Editors

Deborah Menkart

Deborah Menkart is the executive director of Teaching for Change, the co-editor of Beyond Heroes and Holidays: A Practical Guide to K–12 Anti-Racist, Multicultural Education and Staff Development, and co-director of the Zinn Education Project.

Menkart’s activism began in junior high school when she joined protests of D.C.’s “taxation without representation” and the “dresses-only” dress code for girls. During the 1970s she lived in San Diego, California, where she worked as a shipyard electrician and was involved in the antiwar, women’s, international solidarity, and labor movements. Menkart received a master’s in curriculum and instruction from George Washington University.

Alana D. Murray

Alana D. Murray is an educator-activist who has taught world history on both the middle- and high-school levels and currently serves as a middle school principal in Montgomery County, Maryland public schools. She has created pilot lessons on African American history, conducted youth leadership training workshops for several organizations and provided professional development to educators at conferences across the country. Her research interests center on supporting principals in developing the skills to be culturally reflective school-based leaders.  She is the author of The Development of the Alternative Black Curriculum, 1890-1940: Countering the Master Narrative which highlights the impact of black women in shaping the social studies field.

Murray received a M.A.T. from Brown University, and a doctorate from the University of Maryland. Her work on this book stems from both professional and personal experience. She is the granddaughter of Donald Gaines Murray, whose landmark lawsuit against the University of Maryland Law School successfully desegregated the university. Her grandparents dedicated their careers to an equal education for all children and her parents instilled the critical roles of research and community organizing. 

Jenice L. View

Jenice L. View is an associate professor emerita at George Mason University. For more than 40 years, View has worked with a variety of educational and nongovernmental organizations, including a D.C. public charter school, the Just Transition Alliance, Rural Coalition, the Association for Community Based Education, and LISTEN, Inc. to create space for the voices that are often excluded from public policy considerations: women, people of color, poor urban and rural community residents, and especially youth. She has a B.A. from Syracuse University, an MPA-URP from Princeton, and a Ph.D. from the Union Institute and University.

View, a native of one of the last U.S. colonies (Washington, DC), is the proud mother of two daughters, Ava and Leah. She hopes to pass on her inheritance of being a politically aware and socially active woman that she received from many including her paternal grandparents (among the first organizers in the Nation of Islam in the 1940s), and her parents (who have helped form and sustain many local D.C. community institutions).