John H. Morrow Jr., PhD, is a WWI and modern European history scholar who served as Franklin Professor of History at the University of Georgia for more than 30 years. He has taught or lectured at the University of Tennessee, the US Military Academy at West Point, the National War College, and Air War College. Morrow has served on numerous advisory committees, including the National World War I Centennial Commission, the Research Advisory Committee of the National Museum of American History, and the History Advisory Committee of the Department of the Army. He recently served as lead historical consultant on the major exhibit We Return Fighting: World War I and the Shaping of Modern Black Identity at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC. Morrow has also served as a Presidential Counselor at The National WWII Museum for the past decade. He earned his BA from Swarthmore College and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.  

Adrian R. Lewis, PhD, is a retired US Army officer and the David B. Pittaway Professor and Quincy Institute Fellow at the University of Kansas, where he has been a history professor since 2008. As a historian, his areas of expertise include 20th-century warfare: World War II, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and recent military operations, including Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. Lewis has taught at the US Military Academy; the University of California, Berkeley; and the University of North Texas, Denton, where he chaired the Department of History. He is the author of two books, Omaha Beach: A Flawed Victory (2001) and The American Culture of War (2007). He earned his BS from the University of California, Berkeley; MA from the University of Michigan; and PhD from the University of Chicago.  

Marcus S. Cox, PhD, serves as Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Fayetteville State University. He specializes in African American civil-military history, the modern Civil Rights Movement, and US history post-1945. Cox has held leadership positions at Xavier University of Louisiana and at The Citadel Military College, where he was the first African American faculty member appointed to the position of dean. He is the author of over two dozen articles, reviews, and book chapters in peer-reviewed journals and academic publications on the history of African Americans in the military. Cox is also the author of Segregated Soldiers: Military Training at Historically Black Colleges in the Jim Crow South (2013). He earned his BA from Southern University, MBA from The Citadel Military College, and PhD from Northwestern University.

Traci Parker, PhD, is an associate professor of African American history in the Department of History at the University of California, Davis. She served as a Charles Warren Canter for Studies of American History Faculty Fellow at Harvard University in 2023–24. Parker specializes in American history focusing on the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, labor, consumer capitalism, gender, and sexuality. She is the author of Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s (2019) and has written for The American Historian, Black Perspectives, The Washington Post, and The Baltimore Sun. She serves on numerous advisory boards and committees, including the editorial board of the Journal of American History, the Organization of American Historians’ Binkley-Stephenson Award Committee, the executive board of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and the Massachusetts Historical Society’s African American History Seminar’s advisory board. She earned her BA from Cornell University and MA and PhD from the University of Chicago.  

Gregory S. Cooke is the director of Invisible Warriors: African American Women in World War II, a feature-length documentary that explores the social, economic, and political influences of America’s 600,000 Black Rosie the Riveters. Invisible Warriors is an inaugural recipient of the Better Angels/Lavine/Ken Burns Fellowship (2020) and received the Congressional Black Caucus Veterans Braintrust Award (2019). Cooke is also executive producer of the documentary Choc’late Soldiers from the USA, the story of 140,000 African American men and women who formed unexpected bonds with British civilians during World War II. Choc’late Soldiers received the first-ever Congressional Black Caucus Veterans Braintrust Award for film (2014) and won film awards at Indiefest and Bakersfield (2013). Cooke is also featured in My Father’s War: How Pearl Harbor Transformed America and WWII Battles in Color: The Bulge. He earned his BA from American International College and MA from The Ohio State University. 

Henry Coaxum 
Arnold W. Donald

RADM David C. Barata, USCG 
Ronald M. Carrere Jr.
Gretchen Chase
Monique Gougisha Doucette, Esq. 
Sen. Royce Duplessis 
Kathe Hambrick 
Noah Hardie
Lesli Harris
Sheryl Kennedy Haydel, PhD
Rep. Alonzo Knox 
Todd O. McDonald
Maj. Gen. David Mize, USMC (Ret.) 
Dottie Reese
Norman Robinson
Robert A. “Bobby” Savoie, PhD 
Lori Kent Savoie
Damon Singleton 
Kenneth St. Charles, PhD 
Aulston G. Taylor
Col. Sheila Varnado, USA (Ret.) 
Avis Williams, PhD 
Brenda Williams