Memorializing History: A Conversation About Monuments, Truth, and Justice

CJ Hunt

Comedy writer and director

CJ Hunt is a comedy writer and director living in NYC.

He is currently a field producer for The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. CJ has also been a staff writer for A&E's Black and White, a cast member on MTV2's Vidiots, and a field producer for BET's The Rundown with Robin Thede. 

CJ is also the director of The Neutral Ground, documentary about memory, monuments, and breaking up with the confederacy. It’s available now on PBS.

CJ is an Eric & Wendy Schmidt Fellow with New America. He is also an alumnus of the Firelight Media Documentary Lab and New Orleans Film Fest’s Emerging Voices fellowship for directors of color. His work is supported by: ITVS, The Southern Documentary Fund, The Center for Asian American Media, SFFILM, and The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation.

A regular host of The Moth, CJ also runs the weekly standup show Good Delivery with co-hosts Natasha Vaynblat (Comedy Central) and James Hamilton (Vice News). He misses the good old days with the sketch group Stupid Time Machine touring San Francisco Sketchfest, Chicago Sketchfest, iO West, and the Moontower Comedy and Oddity Festival.  

A graduate from Brown University in Africana Studies, CJ is endlessly fascinated by race and comedy's ability to say what we can't.  

Allison Minto

Connecticut-based artist and educator

Allison Minto is a Connecticut-based artist and educator. She holds an MFA in Photography from the Yale School of Art, where she received the John Ferguson Weir Award and a BA in Journalism from SUNY-Buffalo State College. 

Allison's practice is rooted in community, collaboration, and field research. Her photography takes on themes around African American archives, family, history, memory, preservation, and maintenance. Her decision to use archival elements come out of a personal experience. "Not just by digging through my family archives," Allison explains, "but by also recognizing the traditional position many Black women in America have played as carriers of generational narratives."

Allison is a 2021-2022 Happy and Bob Doran Connecticut Artist in Residence, 2021-2022 DocX Archive Lab Fellow at Duke University, and member of Diversify Photo.

Thomas Allen Harris

Senior Lecturer in African American Studies and Film & Media Studies

Raised in the Bronx and Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania, Thomas Allen Harris is the founder and President of Chimpanzee Productions, a company dedicated to producing unique audio-visual experiences that illuminate the search for identity, family, and spirituality. Chimpanzee’s innovative and award-winning films, videos and transmedia projects have received critical acclaim at International film festivals such as Sundance, Berlin, Toronto, FESPACO, Outfest, Flaherty and Cape Town, exhibited at the MoMA Documentary Fortnight, the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial, the Corcoran Gallery, the Gwangju Biennale and Melbourne Arts Festival; and broadcast on PBS, the Sundance Channel, ARTE, CBC, Swedish Broadcasting Network and New Zealand Television.  

A graduate of Harvard College and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, Harris has received numerous awards including a NAACP Image Award and an African Oscar as well as Guggenheim, Rockefeller and United States Artist Fellowships. Harris is a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.  

In 2009, Harris and his team launched the Digital Diaspora Family Reunion Roadshow (1world1family.me), a socially engaged art project that employs touring Roadshows and virtual gathering spaces, where individuals are invited to explore and share the rich and revealing narratives found within their family photo albums. This project was developed into a TV series, Family Pictures USA which nationally broadcast on PBS beginning in 2019.

David Blight

Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies

David W. Blight is Sterling Professor of History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. He previously taught at North Central College in Illinois, Harvard University, and Amherst College. He is the author or editor of a dozen books, including Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom; American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era; Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory; and annotated editions of Douglass’s first two autobiographies. He has worked on Douglass much of his professional life, and been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize, among others. He writes frequently for the popular press, including the Atlantic, the New York Times, and many other journals. His lecture course on the Civil War and Reconstruction Era at Yale is on the internet at https://oyc.yale.edu/history/hist-119. Blight has always been a teacher first. At the beginning of his career, he spent seven years as a high school history teacher in his hometown of Flint, Michigan. Blight maintains a website, including information about public lectures, books, articles and interviews at http://www.davidwblight.com/.