LESLIE M. HARRIS is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia). In 2004 she cofounded the Transforming Community Project (TCP) at Emory University, which she codirected through 2011. The TCP used history to engage members of the university community in dialogue, research, and teaching on racial and other forms of human diversity. JAMES T. CAMPBELL is the Edgar E. Robinson Professor in U.

S. History at Stanford University. He previously taught at Brown University, where he chaired the Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, an initiative launched by Brown President Ruth Simmons to examine the university's historical relationship to slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. He is the author of Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005 . ALFRED L. BROPHY is the D. Paul Jones Chairholder in Law at the University of Alabama School of Law in Tuscaloosa. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 1921, Race, Reparations, Reconciliation ; Reparations: Pro and Con ; and University, Court, and Slave: Proslavery Thought in Southern Colleges and Courts and the Coming of Civil War .

In 2004 he authored an apology for slavery at the University of Alabama, which was passed by the Faculty Senate and is believed to be the first of its kind in the United States.