Mayme Webb-Bledsoe | Chair | She/Her

Mayme Webb-Bledsoe is a long-time organizer of Durham grassroots work who plans and implements community-based strategies through an empowerment model. Webb-Bledsoe is a Technology of Participation qualified trainer, and she provides support and technical assistance to community partners, non-profits, local government, civic groups and the private sector in six Southwest Central Durham neighborhoods through the Quality of Life Project.

Webb-Bledsoe is the Associate Vice-President of the Duke University’s Office of Durham Affairs and Community Development. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from UNC-Charlotte and a Master of Science in Higher Education from Iowa State University, with a concentration in Organizational Development. She is a Samuel DuBois Cook Society Community Betterment Award recipient, in recognition of her outstanding service to the community.

Jesse Huddleston | Board Vice Chair | He/She/They/We

Jesse Nathaniel Huddleston comes from a family full of artists, educators, and ministers, all from North Carolina, where he has lived since 2006. As a Black genderqueer human being inspired by Pauli Murray's life, legacy, and connection to Durham, Jesse continues to develop their deep passions for people, equity, and the arts through vocations focused on community engagement.

Currently, Jesse works as Senior Neighborhood Coordinator at the Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership, as Director of Music Ministry at CityWell United Methodist Church, and as Co-Chair of the Pride: Durham, NC Planning Committee at the LGBTQ Center of Durham. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Sociology from Duke University as well as a Master's degree in Counseling from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

John McCann | Treasurer | He/Him

John McCann has more than 25 years experience in helping leaders work more effectively. He has worked with more than 300 of the nation’s leading cultural institutions including the Association of Arts Presenters, Dance/USA, National Alliance for Musical Theatre, Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, Chicago Opera Theatre, New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the National Symphony Orchestra.

McCann is co-founder and currently a board member of EmcArts, a nonprofit social enterprise for learning and innovation in the arts.

Jeanette Stokes | Secretary | She/Her

Jeanette Stokes is an ordained Presbyterian minister and a graduate of Smith College (1973) and Duke Divinity School (1977). In 1977 she founded the Resource Center for Women and Ministry in the South and currently serves as its Executive Director.

Jeanette is the author of 25 Years in the Garden, a collection of her essays, and the co-editor of God Speaks, Women Respond, a collection of essays by women in ministry. She likes to write, paint, dance, garden and lead workshops on women, spirituality, creativity and social justice.

Chandra Guinn | Board Member | She/Her

Chandra Guinn is a local Mississippian who lived in Iowa & Maryland before making her home in North Carolina. She completed degrees in Sociology at Bucknell University and the UNC Chapel Hill. Ms. Guinn is a Black cultural curator, University educator, and administrator. Currently, she directs the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture at Duke University, a position she has held since 2005.

Prior to assuming her current position, she worked as the program coordinator at the Institute of African American Research (IAAR) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ms. Guinn is also an award-winning teacher, who has taught at UNC Chapel Hill, Duke University, Durham Technical Community College and the North Carolina Correctional Institute for Women. Her primary intellectual interests include Black arts/culture and history, philanthropy, entrepreneurship, and leadership. When away from work, she is called upon for business consultation, personal coaching and motivational speaking. She enjoys educational outings, as well as honing her design sensibilities and is always in pursuit of interior freedom.

Charmaine McKissick-Melton | Board Member | She/Her

Charmaine McKissick-Melton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mass Communication at North Carolina Central University. In May 2017 she received The Board of Governor’s Teaching Excellence Award. She was previously at Bennett College in Greensboro, NC. As the youngest daughter of the late Judge Floyd B. McKissick, Sr., Charmaine helped integrate Durham public schools and is a life-long civil rights activist. She is currently working on the memoirs of her father and two narrative collection projects.

McKissick-Melton received her BA in radio, television and film from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1977, her MA in Speech Communication in 1978 at Northern Illinois University and her PhD in Mass Communications in 2001 from the University of Kentucky. She has been active on the board of directors of many community, business, and political and social awareness organizations.

Alisa Johnson | Board Member | She/Her

Dr. Alisa Johnson is an associate professor of English who teaches American and African American literature, introduction to film study, women’s literature, and supernatural and horror fiction. She is very involved in neighborhood and community issues, serving as the Chair of the Southwest Central Durham Quality of Life Project Steering Committee and Durham Neighborhoods United.

Her essays and entries on African American writers have been published in Modern Fiction, The Reference Guides to Modern and Short American Fiction, and The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing.  She is the coordinator of the Meredith College Documentary Film Festival and a jurist for the Longleaf Film Festival. She is a long-term resident of Burch Avenue, and loves coffee, cats, and Buddhist meditation.

Robin Kirk | Board Member | She/Her

Robin Kirk is the essayist, award winning poet and author of The Bond, the first in a young-adult fantasy trilogy ((Blue Crow Books). More Terrible Than Death: Massacres, Drugs and America’s War in Colombia (PublicAffairs) and The Monkey’s Paw: New Chronicles from Peru (University of Massachusetts Press). She coedits the The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University) and is an editor of Duke University Press’s World Readers series.

Kirk is a Faculty Co-Director of the Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute and is a founding member of the Pauli Murray Project. She is a senior lecturer in Duke's Department of Cultural Anthropology. Kirk co-chaired the City-County Committee on Monuments and Memorials, with fellow Pauli Murray Board member Charmaine McKissick-Melton. She also co-chaired the North Carolina Commission of Inquiry on Torture.

She is a graduate of the University of Chicago and holds an MFA in Children’s and Young Adult literature from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Milan Pham | Board Member | She/Her

Milan T. Pham is a founding member of NicholsonPham Law. Milan worked for Americans for a Fair Chance, a consortium of six national legal civil rights agencies, in developing the southern strategy to preserve affirmative action. Milan was the Director of the Orange County Human Rights and Relations Department where she focused on housing and employment discrimination related matters. In 2007, she became the founding Director of North Carolina Lawyers for Entrepreneurs Assistance Program (NC LEAP) of the North Carolina Bar Association Foundation. Under Milan’s direction, NC LEAP became a statewide program providing free legal services to low-wealth entrepreneurs across the life cycle of their businesses. She received her JD from UNC Chapel Hill School of Law in May 1999. She was admitted to the Maryland State Bar in September 1999 and to the North Carolina State Bar in March 2001.

Milan is a member of the 2008-2010 Friday Fellowship class. She currently serves as a Board member for the following community organizations: Planned Parenthood of Central North Carolina and the LGBTQ Center of Durham. As part of her service to her profession, Milan serves as an officer of the Durham Orange Women Attorneys, a board member of NC Legal Education Assistance Program, and she chairs a project of the Law Related Education Committee of the NC Bar Association.

Antonia Randolph | Board Member | She/Her

Antonia Randolph is a Black feminist queer scholar based in the Triangle. A graduate of Spelman College, she first learned about Pauli Murray’s life and work in a class on Black feminist thought. Her community work reflects her Black feminist values. She wrote love letters to Bresha Meadows, a Black girl who was incarcerated for killing her abuser, in support of the #FreeBresha campaign and hosted a quilt making session for The Monument Quilt for survivors of sexual and gendered violence. Locally, she works at UNC as a cultural sociologist and professor in the American Studies department. She’s a member of the Scholars’ Network on Masculinity and the Well-Being of African American Men and a participant in the Women of Color Leadership Project of the National Women’s Studies Association.

Her first book, The Wrong Kind of Different: Challenging the Meaning of Diversity in American Classrooms (Teachers College 2012), examined the hierarchies elementary school teachers constructed among students of color.  She has also published in the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, The Feminist Wire and Scalawag Magazine. Her current book project, That’s My Heart: Queering Intimacy in Hip-Hop Culture, examines portrayals of Black men’s intimate relationships in hip-hop culture. 

Rosita Stevens-Holsey | Board Member | She/Her

Rosita Stevens-Holsey, known as Ms. Stevens by most, was born in Massachusetts during World War II to Rutherford B. Stevens MD, a military doctor and Rosetta Murray Stevens. Her mother, Rosetta, was the youngest sister of Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray. After leaving New England, Rosita and her family spent her early years in Wyoming and Kansas. Her father had been selected to be the first Black doctor to do his psychiatry residency at the prestigious Menniger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. 

After college, Ms. Stevens taught in the state of New York, followed by a stint as a systems engineer for IBM. After traveling to Europe in 1968, she decided to stay, settling and living in Heidelberg, Germany. She was able to secure a job with the United States Overseas School System where she taught for six years as an officer and negotiator for the teacher’s union (OEA/NEA), and a coordinator for four years on the staff of the Office of the Superintendent of Schools. 

After leaving Atlanta, Ms. Stevens returned to Washington, D.C. where she continued decorating homes and consulting. She utilized her Masters in Counseling and Human Services, spending nearly two decades with a non-profit serving disabled people in the D.C. metro area as a program coordinator, trainer, group home decorator, and director of operations. 

In the past ten years, Ms. Stevens has educated elementary students in the primary grades, mostly in math or science. Ms. Stevens-Holsey served three years as co-chair of the Faculty Advisory Council of her school’s unit of the Prince George's County Education Association (teacher's union). She is also a member of National Organization for Women  (NOW), NAACP, National Women's History Project, the Pauli Murray Chapter, and the Union of Black Episcopalians (UBE).

She continues to consult in Atlanta and brightening and refurbishing homes from NY to the Caribbean. Her work has been featured in The Washington Post, NY Times, House 2 Home, and Essence Magazine, to name a few.

Dorothy Quincy Thomas | Board Member | She/Her

Dorothy Q. Thomas is principal manager of Red Dirt Road Productions, LLC, a strategic advisory firm for scaling and sustaining social change. Thomas currently advises Reverend Dr. William J. Barber of Repairers of the Breach in North Carolina and also leads Free Radicals, an initiative to better measure, publicize and finance women’s affirmative impact on progressive social change. From September 2013-May 2014, Thomas was Interim President and CEO of the Ms. Foundation for Women, where she previously served on its Board of Directors.

Before leading Ms., Thomas co-founded and served as senior strategist to the U.S. Human Rights Fund, a seven year, $20 million dollar field-building collaborative fund. From 2008-11, Thomas held human rights fellowships at the London School of Economics and the School for Oriental and African Studies. From 1990-1998, she served as the founding director of the Human Rights Watch Women’s Rights Division. Thomas was a 2014 Ford Foundation Public Voices Fellow, a 1998 MacArthur fellow, and a 1995 Bunting Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. In 1998, she received the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award from President and Mrs. Clinton. She is a member of the board of The Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice at Duke University.

Bryce Cracknell | Board Member | He/Him

Bryce Cracknell is a passionate storyteller and an award-winning social impact producer from Charlotte, North Carolina currently working in Los Angeles, CA. He led social impact campaigns for narrative and documentary features and television shows including FLEE, MY NAME IS PAULI MURRAY, JOHN LEWIS: GOOD TROUBLE, JUST MERCY, and WHEN THEY SEE US.

As a storyteller, Bryce aspires to elevate narratives, histories, and experiences that are often overlooked, cast aside, or forgotten. He is the Project Lead and Managing Editor of the new environmental justice magazine, The Margin. Bryce is a Morris K. and Stewart L. Udall Scholar and a graduate of Duke University where he earned a B.A. in Public Policy.

Beth Ione Ward | Board Member | She/Her

Beth Ward is an independent consultant specializing in grant proposal development and other strategic writing in Northampton, Massachusetts. She has more than 30 years of experience in the non-profit sector, primarily in educational and health care settings.

Beth met Pauli Murray in 1975, when Pauli came to serve as seminarian at her family church, St. Philip’s Chapel in southern Maryland. Pauli quickly became an integral part of the family and was a profoundly influential mentor.

Beth identifies as a white lesbian-feminist pacifist. Her participation in the human rights movement has included anti-war, anti-racism, HIV/AIDS, women’s rights, abortion rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and worker’s rights activism and advocacy – oftentimes inspired by Pauli.

Elon Cook Lee | Board Member | She/Her

Elon is a Certified Interpretive Guide Trainer through the National Association for Interpretation, and has served as a cultural heritage faculty instructor at several universities. She enjoys engaging the public in loving discussions on challenging topics, opening hearts, and changing minds one conversation at a time. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology and Anthropology from Spelman College, a Master’s degree in Museum Studies from The George Washington University, and a Master’s degree in Public/Applied History from Brown University.