W.E.B. Du Bois was an American sociologist, civil rights activist, historian, writer, and editor. He was the author of many books of fiction and nonfiction, including The Souls of Black Folk and Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, and has been the subject of numerous biographies.

Adrienne Brown is an associate professor at the University of Chicago in the Department English, Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. She is the author of The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race.

Britt Rusert is assistant professor in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the author of Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture.