Convener Biographies
Veronica Burt, Convener, is a Social Entrepreneur and Principal of 600 Strategies – a boutique Community Development Consulting Service that integrates a multitude of approaches in helping clients achieve valuable social, economic, and environmental outcomes. She has worked with a variety of grassroots, non-profit and government entities on matters of racial & social equity, housing, jobs, business development, youth engagement, neighborhood and transportation planning. Veronica is a student of African American history and has long been a proponent of the reparation’s movement upon reading Randall Robinson’s book The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks. Over the years, she’s had the privilege of working with national activists including Chicago City Alderman Dorothy Tillman who passed one of the 1st city level policies on the matter. Veronica looks forward to bringing forth healing and transformation for American Descendants of U.S. Slavery as she shares her skills and experiences with the work of the Legislative Advisory Committee.
Trahern Crews, Convener, is a native of Saint Paul. He is the co-founder and lead organizer with Black Lives Matter Minnesota, and he is the chair of the Green Party of Minnesota and chairs the party’s media committee. He is Chair of the Green Party of the U.S. Reparations Working Group and Co-Chaired the Saint Paul Recovery Act Steering committee to get the Reparations Resolution passed. From 2014 to 2015, he served as spokesperson for the Saint Paul Green Party (4th Congressional District) Campaign Manager for Marcus Walker for Senate 2012, Campaign Manager for Lena Denise Buggs For MN State Representative. Formerly, he served as the community liaison at Dayton’s Bluff Community Council connecting residents with the resources Dayton’s Bluff Community Council and the City of Saint Paul has to offer. He also worked closely with the Neighborhood Development Committee. Trahern Crews taught Black history and Urban Agriculture at Truth Academy and has mentored Black youth at New Lens and Gladiator Records.
Dr. Yohuru Williams, Convener, is Distinguished University Chair and Professor of History and founding director of the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. Dr. Williams received his Ph.D. from Howard University in 1998.
Dr. Williams is the author of Black Politics/White Power: Civil Rights Black Power and Black Panthers in New Haven (Blackwell, 2006), Rethinking the Black Freedom Movement (Routledge, 2015), and Teaching beyond the Textbook: Six Investigative Strategies (Corwin Press, 2008) and the editor of A Constant Struggle: African-American History from 1865 to the Present Documents and Essays (Kendall Hunt, 2002). He is the co-editor of The Black Panthers: Portraits of an Unfinished Revolution (Nation Books, 2016), In Search of the Black Panther Party, New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement (Duke, 2006), and Liberated Territory: Toward a Local History of the Black Panther Party (Duke, 2008). He also served as general editor for the Association for the Study of African American Life and History's 2002 and 2003 Black History Month publications, The Color Line Revisited (Tapestry Press, 2002) and The Souls of Black Folks: Centennial Reflections (Africa World Press, 2003). Dr. Williams served as an advisor on the popular civil rights reader Putting the Movement Back into teaching Civil Rights.
Dr. Williams has appeared on a variety of local and national radio and television programs most notably ABC, CNN, MSNBC, Aljazeera America, BET, CSPAN, EBRU Today, Fox Business News, Fresh Outlook, Huff Post Live, and NPR and was featured in the Ken Burns PBS Documentary Jackie Robinson and the Stanley Nelson PBS Documentary: The Black Panthers. He is also one of the hosts of the History Channel’s Web show Sound Smart. A regular political commentator on the Cliff Kelly Show on WVON, Chicago, Dr. Williams also blogs regularly for the Huffington Post and is a contributor to the Progressive Magazine.
Dr. Williams's scholarly articles have appeared in the American Bar Association’s Insights on Law and Society, The Organization of American Historians Magazine of History, The Black Scholar, The Journal of Black Studies, Pennsylvania History, Delaware History, the Journal of Civil and Human Rights and the Black History Bulletin. Dr. Williams is also presently finishing a new book entitled In the Shadow of the Whipping Post: Lynching, Capital Punishment, and Jim Crow Justice in Delaware 1865-1965 under contract with Cambridge University Press.
Committee Member Biographies
Theresa Cunningham has been deeply committed to civic service, affordable housing, and small business development in the non-profit & public sectors. She is a retired public servant of the City of Minneapolis; where she worked for over 40 years helping to provide safe, decent, and affordable housing. In hindsight, she didn’t realize this work would be her life-long career path and an area of public service and importance responsible in meeting so many peoples’ primary need for shelter. She was born and raised in the old Rondo community of St. Paul, MN as a Hutchinson. As far back, as she can recollect, she lived in numerous locations within the historic Rondo Community. She lived on W Central and N Kent St, just above the old Hollow Playground in Cornmeal Valley. She moved from there just around the corner to Fuller Ave. and Dale St. in the late 1950s which was referred to as Oatmeal Hill. After her mother’s untimely death in 1960, she moved deeper into the Midway area where she has been a native most of her life, except for a short period when she moved to Minneapolis; married and divorced. She then raised her three children as a single mother in Rondo. Her children changed the course of her life. They have followed the path she has forged for them; to put God and honor first and to work hard and be a contributing member of society. They are kind, hard-working, independent individuals who serve our community. They have blessed her with 8 grandchildren, who are the light of her life and promise a true legacy of family staying together.
In her 40+ year work history for the City of Minneapolis, she worked first for the Minneapolis Housing and Redevelopment Authority (MHRA), which morphed into the Minneapolis Community Development Agency (MCDA) and was finally absorbed by the Community Planning and Economic Development (CPED) division of the City of Minneapolis. She worked in all facets of real estate development and finance from single and multi-family housing, construction of public service facilities, to various planned unit developments. In addition, she administered numerous forms of financing for the creation and implementation of shelter housing facilities for the homeless.
After retiring in 2018, she pursued her life’s passion of gardening, since the age of seven. She recently completed the Ramsey County’s Master Gardeners Program at the U of M and now volunteers in helping to beautify and maintain various neighborhood gardens in the historic Rondo community of St. Paul. She spends most of her free time with her family and life-long, close friends: enjoying life and watching plants grow.
She is honored to help define appropriate restitutions for African American descendants of chattel slave families that were stolen and forced to sacrifice their lives, families, loves, liberties, strengths, and imaginations for the growth of America. She is eager to help in fostering the ‘American Dream’ and the unrealized promise of the “forty acres and a mule” for our families which we are so late in receiving. She prays this work is honorable, bears good fruit, and fosters a legacy for African American families for generations to come.
Amber Jones possesses over ten years of community engagement, advocacy, & public policy experience in education, economic development, museums, & state government. She earned her bachelor’s degree in African American & African Studies from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, where she studied public history of Minnesota's African American communities
Benjamin Mchie is an educational consultant, historian and founder of African American Registry (AAREG). Michie holds a B.A. in Speech Communications from Long Beach State University and is a Roy Wilkins Center for Social Change Fellow at the University of Minnesota (UMN). Mchie is the creator of African American Registery's Teacher's Forum subscription service. This online curriculum reform portal is working with E12 teacher's and post-secondary schools of education teaching programs. Also, AAREG works in the community through its Street Team Youth Programs.
In 2017, Mr. Mchie was Minnesota Governor Dayton’s Martin Luther King Day Lifetime Achievement Award winner and in 2018, he spoke with the UMN Humphrey Institute at the 5th World Conference on Remedies to Racial & Ethnic Economic Inequality in Vitoria, Brazil. In 2019, he compiled tribal traditions for preservation in Mali, Africa. In September 2020 he received the Richard Olden Beard award from the University of Minnesota.
Nick Muhammad is a Twin Cities transplant from Indianola, Mississippi. His journey has brought him from the cradle of white supremacy to the crown of white supremacy in Minnesota. He is a product and advocate for the American Descendants of Slavery ADOS/Black community. As Executive Director of the Black Civic Network (BCN) he is a strong advocate for reparations and repairing of the ADOS/Black families. Under his leadership they have authored the “ADOS Reparative Justice Fund” which is a bill to stabilize the ADOS/Black community and are strong allies in support of the “African American Family Preservation Act”. They are also the consultants on several State, County and Municipal initiatives to impact the ADOS/Black community. www.blackcivicnetwork.org
Jessica Nickrand (she/her) works at a national non-profit as a patient advocate for children experiencing neurologic conditions and their families. She holds a BA from Michigan State University in Social Relations and Health Policy, and a PhD in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Her research focused on the intentional disinvestment of Black residents by local, state, and federal governments, and the subsequent negative outcomes in both healthcare and economic prosperity for Black families. In her research, she also found that this disinvestment also detracted from the city's overall prosperity, arguing that inequity and continued inequalities are expensive--it is through this lens that she approaches this work on reparations. She is from the Downriver community of Detroit and has lived in the Twin Cities for the past twelve years. Jessica lives with her husband Nick in the Summit Hill neighborhood.
Jose Perez is a 21-year old R&B Artist and a first-generation youth-leadership expert with over 5 years of managerial experience. Born in the East side of Saint Paul, raised by a single mother of two, Jose sees himself as a product of his immigrant mother's American dream.
Khulia Pringle has a B.S. Human Service, with a Minor in Human Service Administration. B.S. Social Studies. Graduate Certificate Secondary Urban Education with Licensure, AmeriCorp VISTA & AmeriCorp Promise Fellow Alumni. She is a former educator, and currently Brightbeam Activist & Midwest Regional Organizer with the National Parents Union and lead education advocate and organizer for National Parents Union MN. She firmly believes there is no such thing as other people's children.
Vic Rosenthal has a consulting practice focused on organizational development, capacity building, training and campaign development. Prior to this, Vic was the executive director of Jewish Community Action for nearly 18 years, building the size and capacity of the organization, and working on campaigns related to voting rights, racial justice, affordable housing and banking. Vic also was executive director of the Minnesota Senior Federation for nine years. Vic has been a community organizer for more than 40 years. He is the recipient of a Bush Leadership Fellowship and was one of 18 national recipients of the Ford Foundation’s Leadership for a Changing World award in 2004. Vic earned his Master of Public Administration at Rutgers University and his undergraduate degree at the State University of New York-Binghamton. Vic is also a member of Mount Zion Temple in St. Paul.
Jerry Thomas, an American Of African Descent, was born and raised In St. Paul. He grew up as a child in the 60's. Racial unrest was prevalent and a daily occurrence at his junior high school. He remembers highway 94 being built destroying our affluent African American community. He overcame many obstacles his life, he’s a member of IBEW LU 110, and has been an electrician for 14 years. He is sincerely looking forward to being involved with pioneering reparations for our African American community.
