Justice Advisory Board

Vann R. Newkirk II is a senior editor at The Atlantic. He has covered the battles for voting rights since the 2013 Shelby County Supreme Court decision, the fate of communities on the front lines of climate change and disasters, the Black vote in the 2018 and 2020 elections, and wrote the September 2019 cover story for the Atlantic on black land loss. He is the host of The Atlantic’s podcast Floodlines, a narrative series about Hurricane Katrina. Vann was a 2020 James Beard Award Finalist, a 2020 11th Hour Fellow at New America, and a 2018 recipient of the American Society of Magazine Editors’s ASME Next Award. His forthcoming book, Children of the Flood, a chronicle of Black America’s fight against climate crises, will be published by Random House.

Julian Brave NoiseCat is vice president of policy and strategy for Data for Progress, a think tank, narrative change director for The Natural History Museum, an artist and activist collective, and a fellow of the Type Media Center, NDN Collective and Center for Humans and Nature. A columnist for Canada’s National Observer and contributing editor with Canadian Geographic, his work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and other publications. Julian has been recognized as a finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists and was named to the TIME100 Next list of emerging leaders in 2021, alongside the starting point guard of his fantasy basketball team, Luka Doncic.

Harold Jackson, winner of the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing, recently retired after 44 years as a journalist. Jackson grew up in Birmingham, Ala., during the Civil Rights Movement and in 1968 became the first black student in the University of Alabama’s high school journalism workshop. Following his graduation in 1975 from Baker University in Kansas, Jackson became a reporter at the Birmingham Post-Herald and subsequently worked for United Press International, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Birmingham News, and the Baltimore Sun. Jackson returned to the Inquirer in 1999 and in 2007 became its editorial page editor; a position he held until joining the Houston Chronicle editorial board in 2018.

In addition to the Pulitzer, Jackson has received awards from the National Association of Black Journalists, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Alabama Press Association, the Maryland-Delaware-Washington, D.C. Press Association, UPI, and the Associated Press. A former Freedom Forum journalist in residence at the University of Alabama, Jackson also taught journalism at Loyola College of Maryland. He and his wife, Denice, have been married 43 years and have two children and three grandchildren.

Danielle Purifoy is a lawyer and assistant professor of Geography at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on environmental justice and the racial politics of development in Black towns and settlements. Her work is published in various academic and public forums, such as Society and Space, Environmental Sociology, Duke Law and Policy Forum, Southern Cultures, and Environmental Health News. Danielle serves as Board Chair of the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network and as a member of the Durham Beyond Policing Coalition in Durham, North Carolina. She is the former Race and Place editor for Scalawag, a media organization devoted to Southern storytelling, journalism and the arts.

Linda Villarosa is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine, covering race and public health. She teaches journalism and Black Studies at the City College of New York. For several years, Linda edited the health pages of The New York Times, working on medical coverage for Science Times and for the newspaper at large. She was also first the health editor and then executive editor of Essence Magazine—two different times—where she wrote or edited a number of award-winning articles for the publication targeted to black women. Linda is the author or co-author of three books, including the bestselling Body & Soul: The Black Women’s Guide to Physical Health and Emotional Well-Being. She is writing Under the Skin: Race, Inequality and the Health of a Nation to be published by Doubleday.