ABOUT
Tom Weiner
Tom is a social justice activist who addresses issues of fairness and access in his work and in his community. In the past he has held positions ranging from co-chair of the Civil Rights Committee of the Northampton Public Schools to membership on the Journey Towards Wholeness committee seeking greater racial and socio-economic diversity in the local Unitarian Society and the zoning revisions committee as the outreach representative. More recently he has been a member of a men’s cross-race dialogue group and the Bridge4Unity, both intended to promote racial justice and healing. His major endeavor of the past 2 years in this realm has been being one of the co-founders of the Northampton Reparations Committee whose efforts included a petition seeking reparative justice for the city signed by over 1000 people and the unanimous passage of a Reparations Resolution that has set up a Reparations Commission to study past and current harms to Black citizens and to recommend measures that will redress these harms as well as to prevent them from continuing.
Tom taught and mentored student teachers at the Smith College Campus School in Northampton, MA, a laboratory and teacher training elementary school, for 40 years. For the last 33 he was a 6th grade teacher. In addition, he has taught high school to inner city Upward Bound students at the University of Connecticut for 19 summers ending in '95 and summer school in Northampton for 15 years.
Since his retirement he has written two more books as indicated in the BOOKS section of this website and has a fourth due out in 2024. In addition he has been co-facilitating workshops entitled, “Developing Healthy Boys” for pre-school teachers, administrators and parents as part of the Merge For Equality organization (www.mergeforequality.org). He continues to get much satisfaction from playing the piano, riding his bike, being in his men’s group, now in its 45th year, and spending time with his family.
Amilcar Shabazz
A professor of history and Africana Studies in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies since 2007, Shabazz served as the department’s seventh chair from 2007 to 2012. In 2013, he accepted a central administrative appointment as Faculty Advisor to the Chancellor for Diversity and Excellence. He continues to teach in the department with an emphasis on the political economy of social and cultural movements, education, and public policy. His book Advancing Democracy: African Americans and the Struggle for Access and Equity in Higher Education in Texas was the winner of the T.R. Fehrenbach Book Award and other scholarly recognitions. The Forty Acres Documents, a volume he co-edited with Imari Obadele and Johnita Scott Obadele and for which he wrote the introduction, was one of the earliest scholarly works in the modern movement for reparations for slavery and the racial oppression of people of African descent in North America. Shabazz has been a Fulbright Senior Specialist and has done work in Brazil, Ghana, Japan, Cuba, and other countries. Presently, he is completing an historical biography of lawyer-journalist-entrepreneur Carter Wesley, and a book on higher education in the wake of anti-affirmative action litigation from Bakke to Fisher. Shabazz was selected for the 2014-15 class of the American Council on Education Fellows Program, the longest running leadership development program in the United States that focuses on identifying and preparing the next generation of senior leadership for the nation's universities.
Born in Beaumont, Texas, Shabazz graduated from Monsignor Kelly High School, followed by his earning a bachelor’s degree in economics from The University of Texas at Austin, a masters from Lamar University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Houston, both in history. He was an associate professor of History and Director of the American Studies Program at Oklahoma State University, as well as the founding director of its Center for Africana Studies & Development. Prior to that he served as the first director of the African American Studies Program at The University of Alabama while also becoming a tenured professor of American Studies. In 2014, Shabazz was elected for a two-year term as Vice President of The National Council for Black Studies, the premier organization of Black Studies professionals in the world.