Frederick Douglass was an African American social reformer, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing. He is one of the most famous African Americans of all time and his memoirs continue to be studied by historians and enthusiasts today, nearly 150 years after the Civil War.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He hearned his BA in English language and literature, summa cum laude, from Yale University and his MA and PhD in English literature from Clare Collage at the University of Cambridge. An Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Gates has authored or co-authored nineteen books and created fourteen documentary films. Having written for such leading publications as the New Yorker, the New York Times, and Time, he now serves as chairman of theRoot.com, a daily online magazine he co-founded in 2008.