Black against Empire

Joshua Bloom is the Dean's Fellow in Social Research at the University of California, Los Angeles. The winner of the 2014 American Book Award, Joshua is coeditor of Working for Justice: The L.A. Model of Organizing and Advocacy.

Waldo E. Martin, Jr., is a professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. His scholarly and teaching interests include modern American history and culture with an emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; his principal areas of research and writing are African American intellectual and cultural history. He is the author of No Coward Soldiers: Black Cultural Politics in Postwar America and The Mind of Frederick Douglass. Waldo has published numerous articles and lectured widely on Frederick Douglass and on modern African American cultural and intellectual history.

Ron Butler is a Los Angeles-based actor and voice artist with over a hundred film and television credits (playing everything from brooding doctors to screwball hipsters). Most kids will recognize him from the three seasons he spent on Nickelodeon's True Jackson, VP. Ron works regularly as a commercial and animation voice-over artist and has voiced a wide variety of audiobooks. He is a member of the Atlantic Theater Company and an Independent Filmmaker Project Award winner for his work in the HBO film Everyday People. Originally from the Bahamas, Ron grew up singing calypso onstage with his father (the country's number-one recording artist) before touring (and recording) in Europe with a jazz band. In his spare time, he impersonates the president while playing the ukulele.