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Chris Kromm is executive director of the Institute for Southern Studies, a nonprofit media, research, and education center founded by civil rights veterans based in Durham, N.C. Chris also serves as publisher of Facing South, the Institute’s online magazine. Chris is the author or co-author of more than 70 Institute reports on Southern issues and trends including labor, democracy, politics, and demographic change, and has appeared on more than 300 local, state, and national broadcast outlets including CNN, C-SPAN, MSNBC, NPR, and XM Radio. Chris was a founding board member of N.C. Asian Americans Together and Progress North Carolina.

Under Chris’ leadership, the Institute has been recognized with several prestigious honors and awards, including the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting, a North Carolina Justice Center Defenders of Justice Award for Policy Research and Advocacy, a Harry Chapin Media Award for coverage of poverty issues, an Investigative Reporting award from the North Carolina Press Association, and honors from the National Press Club, Society of Professional Journalists, and the White House Correspondents’ Association.

Steve Lownes is an Associate Professor of World Languages at the University of South Carolina-Union where he teaches Spanish, Portuguese, Latin American Studies, Comparative Literature, South Carolina Studies and courses with a heavy emphasis on internships and service-learning.

Formerly, he was the Assistant Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute at the University of Georgia, administering $1.9 million for the Federal Department of Education’s Title VI National Resource Center and Foreign Language and Area Studies grants. He has lived, conducted research, and worked in Spain, Argentina, and Brazil. He is an American Translators Associate (ATA) certified translator. Lownes earned his PhD in Spanish and Portuguese from the Ohio State University in 2018, MA in Public Policy and Management in 2013, also from the Ohio State University, and a B.A. (2005) and MA (2007) in Spanish from the University of South Carolina. He lives with his wife and three children in South Carolina.

Charles W. McKinney, Jr. is Professor of History at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. His areas of interest include the civil rights movement, the confluence of Black Power and civil rights ideology, and the creation of social change institutions in poor, working class communities. He is the author of Greater Freedom: The Evolution of the Civil Rights Struggle in Wilson, North Carolina, and the co-editor of An Unseen Light: The Black Struggle for Freedom in Memphis, and From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle. His writing and commentary have appeared in newspapers and information venues across the country, including the Memphis Commercial Appeal, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Black Perspectives, The History Channel, Vanity Fair, and MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. He has provided commentary on radio programs across the country and news outlets in the United Kingdom, Europe, China and Australia, and has appeared on CNN. 

 

McKinney earned his B.A. with honors in History and English from Morehouse College in 1989, and his Ph.D. in History from Duke University, following in the footsteps of his Morehouse Mentor, Dr Marcellus Barksdale. While at Duke, he won the Samuel DuBois Cook Student Service Award and worked with a host of social justice organizations, including North Carolina Public Allies, The Institute for Southern Studies, the Fund for Southern Communities, and the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation. In Memphis, McKinney serves as Chair of the Steering Committee for Memphis For All, a progressive voter advocacy organization. Since 2016, he has spent summers helping teachers across the nation to craft K-12 civil rights curriculum. Over the years, he has conducted trainings and workshops on movement building and grass-roots activism for union members and organizers in California, Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana. He is the father of three children and married to Natalie McKinney.

David Neal is an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center in Chapel Hill, where he focuses on clean energy policy and environmental justice. Prior to joining SELC, he had a career in indigent criminal defense work. David is the co-founder and former executive director of the Fair Trial Initiative, a non-profit that worked to improve the quality of representation received by people facing the death penalty. David serves on the boards of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation and Repairers of the Breach. He has previously served on the boards of the Orange County Commission for the Environment, Common Sense Foundation, NC Conservation Network, and the Proteus Fund. He completed his undergraduate degree at Oberlin College and law degree at UNC School of Law in Chapel Hill. Before law school, David worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in Turkmenistan.

Paul Ortiz is a first generation university student and a third-generation US military veteran. His work in the labor movement began with the United Farm Workers of Washington State’s 8-year boycott of Chateau Ste. Michelle wines that resulted in a union contract in 1995 that is still in force. With his wife Sheila Payne, Paul has worked in support of struggles including the Farm Labor Organizing Committee’s Mt. Olive Pickle Boycott, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food Campaign, Fight for $15, Black Lives Matter, and El Gran Paro Estadounidense on International Workers’ Day, 2006, the largest General Strike in the History of the Americas. Paul pursued his history graduate studies at Duke University in the 1990s. During this period he served on the board of Student Action with Farmworkers, the Institute for Southern Studies, the North Carolina Farmworkers’ Project and other organizations. Paul has been a university instructor since 2001 beginning with his tenure as an assistant professor of Community Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Between 2008 and 2024, Paul was director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program and a history professor at the University of Florida. He is currently a Professor of Labor History at the ILR School at Cornell University. 

Paul is a former AFL-CIO local union president, and a current member of the American Association of University Professors/American Federation of Teachers. He has served as faculty advisor to activist student organizations like the Students for a Democratic Society, YDSA, MEChA, PorColombia, the Venezuelan Student Association, Chispas, Students for Bernie, Student Farmworker Alliance, and many others.

Paul is the author of An African American and Latinx History of the United States and Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida. In addition to offering courses on African American, Latinx, oral history and social movement history, he has led hundreds of labor and working class history workshops and seminars with unions, community groups, apprenticeship programs, and other organizations. He is currently working on a book under contract with Beacon Press titled, A Social Movement History of the United States. 

Maria T. Perry is an attorney with experience handling a wide range of legal matters.  She particularly enjoys working on civil rights and constitutional law cases. She was one of the attorneys who represented arrested protestors in connection with NC’s first Moral Monday protests of 2013. For over a decade, Maria has also vetted several legal cases for amicus assistance on appeal, and has authored or co-authored briefs in support of various civil and constitutional rights issues. Maria has served as a board member and committee member for multiple organizations in the past, and has a passion for advocating for justice. Having been born to parents who were low wage earners, one of whom picked cotton and harvested tobacco in the 1960s, Maria is particularly passionate about labor rights. She is the author of the soon to be published narrative, “A Luta Continua: The Larry Little Story and the Winston-Salem Black Panther Party,” which chronicles the life of the leader of the first Southern chapter of the Black Panther Party.

Melanie Stratton Lopez is a Senior Attorney for Strategic Enforcement at the Workplace Justice Lab at Northwestern University, where she advises state and local governments on labor law implementation, contributes to national coalitions shaping federal labor enforcement policy, and conducts academic research on workers’ rights. Previously, she served as a Senior Trial Attorney at the U.S. Department of Labor, where she led enforcement litigation under the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), and whistleblower provisions of various federal statutes. Her work included securing an eight-figure settlement in a corporate-wide agreement against a major retailer, developing novel enforcement strategies to address workplace hazards like heat illness, and providing strategic counsel in investigations of systemic labor abuses, such as securing back wages for Black farmworkers in the Mississippi Delta. She was the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Bloomberg Law’s Fifth Edition of the Occupational Safety and Health Law Treatise and is a frequent speaker on labor and employment law issues. Melanie is admitted to the North Carolina bar and received her undergraduate and law degrees from the University of North Carolina. Melanie attributes her career as an employment attorney advocating for low-wage workers to her grandparents—who were migrant farmworkers from South Texas—and to her bicultural upbringing in Texas and rural North Carolina.

Lekha Shupeck is the Institute for Southern Studies’ director of programs, working in collaboration with the executive director to oversee the Institute’s media, research, and outreach initiatives, as well as assist with foundation and institutional fundraising. Prior to joining the Institute, Lekha was state outreach director for Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism organization. She was previously North Carolina Director of All on the Line, a group promoting redistricting reform, and statewide campaigns manager for the ACLU of North Carolina. She holds a Ph.D. in history from UNC-Chapel Hill and a J.D. from Duke University School of Law.