Michelle Gross is the President of Communities United Against Police Brutality (CUAPB), a Twin-Cities based organization that works to create a climate of resistance to abuse of authority by police organizations and to empower local people with a structure that can take on police brutality and actually bring it to an end. CUAPB provides support for survivors of police brutality and families of victims so they can reclaim their dignity and join the struggle to end police brutality. She has a 40-year background as an activist and community organizer involved in a number of social justice issues, including anti-racism, criminal justice, and reproductive rights work.
Matthew D. Lassiter, Louis Evans Professor of History and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan, is a scholar of the twentieth-century United States with a research and teaching focus on political history, urban/suburban studies, racial and social inequality, and the history of policing and the carceral state. He is the author of The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs (Princeton University Press 2023), The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton University Press 2006), co-editor of The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism (Oxford University Press 2009), and lead author of the website exhibit of Detroit Under Fire: Police Violence, Crime Politics, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Civil Rights Era (U-M Carceral State Project 2021). Lassiter is co-director of the University of Michigan’s Carceral State Project and is co-PI of its Documenting Criminalization, Confinement, and Resistance research initiative. He is also director of the affiliated Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab, which involves undergraduate and graduate student researchers in collaborative public engagement projects.
Ayaan Natala is an aspiring research-scholar-activist, who grew up in Minnesota (Mni Sota), also known as Ojibwe/Dakota land. She is a PhD candidate in American Studies and a member of the Critical Black Studies cohort at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities where she studies Black feminism, Black radicalism, and social movements. Her dissertation explores how Black Lives Matter organizing influenced Black Minnesotans' reflections on freedom within the context of their life histories. She seeks to understand how the 2020 historic moment of social movement mobilization influences Black residents, activists, and community leaders' conceptions of freedom—and how they struggle to make those visions a reality. As a Black Minnesotan, she is excited to stay connected with community members to reflect, heal, and dream of alternative futures. Her research is funded by the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship.
Moderator
Susanna L. Blumenthal is the William L. Prosser Professor of Law and Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Law and the Modern Mind: Consciousness and Responsibility in American Legal Culture (Harvard University Press 2016). Her current research examines law’s role in policing the borderland between capitalism and crime. Longer term projects center on violence and its regulation in carceral institutions in United States history.
