Ray Anthony Shepard has put together an award-winning book for young readers to counter what he says are "years of sanitized Black History months and schoolbooks." He has chosen instead to tell the story from the inside - examining the question of race through the lyrical biographies of six prominent American heroes, all of whom challenged and changed the racial barriers of their day - Ona Judge, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Ida B Wells, MLK and Barack Obama.

Cambridge Forum guest speaker Shepard, intertwines his academic research with personal memories of his mother's stories about her enslaved father, accounts informed by his own experiences of living through eight decades from the era of Jim Crow to the present day. He provides a refreshing and corrective understanding of the role of race in American life - Black and White. As a retired history teacher and textbook editor, he now writes books "that didn’t exist when I was in the classroom and books I couldn’t publish as an editor.” Ray Anthony Shepard graduated from the University of Nebraska and the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

The conversation will be moderated by Jude Nixon, Professor of English and former Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Salem State University.