Alexander X. Byrd is associate professor of history and Vice Provost at Rice University. He is the author of Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World, which won the Wesley-Logan Prize.

W. Caleb McDaniel is the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of the Humanities and professor of history at Rice University. He is the author of Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America, which won the Pulitzer Prize in history.

Ruth J. Simmons, who grew up in Houston, is a former president of Smith College and Brown University, where she established the University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice. Simmons was most recently president of Prairie View A&M University.