Desmond Meade

Nia Long recently produced and starred in the Netflix smash hit thriller FATAL AFFAIR which debuted at number one on the platform. Additionally, Nia starred opposite Samuel L. Jackson and Anthony Mackie in the Apple film, THE BANKER, for which she received an NAACP Image Award nomination for “Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture.”

Other recent film credits include Janicza Bravo’s Sundance-nominated LEMON, and Netflix’s ROXANNE ROXANNE with Chanté Adams and Mahershala Ali. Long headlined the long awaited Sony feature film SEARCHING 2, a follow-up to the hugely successful and critically acclaimed box office hit SEARCHING, as well as the Netflix feature PLUS/MINUS.

In TV, recent credits include Kenya Barris’ #BLACKAF, Justin Simien’s DEAR WHITE PEOPLE, THIRD WATCH, and THE BEST MAN franchise; the latter two garnering her three NAACP Image Award wins.  She reprised her two-time film role alongside the original cast in the Peacock limited series THE BEST MAN: THE FINAL CHAPTERS, , and also recently appeared in new Netflix comedy You People opposite Jonah Hill and Eddie Murphy, with Kenya Barris directing.

As the founder of the award-winning Tezlyn Figaro Communications Group, Tezlyn Figaro provides communications solutions, political consulting, crisis management, and customized training for the most influential political, social and cultural leaders in America. Tezlyn’s service offerings are informed by her extensive work as a Florida Supreme Court Certified Civil, Circuit, and Appellate Conflict Resolution Mediator and trainer.

Named “The Hood Whisperer,” by nationally-syndicated radio show host and television personality Charlamagne Tha God, Tezlyn is a sought-after public speaker whose prophetic and powerful message stirs the conscience and inspires listeners across demographics. She is the host of the “Straight Shot, No Chaser” podcast on Charlamagne Tha God Tha God’s Black Effect Podcast Network on iHeartRadio, the largest digital radio and music streaming service in America. 

In addition to hosting her weekly podcast, Tezlyn has been seen sharing her independent, nonpartisan, black-centered perspective as a political contributor for the Black News Channel. Tezlyn has also frequently appeared on The Breakfast Club, The Hill, Fox News, MSNBC, and more.

Tezlyn was featured in the Netflix documentary ‘Civil’ as a senior public policy consultant for Attorney Benjamin Crump, who was named TIME Magazine’s 100 world’s most influential people in 2021. She has led public policy strategy for high-profile clients of the Ben Crump Law Firm, including; surviving family members of victims of police killings – George Floyd, and Monroe Bird; assault victims of former Oklahoma City Police Officer Daniel Holtzclaw, victims of the Flint water crisis, and the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida.

In 2016, she served as the National Racial Justice Director for the Bernie Sanders campaign. Her work led to several national successes during the campaign, including but not limited to the historic win during the Michigan primary.  In addition, Tezlyn has served as various local, state and federal campaign operative roles throughout America over the last decade. 

In 2018, Tezlyn partnered with the Cut 50 organization to assist with organizing and advocating for the historic bi-partisan first step act, which in turn passed in both the House and Senate in December 2018. 

As Founder of the Allied Group, a Florida staffing firm that employed over 300 people during the 2010 recession, Tezlyn was awarded several recognitions highlighting her dedication to community service and excellence in business. In 2009, she was named the Cadillac Community Influencer of the year. She has also named the 2010 Orlando Business Journal’s “40 Under 40” and the 2012 Orlando Business Journal’s “Women Who Mean Business” finalist. Tezlyn is a certified Florida Supreme Court civil, circuit, and appellate conflict resolution mediator and approved trainer. She holds a bachelor’s degree in management and a master’s degree in adult education and training.

George Floyd 

As Senior Political Consultant for the Ben Crump Law Firm, Tezlyn contributed her expertise to the historic George Floyd Case. Tezlyn’s work included but is not limited to public policy strategy and media booking for Attorney Crump on Court TV and other national outlets. Additionally, Tezlyn and Attorney Crump jointly appeared on the nationally syndicated show The Breakfast Club. 

In addition, Tezlyn also served as Senior Advisor for  the George Floyd Foundation on various projects such as the George Floyd Hologram project with Change.org and The Eddie Robinson Legacy Scholarship Fund

Tezlyn also provided public policy strategy and onsite communications messaging during the historic George Floyd Justice in Policing Act 2020 congressional testimony hearing at the United States Congress in Washington, D.C. 

Tezlyn also provided assistance coordinating efforts between the George Floyd Foundation and the Texas Legislative Black Caucus for the historic Texas George Floyd Act. 

Flint Water Crisis 

As Senior Political Consultant for the Ben Crump Law Firm, Tezlyn contributed her expertise to the historic Flint Waster crisis. Tezlyn’s work included but is not limited to a political strategy, media relations, media booking, community advocacy, and assisting in organizing over 2000 Flint residents, which resulted in a historic $600 million settlement. 

OKC Officer Daniel Holtzclaw 

Through her extensive relationships with major media networks and her expertise in rapid response communications, Tezlyn was able to garner national and international media attention for clients whose stories are often ignored. After learning about the case of Daniel Holtzclaw, an Oklahoma City police officer accused of raping multiple Black women in his custody, she immediately enlisted Benjamin Crump, the lead attorney in the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown cases, for legal counsel click here for clip. She withstood opposition from city leaders and raised the profile of the case while living next door to the police station Holtzclaw was assigned. Forging forward in her role as the chief publicist, she led the media strategy through the sentencing period, in which Holtzclaw received a record 263-year sentence for his heinous crimes. Outlets including MSNBC, CNN and FOX News covered the story, and 60 minutes aired a featured segment on the case. Tezlyn’s bold approach and impassioned support of the survivors led her to the United Nations, where she provided testimony on behalf of the victims during the truth and reconciliation tribunal hearings. 

Monroe Bird III 

After noting a lack of media coverage for Monroe Bird III, the 21-year-old denied medical coverage for a gunshot wound that left him paralyzed (a wound that would later be fatal) in an altercation with a security guard, Tezlyn re-enlisted Benjamin Crump for legal counsel. Working directly with Crump and his legal team, she spearheaded the communications efforts that resulted in national network coverage, including an investigative feature on Crime Watch Daily. 

Orlando Pulse Case Shooting 

Tezlyn initiated and led the rapid response and crisis communication efforts on the Orlando Pulse nightclub shootings and the Dallas police shootings. She booked over 80 national media appearances within the first hour of the Pulse nightclub shootings for the elected representatives of Orlando, Commissioner Patty Sheehan and Commissioner Regina Hill. Tezlyn convened a national press conference, drafted key talking points and booked numerous media interviews with national and international outlets for the Next Generation Action Network during the Dallas police shootings. 

2016 Bernie Sanders for President 

In 2016, she served as National Racial Justice Director for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. Her work in this senior leadership role was pivotal to several successes during the campaign, including the historic win in the Michigan primary race. In Michigan, Tezlyn arranged a meeting with families impacted by the Flint water crisis and Senator Sanders. The earned media generated from the meeting elevated the crisis to the national political stage, with Sanders referencing the meeting during the Flint presidential debate, in subsequent campaign advertisements and during campaign rallies. 

As Founder and President of the Allied Group, a Florida staffing firm that employed over 300 people during the 2010 recession, Tezlyn was the recipient of awards highlighting her dedication to community service and excellence in business. In 2009, she was named the Cadillac Community Influencer of the year. She has also named the 2010 Orlando Business Journal’s “40 Under 40” and the 2012 Orlando Business Journal’s “Women Who Mean Business” finalist. 

Tezlyn holds a Bachelor of Science in management and a masters degree in adult education and training. Tezlyn is also a certified Florida Supreme Court civil, circuit and appellate conflict resolution mediator and approved trainer. 

Jeffery Robinson is a deputy legal director and the director of the ACLU Trone Center for Justice and Equality, which houses the organization’s work on criminal justice, racial justice, and reform issues. Since graduating from Harvard Law School in 1981, Jeffery has three decades of experience working on these issues. For seven years, he represented indigent clients in state court at The Defender Association and then in federal court at the Federal Public Defender’s Office, both in Seattle. In 1988, Jeffery began a 27-year private practice at the Seattle firm of Schroeter, Goldmark & Bender, where he represented a broad range of clients in local, state, and federal courts on charges ranging from shoplifting to securities fraud and first-degree murder. He has tried over 200 criminal cases to verdict and has tried more than a dozen civil cases representing plaintiffs suing corporate and government entities. Jeffery was one of the original members of the John Adams Project and worked on the behalf of one of five men held at Guantanamo Bay charged with carrying out the 9/11 attacks.

Jeffery has been listed in Best Lawyers in America since 1993. He has been selected as one of the top 100 black lawyers in America by Black Enterprise magazine and is an elected fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, whose membership is limited to one percent of the attorneys in any state. He is also consistently ranked as one of the top 10 Criminal Defense Lawyers in Washington State by Washington Law & Politics magazine. Jeffery has tried over 200 cases to verdict and represents a broad range of clients facing investigation or prosecution for white-collar crimes and other serious felony charges.

After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1981, Jeffery spent the next seven years representing indigent clients in state court at The Defender Association and then in federal court at The Federal Public Defender’s Office, both in Seattle. In private practice at SGB since 1988, Jeffery has successfully represented individuals and corporations in state and federal court on charges ranging from first-degree murder to healthcare fraud. He also has extensive experience representing clients in lengthy grand jury investigations that have resulted in no indictment.

In addition to being a nationally recognized trial attorney, Jeffery is also a respected teacher of trial advocacy and has lectured on trial skills all over the United States. He is a faculty member of the National Criminal Defense College in Macon, Georgia. He is a past President of the Washington Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and a winner of that Association’s prestigious William O. Douglas Award (2004).

Dr. Marc Lamont Hill is one of the leading intellectual voices in the country.

He is currently the host of BET News and the Coffee & Books podcast. An award-winning journalist, Dr. Hill has received numerous prestigious awards from the National Association of Black Journalists, GLAAD, and the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Hill is the Steve Charles Professor of Media, Cities, and Solutions at Temple University. Prior to that, he held positions at Columbia University and Morehouse College.

Since his days as a youth in Philadelphia, Dr. Hill has been a social justice activist and organizer. He has worked on campaigns to end the death penalty, abolish prisons, and release numerous political prisoners. Dr. Hill has also worked in solidarity with human rights movements around the world. He is the founder and director of The People’s Education Center in Philadelphia, as well as the owner of Uncle Bobbie’s Coffee & Books.

Ebony Magazine has named him one of America’s 100 most influential Black leaders.

Dr. Hill is the author or co-author of six books: the award-winning Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life: Hip-Hop Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity; The Classroom and the Cell: Conversations on Black life in America; Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on The Vulnerable from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond; Gentrifier; We Still Here: Pandemic, Policing, Protest, and Possibility; and Except For Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics. He has also published two edited books: Media, Learning, and Sites of Possibility; and Schooling Hip-Hop: New Directions in Hip-Hop Based Education.

Dr. Hill holds a Ph.D. (with distinction) from the University of Pennsylvania. His research agenda focuses on the intersections between culture, politics, and education in the United States and the Middle East.

Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is an intellectual who speaks to the complex dynamics of the American experience.  His most well-known books, Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul, and In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America, take a wide look at black communities, the difficulties of race in the United States, and the challenges our democracy face.  He is an American critic in the tradition of James Baldwin and Ralph Waldo Emerson.  In his writings, the country’s complexities,  vulnerabilities, and the opportunities for hope come into full view. Hope that is, in one of his favorite quotes from W.E.B Du Bois, “not hopeless, but a bit unhopeful.”

He is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor and chair of the Department of African American Studies, a program he first became involved with shaping as a doctoral candidate in Religion at Princeton. He is the former president of the American Academy of Religion. His books on religion and philosophy include An Uncommon Faith: A Pragmatic Approach to the Study of African American Religion, African American Religion: A Very Short Introduction and Exodus! Religion, Race and Nation in Early 19th Century Black America, which was awarded the Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Book Prize. Glaude is also the author of two edited volumes, and many influential articles about religion for academic journals. He has also written for the likes of The New York Times and Time Magazine.

Known to be a convener of conversations and debates, Glaude takes care to engage fellow citizens of all ages and backgrounds – from young activists, to fellow academics, journalists and commentators, and followers on Twitter in dialogue about the direction of the nation. His scholarship and his sense of himself as a public intellectual are driven by a commitment to think carefully with others in public.

Glaude’s most recent book, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, was released on  June 30, 2020. Of Baldwin, Glaude writes, “Baldwin’s writing does not bear witness to the glory of America. It reveals the country’s sins, and the illusion of innocence that blinds us to the reality of others. Baldwin’s vision requires a confrontation with our history (with slavery, Jim Crow segregation, with whiteness) to overcome its hold on us. Not to posit the greatness of America, but to establish the ground upon which to imagine the country anew.”

Some like to describe Glaude as the quintessential Morehouse man, having left his home in Moss Point, Mississippi at age 16 to begin studies at the HBCU. He holds a master’s degree in African American Studies from Temple University, and a Ph.D. in Religion from Princeton University. He began his teaching career at Bowdoin College. In 2011 he delivered Harvard’s Du Bois lectures. In 2015 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Colgate University, delivering commencement remarks titled, “Turning Our Backs” that was recognized by The New York Times as one of the best commencement speeches of the year.  He is a columnist for Time Magazine and a MSNBC contributor on programs like Morning Joe, and Deadline Whitehouse with Nicolle Wallace. He also regularly appears on Meet the Press on Sundays.  Glaude hosts the podcast AAS 21, recorded at Princeton University in Stanhope Hall, the African American Studies department’s home.

Dr. Regina N. Bradley is a critically acclaimed creative and scholarly writer and researcher of African American Life and Culture with an emphasis on the contemporary American South. She is an alumna and Nasir Jones HipHop Fellow at Harvard University and is an Assistant Professor of English and African Diaspora Studies at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia.

Dr. Bradley’s expertise and research interests include 20th and 21st Century African American Literature, hip hop culture, race and the contemporary U.S. South, and sound studies. Her current book-length project, Chronicling Stankonia: OutKast and the Rise of the Hip Hop South (under contract, UNC Press), explores how Atlanta, GA hip hop duo OutKast influences renderings of the Black American South after the formally organized Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Bradley is also editing a collection of essays about OutKast for UGA Press. 

The founder and host of OutKasted Conversations, a critically acclaimed dialogue series dedicated to thinking about the cultural and academic implications of the hip hop group OutKast, Dr. Bradley’s work has been featured in Ebony, The New York Times, Musiqology, For Harriet, The Huffington Post, and The Feminist Wire. Her scholarship has been documented in Black Camera, Meridians, Comedy Studies, Journal of Ethnic American Literature, and Current Musicology, to name a few. Additionally, Dr. Bradley’s commentary can be found on a range of news media outlets including The Washington Post, NPR, NewsOne, SoundingOut!, and Creative Loafing Atlanta. She has conducted a TEDx talk entitled, “The Mountaintop Ain’t Flat,” about the significance of hip hop in bridging the American Black South to the present and future, and is the co-host of the southern hip hop podcast Bottom of the Map for WABE (NPR Atlanta) and PRX.

Dr. Bradley was also featured in Season Three of Netflix’s docu-series Hip Hop Evolution, which interviews and features influential MCs, DJs, and moguls in discussions on the dynamic evolution of the hip-hop genre from the 1970s to the present.

As a complement to her scholarly work, Dr. Bradley is a critically acclaimed fiction writer. Her fiction has been supported by Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and Tin House Summer Workshop. Dr. Bradley’s short story, “Beautiful Ones,” was a 2017 Pushcart Prize nominee. Her first short story collection, Boondock Kollage: Stories from the Hip Hop South, was published in April 2017. Dr. Bradley’s fiction is also featured in BOAAT, Transition, Obsidian, Sycorax’s Daughters, and Oxford American. 

Tamika Mallory is an activist and national co-chair of the Women’s March on Washington. She is an advocate of gun control, feminism and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Mallory was born on September 4, 1980, in The Bronx, New York. Her parents, Stanley and Voncile Mallory, were founding members of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network (NAN), a leading U.S. civil rights organization.

Mallory joined NAN at age 11 and was a staff member by age 15. She became the youngest executive director at NAN, stepping down in 2013 to work on behalf of her own activist goals. Following the murder of her son’s father, she worked closely with the Obama administration on gun control legislation. In 2014, she was selected to serve on the transition committee of the New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, helping to create the NYC Crisis Management System. She also served as co-chair for Gun Violence Awareness Month, an initiative through the Crisis Management System.

After the November 2016 presidential election, Mallory and three others organized the Women’s March held on January 21, 2017, as a protest against the inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump. The march also advocated for women’s rights, immigration reform, LGBTQIA rights, healthcare reform, environmental reform, racial justice and racial equality. An estimated 500,000 people attended the Washington D.C. march and millions more participated in sister marches across the country, making it possibly the largest single-day protest in U.S. history.

Tommy J. Curry is a Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University. His research interests are 19th century ethnology, Critical Race Theory & Black Male Studies. He is the author of The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Temple University Press 2017), which has recently won the 2018 American Book Award. He is the author of Another white Man’s Burden: Josiah Royce’s Quest for a Philosophy of Racial Empire (SUNY Press 2018), and re-published the forgotten philosophical works of William F. Ferris as The Philosophical Treatise of William H. Ferris: Selected Readings from The African Abroad or, His Evolution in Western Civilization (Rowman & Littlefield 2016). He is also the editor of the first book series dedicated to the study of Black males entitled Black Male Studies: A Series Exploring the Paradoxes of Racially Subjugated Males on Temple University Press. Dr. Curry is currently co-editing (with Daw-nay Evans) the forthcoming anthology Contemporary African American Philosophy: Where Do We Go from Here on Bloomsbury Publishing, (2019). His research has been recognized by Diverse as placing him among the Top 15 Emerging Scholars in the United States in 2018, and his public intellectual work earned him the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy’s Alain Locke Award in 2017. He is a past recipient of the USC Shoah Foundation and A.I. and Manet Schepps Foundation Teaching Fellowship (2017), the Ray A. Rothrock Fellowship at Texas A&M University (13-16), and the past president of Philosophy Born of Struggle, one of the oldest Black philosophy organizations in the United States.