Charles M. Payne is Henry Rutgers Professor of African American and African Studies and Director of the Joseph C. Cornwall Center for Metropolitan Studies at Rutgers University Newark. He is author of I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Movement (University of California Press) and co-editor, with Decoteau Irby and Charity Anderson, of the forthcoming Somebodiness: A Call for Dignity-Affirming Education (Teachers College Press).