Steve Schapiro’s career as a freelance photojournalist started with a story on Arkansas migrant workers that made the cover of the The New York Times Magazine in 1961. Since then, his images have appeared in Life, Look, Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and many other publications. In the 1970s, he began a second career as a successful publicity stills and movie poster photographer, working on classic films such as Taxi Driver, The Way We Were, and The Godfather—which can be seen in The Godfather Family Album (TASCHEN, 2008). In 2016, he collaborated with Lawrence Schiller on a Barbra Streisand book (TASCHEN) and in 2017, his Civil Rights photographs were combined with the text of James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time (TASCHEN). He died in 2022.

James Baldwin (1924–1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic, and one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the postwar era. His nonfiction collections, most notably Notes of a Native Son (1955) and The Fire Next Time (1963), and novels, including Giovanni’s Room (1956) and Another Country (1962), explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in mid-20th-century America. A Harlem, New York, native, he primarily made his home in the south of France.

Gloria Karefa-Smart was born Gloria Esther Baldwin in Harlem. She traveled widely with her brother James and is the literary executor of his estate. She has lived in Freetown, Sierra Leone; New York’s Upper West Side; and Washington, D.C., where she still resides, and is the mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother of 22.

Congressman John Lewis (1940–2020) played a key role in the struggle to end segregation—as a Freedom Rider, the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and an organizer of the March on Washington—and continued to serve as a prominent voice for social justice until the end of his life. He was the recipient of the Lincoln Medal, the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Lifetime Achievement Award, and the NAACP Spingarn Medal, among many other honors.

Marcia Davis is the news editor of The Marshall Project. A native of St. Louis, she spent more than 20 years as an editor and writer at The Washington Post, where she helped lead the coverage of the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in 2014. She also worked at the Minneapolis Star Tribune and was senior editor of Emerge magazine.