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Max Krochmal is Professor of History, Director of Justice Studies, and the Czech Republic Endowed Professor in Comparative Urban Studies at the University of New Orleans. He is a member of the Local Executive Board of the United Campus Workers Southeast, CWA Local 3821, and a delegate to the Greater New Orleans AFL-CIO. Krochmal recently co-created a traveling public history exhibition, Don’t Stand Alone: Black Labor Organizing in New Orleans, and he is now launching the Economic Justice Research Lab at UNO.

Previously, Krochmal spent more than a decade teaching, researching, and organizing in Texas. His first book, Blue Texas: The Making of a Multiracial Democratic Coalition in the Civil Rights Era (University of North Carolina Press) won the OAH’s Frederick Jackson Turner Award, the NACCS Tejas Foco Non-Fiction Book Award, and other prizes. He is the co-editor of Civil Rights in Black and Brown: Histories of Resistance and Struggle in Texas (University of Texas Press), winner of the Oral History Association Book Award, and he led the collaborative effort to conduct the 530 interviews that undergird the volume. In partnership with colleagues and the Fort Worth Independent School District Krochmal, Krochmal co-authored Latinx Studies Curriculum in K-12 Schools: A Practical Guide (TCU Press). In 2023, Krochmal was admitted as an expert witness on Voting Rights in U.S. federal court in Petteway v. Galveston County.

Krochmal’s scholarship has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Fulbright-García Robles Fellowship in Mexico, the Clements Center for Southwest Studies, and, most recently, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He is an OAH Distinguished Lecturer and the Past President of the Southern Labor Studies Association. Before becoming a professor, Krochmal was an organizer with the Service Employees International Union and among banana workers in Ecuador.

Calvin Allen is Vice President for Partnerships and Programs for MDC’s programmatic vision and direction while supervising MDC’s program leaders. He also cultivates and manages key state, regional, and national partnerships across the 13 southern states MDC supports. With 30 years of nonprofit experience in organizational development, philanthropy, rural community economic development, conflict management, and leadership development, Calvin holds a bachelor’s degree and a certificate in nonprofit management from Duke University, where he has also been a co-instructor at the Nicholas School of the Environment for the past 10 years for their Community Based Environmental Management practicum.

Calvin joined MDC in 2021 as Senior Program Director for the Rural Forward program. He co-founded Rural Forward in 2014 after serving three years with the Golden LEAF Foundation as a community grantmaking program officer. He also served as deputy director at the Southern Rural Development Initiative, director of the National Community Forestry Service Center at the Conservation Fund, and associate director at the Dispute Settlement Center of Orange County. He is a 1994 graduate of Leadership Durham and a 2003-2005 graduate of the William C. Friday Fellow for Human Relations through the Wildacres Leadership Initiative where he serves on the board of directors.

Melanie Barron is an organizer with the Communications Workers of America. She has been organizing with CWA for 13 years, first as a member of United Campus Workers (UCW), CWA Local 3865, a direct-join, wall-to-wall union for public higher education workers in Tennessee. She joined UCW as a member in 2012 while working at the University of Tennessee and served in a variety of member roles before joining the local staff in 2015. During her first few years as a local organizer, she was part of the team to defeat a major outsourcing push in Tennessee state government through a campaign called Tennessee is Not for Sale. This raised the profile of UCW, and in 2018, she joined CWA staff to expand the UCW model of organizing beyond Tennessee to universities across the South. Now, UCW is a mega-local with 5,000 members spanning 8 states and dozens of campuses, and there are additional UCW locals in Arizona, Colorado, and Utah. 

 

Currently, Melanie is organizing with United Videogame Workers, a new industry-wide, direct-join union for videogame developers, and she’s supporting a variety of CWA organizing priorities in the Southeast region. She believes in the labor movement’s potential to reinvigorate civic life in the United States, and wants to support new forms of labor organization to aggressively organize as many workers as possible into our movement, regardless of the legal barriers they may face to certification and collective bargaining.

Kelsey Coleman is a Regional Organizer for the Southern Labor Youth Movement (SLYM), a student organization preparing young people to build political power in the South via organizing campaigns and political education. Inspired by the Black and worker power movements of the South, Kelsey helped found SLYM in February 2025 because she understood the urgent need to challenge the power of the wealthy interests that have dominated the South for so long, including the biggest employers and universities. Kelsey joined the labor movement in 2021 as a student worker at the University of Maryland College Park, fighting for a $15 minimum wage on campus with AFSCME Local 1072. She’s a DMV native and is currently based in Durham, NC. 

Ajamu Dillahunt-Holloway is an Assistant Professor of African American History and Public History at NC State University. His research is on twentieth century African American history with a focus on the U.S. South, labor, environmental justice, and the Black Freedom Struggle. Dillahunt-Holloway’s research and commitment to making the world a better place has allowed him to travel to South Africa, Cuba, Palestine, and Senegal. 

At present, he is a board member of the Interreligious Foundation of Community Organizations (IFCO), the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network (NCEJN), and Democracy North Carolina. Dillahunt-Holloway is also part of the City of Raleigh’s Historic Resources and Museums Advisory Board, and the North Carolina Highway Historical Marker Advisory Committee. At present, Dillahunt-Holloway is at work on a book tentatively titled The South Will Never Be the Same: The History of Black Workers for Justice, Black Liberation, and Southern Labor. Dillahunt-Holloway earned his Ph.D. in History from Michigan State University in 2023. He holds a B.A. in History and a B.A. in Political Science from North Carolina Central University.

Angeline Echeverría is the Director of Affiliate Sustainability for the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), coordinating capacity-building and organizational development for support for dozens of independent domestic worker organizations in cities across the country. Angeline is a passionate advocate for immigrant and worker rights, reproductive justice, and intergenerational organizing. Prior to joining NDWA, Angeline provided member recruitment, retention, and support for the NC Counts Coalition; served as the executive director for El Pueblo; and served in different capacities for women’s and immigrant workers’ organizing in the southeast and beyond.

 

Angeline credits Durham-based Student Action with Farmworkers for starting them on the path to social justice work through an undergraduate internship program they participated in while earning a BA in Latin American Studies from the University of South Carolina-Columbia. Angeline’s roots are in Cuba, upstate New York, and South Carolina and they have lived in Raleigh since 2012. Outside of work, Angeline enjoys Zumba, soccer, and spending time outdoors.

Raúl Gámez recently earned his Ph.D. in higher education from the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  Raúl’s research focuses on understanding the role of diversity, equity, and inclusion work in higher education as a mechanism for achieving racial equity. He earned an MA in Higher Education Administration from the University of Michigan and a BA in Theatre Arts and Translation and Interpretation Studies from California State University, Long Beach. Before enrolling in graduate school, Raúl worked as the Migrant Youth Director with Student Action with Farmworkers working with migrant and immigrant youth in North Carolina. Raúl utilized theatre, art, and popular education as tools for leadership development with migrant youth and their family. He also coordinated the Adelante Education Coalition, a statewide coalition in North Carolina focused on increasing access to education for Latino and immigrant students and their families.

Robert Korstad is Emeritus Professor of Public Policy and History at Duke University. He received his B.A. and PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests include twentieth century U. S. history, labor history, African American history, and contemporary social policy.

 

His publications include: Fragile Democracy: The Struggle Over Race and Voting Rights in North Carolina (coauthor, University of North Carolina Press, 2020); To Right These Wrongs: The North Carolina Fund and the Battle to End Poverty and Inequality in 1960s America (coauthor, University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Talk About Life in the Segregated South (coeditor, The New Press, 2001); Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (coauthor, University of North Carolina Press, revised edition, 2000).