​Reverend Dr. James A. Forbes, Jr. is the recipient of fourteen honorary degrees, including D.D. degrees from Princeton University, Trinity College, Colgate University, and University of Richmond. In 1996, Newsweek recognized Forbes as one of the twelve “most effective preachers” in the English-speaking world.

Union Theological Seminary named Forbes the first Harry Emerson Fosdick Adjunct Professor of Preaching in 1989, the same year he was installed as fifth senior minister of Riverside Church in New York City. His installment rendered him the first African American senior minister of one of the largest multicultural and interdenominational congregations in the United States. Following his address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, Massachusetts, Forbes led an interfaith rally and demonstration at Riverside Church as part of the Church’s Mobilization 2004 campaign. In 2007, he formed the Healing of the Nations Foundation, a non-partisan, non-profit, national ministry of healing and spiritual revitalization.

Tamara Tunie starred for 18 seasons as Medical Examiner Dr. Melinda Warner in Wolf Films/Universal Media Studio’s top-rated series “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.” Ms. Tunie has had other memorable roles on television, most notably as the longstanding character Jessica Griffin on the CBS Daytime Drama “As The World Turns,” for which she received two NAACP Image Award nominations and two Soap Opera Digest award nominations.

In film, Ms. Tunie worked with legendary director Robert Zemekis, and several other of the most respected directors of the screen, including Taylor Hackford, Brian De Palma, Mimi Leder, Harold Becker and Oliver Stone. She starred on Broadway with Denzel Washington in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” and she has also shared the Broadway stage with the legendary Lena Horne in the Broadway musical “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music”. She starred in David Merrick’s revival of “Oh Kay!” with Brian Stokes Mitchell. In addition, she played “Maggie” in the FIRST all African American production of Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” at Theatre Virginia in Richmond.

She is Chair Emerita of the Board of Directors of Figure Skating in Harlem; serves on the Board of Directors at Harlem Stage/The Gatehouse and God’s Love We Deliver; and also serves on the Advisory Board of Hearts of Gold and the Center for Military Medical Research in Pittsburgh.

In 2005, Mayor Bloomberg awarded Ms. Tunie the “Made in New York Award” from the City of New York for her support and commitment to Film, Television and Theater in Manhattan.

Martin Luther King III, or MLK3, is an American human rights advocate and community activist. Martin Luther King III was born on October 23, 1957, to civil rights advocates Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King. He is the oldest son and oldest living child of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King.

King has been described as a shy man who rarely socialized, and friends have claimed he tends to overwork, in part due to the pressure to live up to his father’s name. One friend, Rev. E. Randel T. Osburn, said of King, “Watching him is like watching somebody trying to outrun themselves. It’s like there’s a ghost in front of him and he’s always trying to catch it. He was ten years old when his father was assassinated. Years prior to his father’s death, Harry Belafonte set up a trust fund for King and his siblings.

In May 2006, Martin Luther King III married longtime girlfriend Andrea Waters. On May 25, 2008, the couple had a daughter, Yolanda Renee King, the first and only grandchild of Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King.

Dr. Iva E. Carruthers is General Secretary of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference (SDPC), an interdenominational organization within the African American faith tradition focused on justice and equity issues. SDPC is both a 501c3 and United Nations Non-Governmental Organization (NGO). As founding CEO and a trustee of SDPC, she has steered the organization as a unique, influential and esteemed network of faith-based advocates and activists, clergy and lay. Dr. Carruthers is former director of the Black Theology Project, Professor Emeritus and former Chairperson of the Sociology Department at Northeastern Illinois University and was founding President of Nexus Unlimited, an information and educational technology firm. She was appointed to the White House Advisory Council on the internet, “National Information Infrastructure”, Mega Project and the educational software she developed was awarded a ComputerWorld Smithsonian Award. She is also founder of Lois House, an urban retreat center, Chicago, Illinois.

Her many awards and appointments include the 1999 Life Achievement Award by Northeastern Illinois University and “Year 2000 Woman Entrepreneur of the Year” award, given by the National Foundation of Women Legislators and the Small Business Administration. She was inducted into the National History Makers; was a recipient of Ebony Magazine’s year 2001 Outstanding Mother Award for Mentoring; and, noted as a Chicago area social justice pioneer in the Women Alive! A Legacy of Social Justice Exhibit.

Dr. Carruthers is the mother of two sons.

David Crawford is the eleventh president of McCormick Theological Seminary. Crawford is an ordained ruling elder in the Presbyterian Church (USA), and has served on the boards of McCormick, Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago, Lifelink Housing Corporation, and has previously served as a Practitioner-in-Residence at the University of Iowa Law School. Crawford and his wife, Elizabeth, live in Glencoe with their two daughters Grace and Kate.

Before joining McCormick’s board of trustees, Crawford was Principal and Co-Founder of Technology Advisors Group, a consulting firm specializing in early-stage technology and environmentally-sustainable businesses; the CEO of Allied Riser Communications Corporation, an internet and data communications company; and Senior Vice President and General Counsel for Equity Office Properties Trust, where he was part of the senior management team that lead Equity Office to become the largest, publicly-traded owner of commercial office buildings in the North America. Earlier in his career Crawford was an Associate at the international law firm of Kirkland and Ellis and Chicago-based Gardner, Carton & Douglas. Before earning his J.D. from Georgetown, Crawford served as staff director for the Youth Policy Institute of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial in Washington.

Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard. Gordon-Reed won sixteen book prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2009 and the National Book Award in 2008, for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton, 2008). In addition to articles and reviews, her other works include Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (UVA Press, 1997). Vernon Can Read! A Memoir, a collaboration with Vernon Jordan. (PublicAffairs 2001), Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History (Oxford University Press, 2002), a volume of essays that she edited, Andrew Johnson (Times Books/Henry Holt, 2010) and, most recently, with Peter S. Onuf, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (Liveright Publishing, 2016).

A selected list of her honors includes a fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, a Guggenheim Fellowship in the humanities, a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Award, the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, and the George Washington Book Prize, and the Anisfeld-Wolf Book. Gordon-Reed was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and was a member of the Academy’s Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2019, she was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society.