Cast

Ray Rickman is a former State Representative from the College Hill area and served as Rhode Island Deputy Secretary of State from 2000 to 2002. In the 1970s, Rickman served as Chief of Staff for United States Congressman John Conyers, Jr. He is currently President of the Rickman Group, a consulting firm that raises funds and conducts management and diversity training for non-profits and small businesses.

Additionally, Rickman has served as both Equal Opportunity Officer and Executive Director of the Human Relations Commission for the City of Providence. In the 1980s, he was the Associate Director of the Compliance Office for the Massachusetts Housing Finance Agency. From 2004-2006, Rickman was the Assistant Director of the Diversity Office for Lifespan, Rhode Island’s largest employer. As an avocation, Rickman gives historic walking tours of the East Side, including discussions about the role of the Triangle Trade in the colonial economy. He also has devoted efforts as a rare book collector to the further discussion and scholarship of the memoirs of William J. Brown, an African-American whose grandfather was owned as a slave by Moses Brown until some time after the Gaspee attack, when Moses converted to the Quaker religion and manumitted his enslaved servants as part of an overall embrace of the young Abolitionist movement.

Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, PhD, is a Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and African Studies at Rhode Island College. She received her Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Temple University and her PhD in Anthropology and African Studies from Northwestern University in 1973. At Rhode Island College she has received both the Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1990 and the Award for Distinguished Scholar in 1998.

She has spent six years since 1970 living and conducting research in three different African countries, including the Sudan, Egypt and Tunisia, and has traveled extensively throughout the world including two trips around the world teaching anthropology with the University of Pittsburgh Semester at Sea program. Her research subjects have covered such topics as Islamic law and Islamic society, women's social and legal status in Muslim societies, ethics and anthropological research, human rights and cultural relativism, and comparative studies in law and society.

She has authored three textbooks: Race, and Racism: an Introduction (2006); Female Well-Being(2005); and Islamic Societies in Practice (1994; 2004). She translated the writings of Egyptian liberal-humanist intellectual, Muhammad Sa`id al-Ashmawy, from Arabic to English in Against Islamic Extremism (1998; 2001). She is the author or editor of eleven books, including the following works on Sudan: Shari`a and Islamism in Sudan: Conflict, Law and Social Transformation (2012); Islamic Law and Society in the Sudan (1987; Arabic translation 2004) and co-author of Historical Dictionary of the Sudan (1991; 2003), and Race and Identity in the Nile Valley (2004).

Richard Lobban, Jr., PhD, is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and African Studies at Rhode Island College, where he taught since 1972. He has been engaged in African studies since 1964, when he first went to Africa. Professor Lobban spent two years on the research staff at the American University in Cairo and has taught in Khartoum, Sudan, as well as in the U.S. at the University of Pittsburgh, Tufts, Bucknell, and Dartmouth. He lived in the Nile Valley for six years and conducted his own ethnographic fieldwork in Arabic. Among his published works is The Historical Dictionary of Ancient and Medieval Nubia. University courses he has taught include comparative language, human slavery market, and writing systems, rise of the state in the Egypto-Nubian valley, ethnoarchaeology of ancient Nubia, and anthrozoology along the Nile. Dr. Lobban also is a consultant for the US Navy and lectures at the Naval War College in Newport.