to anchor multi-generational planning for more just urban futures. She currently leads the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce in partnership with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston to assess the regional racial wealth gap. 

Angela Y. Davis is known internationally for her ongoing work to combat all forms of oppression in the U.S. and abroad. Over the years she has been active as a student, teacher, writer, scholar, and activist/organizer. She is a living witness to the historical struggles of the contemporary era.

Professor Davis’s political activism began when she was a youngster in Birmingham, Alabama, and continued through her high school years in New York. But it was not until 1969 that she came to national attention after being removed from her teaching position in the Philosophy Department at UCLA as a result of her social activism and her membership in the Communist Party, USA. In 1970 she was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List on false charges, and was the subject of an intense police search that drove her underground and culminated in one of the most famous trials in recent U.S. history. During her sixteen-month incarceration, a massive international “Free Angela Davis” campaign was organized, leading to her acquittal in 1972.

Professor Davis’s long-standing commitment to prisoners’ rights dates back to her involvement in the campaign to free the Soledad Brothers, which led to her own arrest and imprisonment. Today she remains an advocate of prison abolition and has developed a powerful critique of racism in the criminal justice system. She is a founding member of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to the dismantling of the prison industrial complex. Internationally, she is affiliated with Sisters Inside, an abolitionist organization based in Queensland, Australia that works in solidarity with women in prison.

Like many educators, Professor Davis is especially concerned with the general tendency to devote more resources and attention to the prison system than to educational institutions. Having helped to popularize the notion of a “prison industrial complex,” she now urges her audiences to think seriously about the future possibility of a world without prisons and to help forge a 21st century abolitionist movement.

During the last twenty-five years, Professor Davis has lectured in all of the fifty United States, as well as in Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and the former Soviet Union. Her articles and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and she is the author of nine books, including Angela Davis: An Autobiography; Women, Race, and Class; Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday; The Angela Y. Davis Reader; Are Prisons Obsolete?; a new edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; and The Meaning of Freedom.

Former California Governor Ronald Reagan once vowed that Angela Davis would never again teach in the University of California system. Today she is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies Departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1994, she received the distinguished honor of an appointment to the University of California Presidential Chair in African American and Feminist Studies.

Joseph D. Feaster, Jr., Counsel at Dain, Torpy, Le Ray, Wiest & Garner, P.C., has established himself during his more than 48-year legal career as one of the deans of the Boston bar. Since his time as the Chair of the Boston Zoning Board of Appeal, Feaster has become one of the City’s most prominent development and permitting attorneys. His practice also encompasses general estate and licensing, corporate, litigation, employment and labor law, and probate. 

Feaster practiced at McKenzie & Associates, P.C. and at Wynn & Wynn, P.C. before joining Dain Torpy. Feaster is also President of Feaster Enterprises, a strategic planning, organizational development, and community outreach consulting firm. He currently serves as the court-appointed Receiver for the Edgar P. Benjamin nursing home. 

Additionally, Feaster previously served as the court-appointed Receiver for Roxbury Comprehensive Community Health Center for 5 years, as the Interim Town Manager of the Town of Stoughton, as President of the Massachusetts Community and Banking Council (MCBC), Acting Director of Real Estate for the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, Interim Administrator of the Boston Housing Authority (one of the largest public housing authorities in the country), Assistant Secretary and General Counsel in the Commonwealth’s Executive Office of Administration and Finance, Associate Counsel in Prudential Insurance Company’s Northeast Home Office, and as an attorney at the National Labor Relations Board’s Boston Regional Office. 

Feaster’s professional affiliations are numerous, as his expertise is sought within the City of Boston and nationally. These affiliations and service include serving as a mediator for the Suffolk County (MA) Superior Court Mediation program, as a registered lobbyist in Massachusetts, and, as noted, as chairman and member of the City of Boston Board of Appeal. He serves as an Executive Committee member of the Massachusetts Association for Mental Health, Inc. (MAMH), and as an Advisory Board Member of the Samaritan, Inc. He previously served as Chairman of the Board of Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts (ULEM); President of the Boston Branch NAACP, as Vice Chairman and board member of Neighborhood Health Plan (NHP), as Speaker of the House of the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC), as a board member of the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers (MLCHC), as a board member of Dimock Community Health Center, which tenure included serving as board chairman and as the Center’s Interim President, and on the Executive Council of the Massachusetts AARP. 

Feaster is a former board member of the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, former board member of the National Alliance of Mental Illness (NAMI) Boston, a gubernatorial appointee to the Commonwealth’s Workforce Investment Board, past president of Northeastern University School of Law Alumni Association, past president of Northeastern University School of Law Black American Law Student Association (BALSA); past president of Combined Boston BALSA, past chairman of the Boston Enhanced Enterprise Community Advisory Board, and past co-chair of the Greater Boston Civil Rights Coalition. 

Feaster previously served as the Senior Vice President of Victory Group, a government and community relations firm, as an adjunct professor in Northeastern University’s Master of Public Administration program, and as a research associate at the William Monroe Trotter Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. 

Feaster received his Juris Doctor from Northeastern University School of Law. He has also completed programs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Real Estate Development and Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. 

Diane Harriford is a sociologist and feminist interested in social theory, Black resistance and survival and understanding what makes some societies accommodate excessive violence. She spent 2017-18 at CRRJ as a scholar in residence and became familiar with the archive and impressed with the range and depth of the work that went on under Professor Burnham’s direction. Since then, several Vassar students have come to CCRJ to serve as summer interns. Harriford is a Professor at Vassar College and a past director of the Africana Studies program. 

Geraldine S. Hines is a retired Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.  Justice Hines began her judicial career in 2000, as a judge on the Superior Court where she served for 12 years before being appointed to the Appeals Court in 2013.  Governor Deval Patrick appointed her to the state’s highest court in 2014.  At the time of her appointment, she was the first African American woman to serve on the Court in its three hundred- and twenty-two-year history.   While on the SJC, Justice Hines authored two important decisions in the area of criminal law.  In Commonwealth v. Warren reported at 475 Mass. 530 (2016), the opinion recognized that a black man’s flight from the police in Boston “might just as easily be motivated by the desire to void the recurring indignity of being racially profiled as by the desire to hide criminal activity.”  The opinion in Commonwealth v. Brangan, 477 Mass 691 (2017) fundamentally changed the bail procedure in Massachusetts, ruling that a judge must consider a defendant’s financial circumstances in setting bail. Upon her retirement from the bench, Justice Hines was named the Rappaport Distinguished Visiting Professor at Boston College Law School in 2018.  Presently, she is the Huber Distinguished Visiting Professor at Boston College Law School where she teaches a course on race and policing.

Justice Hines graduated from Tougaloo College in Mississippi in 1968, and from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1971.  She has been a member of the Massachusetts Bar for more than 50 years. 

Prior to her judicial tenure, Justice Hines’ practice was concentrated on criminal defense and civil rights litigation in both the Massachusetts state courts and the federal court.  She served as cooperating counsel with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and the ACLU of Massachusetts. As a trial lawyer, Justice Hines represented criminal defendants in murder cases and other major felonies.  Her civil rights practice focused on the litigation of police misconduct and employment discrimination claims.  In addition to her practice, Justice Hines was an adjunct faculty member at Northeastern University School of Law where she taught in Criminal Advocacy Clinic for more than 20 years and later taught Criminal Trial Practice for 10 years after her appointment to the bench.  Over the course of her legal and judicial career, Justice Hines contributed to dozens of continuing legal education programs as a panelist and author on a broad range of topics in criminal and civil rights law.   

Justice Hines has been actively involved in international human rights.  She was a founding member of Lawyers Against Apartheid and an active member and Vice Chair of the Massachusetts Citizens Against the Death Penalty. As a member of a joint National Conference of Black Lawyers/National Lawyers Guild delegation, she traveled to Kuwait to  investigate allegations of human rights abuses in the aftermath of the first Gulf War in 1992.  In 1991, she served as an election observer in the referendum on Eritrean independence and as an observer in Sough Africa’s first multi-racial election in 1994.  In 2010, she accepted an invitation from the International Judicial Academy to participate in its international law program in the Hague, Netherlands where the attendees observed trials involving war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda at the International Criminal Court.  

Roderick Ireland is now in his 49th year teaching at the SCCJ and its predecessor, the College of Criminal Justice. Ireland is a graduate of Lincoln University, (the first HBCU in the United States), Columbia Law School (J.D.), Harvard Law School (LL.M), and Northeastern University, Ph.D. in Law, Policy and Society. 

He began his legal career in 1969 as a Neighborhood Legal Services attorney. In 1971 he founded, along with attorney Wallace Sherwood (who later taught at the SCCJ for 35 years), the Roxbury Defenders Committee, a public defender program that provided free legal services in criminal cases. While there, he participated in three landmark cases that significantly changed Massachusetts’ criminal law and procedure: Commonwealth v. Britt (a 1972 case that led to the use of tape recording in all courts across the state; and Myers v. Commonwealth and Corey v. Commonwealth (both 1973 cases) that changed the standards in probable cause hearings in criminal cases. 

In 1975 he was appointed the Assistant Secretary and Chief Legal Counsel for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Administration and Finance, and in 1977, the Chair of the Massachusetts Board of Appeals on Motor Vehicle Liability Policies and Bonds. He then served as a judge for 37 years, sitting in the Boston Juvenile Court from 1977 to 1990, the Massachusetts Appeals Court from 1990 to 1997, and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court from 1997 to 2014. When he was appointed an associate justice of the Supreme Judicial Court in 1997, he became the first African-American to sit on that bench in its over three hundred year history. In 2010 he became the Court’s first African-American chief justice. 

While sitting as a judge full-time, Ireland also served as an adjunct faculty member in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice (formerly the College of Criminal Justice) from 1978 to 2014. He also taught at Harvard Law School, Boston University Law School, Northeastern University School of Law (1979-2004), the University of Massachusetts in Boston, and New York University Law School’s Appellate Judges Seminar (2001 to 2016). He is the author of a two volume treatise on Massachusetts Juvenile Law published by Thomson/Reuters in its Massachusetts Practice Series (the first edition was published in 1993 and the second edition in 2006), as well as several law review articles. 

As one of the four justices who voted in favor of same-sex marriage in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health (2003), the nation’s very first case in which a state supreme court declared same-sex marriage constitutional, he has lectured and spoken on that topic a number of times, including giving the Sixteenth Annual Justice William J. Brennan Jr. Lecture on State Courts and Social Justice at New York University School of Law entitled, “In Goodridge’s Wake: Reflections on the Political, Public and Personal Repercussions of the Massachusetts Same-Sex Marriage Cases.” 

His interests include criminal law, juvenile law, and constitutional law. Of particular interest, given his experience as chief justice of the SJC, is studying both the theory and the reality of how government works, with a focus on the interplay of the judiciary with the legislative and executive branches, as well as with external entities such as the business community and the media. He is also very interested in diversifying the judiciary at all levels through increased training programs, as well as scholarship and fellowship opportunities for minorities, and works closely with the Justice George Lewis Ruffin Society, an organization sponsored by Northeastern’s School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, to support and uplift minority professionals in the criminal justice system and the legal profession in general. 

In 2017, Chief Justice Ireland was asked by the Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, Robert DeLeo, to advise the Legislature on issues related to Criminal Justice Reform. In 2018, he was asked by the Cambridge Police Department to review their arrest policies and procedures in a highly controversial case. In 2020, he was retained by the City of Springfield, Massachusetts to be Special Advisor on police reform, including reviewing the police department’s policy, training and accountability systems. In 2021 he was asked by the parties to be the claims adjudicator in a multi million dollar class action settlement due to racial discrimination by the city of Brockton. In 2023 and 2024 Chief Justice Ireland was an expert witness on Massachusetts law in a multi-billion dollar series of patent infringement cases between Moderna and Pfizer, (two premier international biopharmaceutical and biotechnological corporations), in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and the U.K. related to the production of Covid 19 vaccines during the pandemic. 

There are three organizations that Chief Justice Ireland helped create that he is especially proud of. They are 1) The Roxbury Defenders Committee, a public defender program he founded in 1971 (with attorney Wallace Sherwood, who later taught at the SCCJ for 35 vears) that is still in operation and highly regarded in the legal community; 2) The Judge Ireland Children’s Fund, created in his honor in 1990 (when he moved from the Boston Juvenile Court to the Massachusetts Appeals Court) and still in operation, that is dedicated to providing support and help to children and families in greater Boston who are the subjects of abuse and neglect; and 3) The Judicial Youth Corps, a program he helped create at the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 1990, and still in operation, that gives high school students summer jobs working in various courts in Boston, Worcester, and Springfield, with the goal of exposing them to the legal field and expanding their knowledge about the legal system. Many of the alumni are now lawyers, judges, teachers, chefs, pharmacists, administrators, etc. 

In 2015, the City of Springfield, Massachusetts renamed the street he grew up on (Terrence Street) to “Chief Justice Roderick L. Ireland Way,” and in 2017 the Massachusetts Legislature renamed the Hampden County Hall of Justice “The Roderick L. Ireland Courthouse. 

Tara Dunn Jackson is a litigator at Cloherty & Steinberg LLP.  Her work includes the representation of individuals and businesses in connection with employment-related disputes, and civil rights matters. She also assists clients in matters involving state and federal criminal litigation, in civil business-related disputes, and in complex higher education matters.  

A graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and Northeastern University School of Law, Ms. Dunn Jackson previously served as a law clerk for Hon. Angel Kelley in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts and as an Assistant Attorney General in the Office of the Attorney General for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  Ms. Dunn Jackson also serves in the U.S. Air Force Reserve as an Assistant Judge Advocate General, where she litigates evidentiary hearings, tries court martials and advises military personnel in the United Kingdom.  Prior to joining Cloherty & Steinberg LLP, Ms. Dunn Jackson was an associate at Mintz Levin and Todd & Weld. 

Ms. Dunn Jackson is the Past-Immediate President of Massachusetts Black Women Attorneys (MBWA), and a Trustee and Fellow of the Massachusetts Bar Foundation.  She also serves on the Board of Advisors for the Civil Rights & Restorative Justice (CRRJ) Project at Northeastern University School of Law.  In 2025, Ms. Dunn Jackson was named as a 40 Under 40 honoree by the National Bar Association.  That same year, she was also a recipient of the Lynn A. Girton Distinguished Service Award from Veterans Legal Services and was recognized as one of Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly’s Top Women in the Law.  She was also named 2024, 5 Under 40 Legal Professionals by the Just the Beginning organization for her efforts to diversify the judicial intern and clerkship pipeline and also received the 2021 Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly: Excellence in the Law, Up & Coming Lawyer Award. 

Régine Michelle Jean-Charles is a Black feminist literary scholar and cultural critic who works at the intersection of race, gender, and justice. Her scholarship and teaching in Africana Studies include expertise on Black France, Sub-Saharan Africa, Caribbean literature, Black girlhood, Haiti, and the diaspora. She is the author of Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary (Ohio State University Press, 2014), The Trumpet of Conscience Today (Orbis Press, 2021), and Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction (University of Virginia Press, 2022). She is currently working on two book projects–one explores representations of Haitian girlhood, and the other is a co-authored interdisciplinary study of sexual violence entitled The Rape Culture Syllabus. Dr. Jean-Charles is a regular contributor to media outlets like The Boston Globe, Ms. Magazine, WGBH, America Magazine, and Cognoscenti, where she has weighed in on topics including #metoo, higher education, and issues affecting the Haitian diaspora.

Imari K. Paris Jeffries, Ph.D., leads at a crossroads many cities would rather avoid. The crossroads between memory and power. Between who is named and who is erased. Between belonging and the long American habit of othering. He is President and CEO of Embrace, an arts, culture, and community organization advancing belonging through justice. His work begins with a simple premise: cities are shaped not only by policy and economics, but by story. By monument. By silence. By who is remembered, who is centered, and who is made peripheral to 

the promise of democracy. Under his leadership, Embrace has grown into a civic force committed to reshaping public memory as public policy. The Embrace Monument, honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And Coretta Scott King on Boston Common, America’s oldest public park, stands as a declaration 

that love, struggle, and Black life belong at the heart of the city’s landscape. It asserts that memory is not ornamental. It is political. And that who we choose to center in public space reflects who we believe belongs in the democratic imagination. What began as a monument has evolved into a movement, demonstrating that symbolic gestures must be paired with institutional 

commitments if they are to shift culture in lasting ways. Beyond this first monument, Imari has advanced a broader vision of civic infrastructure through 

collaboration on the WEB Du Bois Monument in Great Barrington and the forthcoming Embrace Meeting House. Envisioned as a twenty-first century civic home where culture and democracy meet, the Meeting House represents an investment in durable social infrastructure. It is designed to be a space for arts, research, dialogue, and cross-sector partnership, rooted in the Black experience and open to the city. Through research initiatives, arts programming, policy 

engagement, and capital development, his work moves beyond symbolic recognition toward structural belonging grounded in justice. 

Imari’s leadership is anchored in the belief that justice requires infrastructure. It requires design, accountability, shared power, and financial sustainability embedded in systems and sustained over time. Justice is not an abstract aspiration. It is democracy practiced daily. Whether stewarding complex capital projects, guiding organizational turnarounds, or building partnerships across philanthropy, government, and the private sector, he approaches leadership 

as the work of constructing venues where belonging is enacted, not merely proclaimed. Before leading Embrace, Imari served as Executive Director of Parenting Journey, Chief Executive Officer of the Italian Home for Children, Chief Operating Officer of Jumpstart, a senior leader at Boston Rising, and Executive Director of Friends of the Children Boston. Across these roles, he strengthened governance, stabilized finances, expanded programmatic reach, and 

embedded equity as an operational discipline rather than a rhetorical commitment. His career reflects a consistent focus on building durable institutions capable of serving communities long asked to wait for inclusion. A dedicated civic leader, Imari serves as a Trustee of the University of Massachusetts System 

and UMass Global, and on the boards of Boston Ballet and the GBH Advisory Board. He has also served on the Commonwealth’s Black Advisory Commission and the City of Boston’s Black Men and Boys Commission, contributing to policy conversations at the intersection of equity and 

institutional reform. Imari has been recognized among Boston Magazine’s 100 Most Influential Bostonians and the Boston Business Journal’s Power 50. He is a recipient of the Mel King Social Innovator Award, has received an honorary doctorate from Cambridge College, and has served as the Shabbat 

Tzedek MLK speaker at Temple Israel, among other honors. A four- time graduate of the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he earned his Ph.D., 

Imari is also a United States Army veteran. He lives in Boston with his family, committed to building a city where belonging is not aspirational language but shared civic practice.

Dr. Monica Muñoz Martinez is Associate Professor of History and the Clyde Rabb Littlefield Chair in Texas History Fellow. She is an award-winning author, teacher, and public historian. Martinez is the author of The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas and co-founder of the public history project Refusing to Forget. Martinez’s research documents the long impacts of massacres and racist violence on communities and offers recommendations for addressing historical harms. Since the tragedy at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, her hometown, Martinez has been leading a multidisciplinary team of faculty at UT to bring solutions to meet the ongoing and urgent needs in Uvalde and rural communities impacted by mass violence. She is currently leading the Initiative for Rural Well-Being, Health, History, and Resilience. Her research has received funding from the Mellon Foundation, the Andrew Carnegie Foundation, and the National Institute for Justice, among others. Martinez is a 2021 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and was named a 2023 national honoree for Woman of the Year by USA Today. 

Chancellor Melissa Nobles is the Class of 1922 professor of political science and has been a member of the MIT faculty since 1995. Before being appointed chancellor in 2021, she served as the Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) and as head of the Department of Political Science.   

As chancellor, Melissa Nobles is responsible for overseeing more than 60 interconnected offices that support undergraduate and graduate students’ academic success, foster community and well-being, and cultivate personal and intellectual growth. Chancellor Nobles works closely with senior leaders to develop and implement the Institute’s strategic priorities.  

Her international, comparative research focuses on restorative justice in light of ethnic and racial conflicts.  She is the author of two books, Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics (Stanford University Press, 2000) and The Politics of Official Apologies (Cambridge University Press, 2008),and is the co-editor with Jun-Hyeok Kwak of Inherited Responsibility and Historical Reconciliation in East Asia (Routledge Press, 2013). Her work has also appeared in the Annual Review of Political Science, Comparative Politics, Social Research, Daedalus, American Journal of Public Health, and several edited books.  

Working closely as a faculty collaborator and advisory board member of Northeastern University Law School’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice law clinic, Nobles has conducted extensive archival research, unearthing understudied and previously unknown racial murders, and contributing to several legal investigations. In fall 2022, the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive was publicly released for scholarly and public use.  

Nobles graduated from Brown University with a degree in history and received her MA and PhD in political science from Yale University. She has held fellowships at Boston University’s Institute for Race and Social Division and Harvard University’s Radcliffe Center for Advanced Study. She has served on the editorial boards of Polity, American Political Science Review, and Perspectives on Politics as well as a guest editor for a special issue of Nature. 

Mary Nguyen is an experienced civil and criminal litigator with extensive experience representing individuals and businesses in federal and state courts, including in complex civil litigation, government investigations, white-collar crimes, and high-stakes legal matters. She served as the inaugural head of the Conviction Integrity Unit at the Massachusetts Office of the Attorney General and spearheaded the development of policies and procedures to review potential wrongful convictions, while implementing safeguards to ensure impartiality, mitigate prosecutorial bias, and foster transparency. As an Assistant Attorney General, Nguyen prosecuted high-profile white-collar crime and public corruption cases across the Commonwealth’s Superior Courts, focusing on instances where public officials and institutions abused their power, compromised public trust, and engaged in systemic misconduct. Nguyen prosecuted over two dozen jury and bench trials as an Assistant District Attorney, handling a diverse caseload that included burglaries, serious assaults, domestic violence, and complex larcenies across the Boston Municipal Court system. She is a former television journalist with over seven years of experience reporting in Boston, New York City, and Pennsylvania, bringing a strong communication and investigative skill set to legal practice. 

Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist, author, historian, and college professor.  Her writings on race, child welfare issues, education, culture and politics have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, NewsOne, Al Jazeera, The Chronicle of Higher Education and other outlets. She has appeared on MSNBC, ABC News, Democracy Now, Fox News, and CNN.  She is the author of multiple books including That Mean Old Yesterday, Spare the Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America, and her forthcoming book Strung Up: How While America Learned to Lynch Black Children will be published in October by Beacon Press.  Dr. Patton teaches journalism at Howard University, and she is a research associate at Morgan State University’s Institute for Urban Research.

Katheryn Russell-Brown is the Brooks Trustee Professor of Crime, Law and Justice at Northeastern University.   

Professor Russell-Brown received her undergraduate degree from the UC Berkeley, her law degree from UC Law San Francisco, and her Ph.D. in criminology from the University of Maryland.  

Prior to joining the Northeastern University faculty in 2026, she taught at the University of Florida, Levin College of Law for 21 years and prior to that she taught in the Criminology and Criminal Justice Dept. at the University of Maryland for 11 years.  Her first teaching position was at Alabama State University.   

Professor Russell-Brown teaches, researches, and writes on issues of race and crime and the sociology of law. Her recent work has explored the impact of broadscale educational bans on teaching and learning about race, racism, and race history. This includes her 2023 piece, “The Stop Woke Act: HB 7, Race, and Florida’s 21^st Century Anti-Literacy Campaign” (NYU Review of Law & Social Change) and her 2024 article, “The Multitudinous Racial Harms Caused by Florida’s Anti-DEI and Stop Woke Laws” (Fordham Urban Law Journal). Her article, “The Constitutionality of Jury Override in Alabama Death Penalty Cases,” was cited in the U.S. Supreme Court decision, Harris v. Alabama (1995).  

Professor Russell-Brown’s books include The Color of Crime, 3d ed (2021), Criminal Law (with co-author Angela J. Davis) (2025), Protecting Our Own: Race, Crime, and African Americans (2006), and Underground Codes: Race, Crime, and Related Fires (2004).    

She has also written several children’s picture books, including Little Melba and Her Big Trombone (2014), A Voice Named Aretha (2020), and She Was the First! The Trailblazing Life of Shirley Chisholm (2020), which received a 2021 NAACP Image Award, and Justice Rising: 12 Amazing Black Women in the Civil Rights Movement (2023). 

Kaylie Simon is the incoming Director of the Alameda County Criminal Court Appointed Attorneys Program (CAAP), where she will support and strengthen indigent defense across Alameda County. She brings nearly 15 years of experience as a public defender in California, where she represented youth and adults and led a diversion program designed to keep young people out of the legal system and connected to community-based supports. 

Kaylie attended Northeastern University School of Law specifically to study with Professor Margaret Burnham, whose teaching continues to shape her approach to life and lawyering. In 2018, she worked with Professor Burnham through the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ), contributing to collective restorative justice efforts. She serves on CRRJ’s advisory board. 

Emily A. Spieler is Edwin W. Hadley Professor of Law Emerita and Dean Emerita at Northeastern University School of Law. She arrived at NUSL in 2002, the same year that Professor Burnham joined the NUSL faculty, and from the start encouraged and supported Professor Burnham’s development of the Civil Rights and Restorative Project. In recent years, Professor Spieler has acted as Strategic Advisor to the Project. While active in civil rights matters, Professor Spieler’s own academic and activist work has focused primarily on workers and the law of work, and particularly on issues of workplace safety and treatment of workers who are injured on the job. In addition to her continuing work with CRRJ, she currently works actively with the Massachusetts Coalition for Safety and Health (MassCOSH) and with a coalition of Massachusetts workers’ centers in support of better protective legislation and a more just system of compensation for injured workers. She was appointed by Governor Maura Healey as a labor representative to the Massachusetts Workers’ Compensation Advisory Council in 2025. 

James Hackney has spent more than three decades shaping the future of legal education at Northeastern University School of Law and beyond. A scholar, innovator and institutional leader, he was appointed dean of the School of Law on July 1, 2018.

A forward thinker well ahead of the curve, Dean Hackney launched the law school’s first online programs for non-lawyers during his tenure as associate dean for entrepreneurial programs and research support (2013–2015) — recognizing early that law and regulation were becoming indispensable forces in fields including AI, health, human resources, intellectual property, privacy and compliance. When Northeastern President Aoun called on him to serve as chief of staff in 2016, Dean Hackney stepped into the university’s highest strategic circles, helping write Northeastern 2025 and co-chairing the Presidential Council on Diversity and Inclusion.

Dean Hackney’s intellectual reach is equally broad. He teaches and researches across a wide landscape, including intellectual history, torts, corporate finance, corporations, the mutual fund industry, law and economics, and theories of race in America. He is the author of two acclaimed books: Under Cover of Science: American Legal-Economic Theory and the Quest for Objectivity (Duke University Press, 2007) and Legal Intellectuals in Conversation: Reflections on the Construction of Contemporary American Legal Theory (New York University Press, 2012).

Before entering academia, Dean Hackney practiced as an associate at the prominent Los Angeles firm Irell & Manella. At Yale Law School, he served as book review and comment editor of the Yale Law Journal.

Nan Elizabeth Woodruff is the Professor Emerita of African American Studies and Modern US History at Penn State University. A specialist in twentieth-century African American and southern history, she is the author of American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta (2003, paperback edition 2012), winner of the McClemore Prize. She is currently working on a book project on history, memory, and trauma entitled “All White Folks Was the Police:Living With The Everyday Legacies of Racist Violence in the South.” 

Professor Rose Zoltek-Jick is the Associate Director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ), and was the second person to join the Project after it was founded in 2007. She has taught at the School of Law for 40 years, specializing in criminal law and procedure, evidence, professional responsibility, and law and psychiatry. Her academic writing has focused on statutes of limitation, cold cases, and civil lawsuits on cases of sexual abuse.