Mary Elizabeth Jones Parrish (1892–1972) was born in 1892 in Yazoo City, Mississippi. She moved to Tulsa around 1919 and worked teaching typing and shorthand at a branch of the YMCA. A trained journalist, Parrish gathered eyewitness accounts from survivors of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre and chronicled her own experience fleeing the violence with her young daughter. Those accounts were published in her book Events of the Tulsa Disaster, which was privately printed in 1922.
Anneliese M. Bruner, the great-granddaughter of Mary E. Jones Parrish, is a writer and editor who has worked in the business, media, and nonprofit sectors. She attended Bryn Mawr College. Her writing has appeared in Honey Magazine, Savoy Magazine, USAID FrontLines, and The Lily (Washington Post). She was born and raised in San Francisco, with stints in Oakland, and still considers California her home. She has lived in Washington, D.C., for more than thirty-five years.
John Hope Franklin (1915–2009) taught at a number of institutions, including Duke University, Howard University, and the University of Chicago. His 1947 landmark study of the African American experience, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, remains among the most widely read works in the field. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995.
Scott Ellsworth is a professor of Afroamerican and African studies at the University of Michigan and the author of The Ground Breaking: An American City and Its Search for Justice and Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, the first comprehensive history of the horrific 1921 Tulsa race massacre. He is helping to lead the ongoing effort to uncover the unmarked graves of massacre victims.
Ajamu Kojo is a native of Little Rock, Arkansas, and a graduate of Howard University. He splits his time developing independent film projects, working as a scenic artist on television and film productions, including Law & Order, Boardwalk Empire, Vinyl, and Bull, and concentrating on his artwork. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
