Ed Whitfield

Ed Whitfield is social critic and community activist who works closely with the Beloved Community Center in Greensboro, NC, and has just become the Executive Director of the newly formed Fund for Democratic Communities. He recently played a prominant role in the establishment of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission. After graduating as a Presidential Scholar from Little Rock Central High School in the late 60s, he went on to Cornell University where he became the leader of the Black student organization during the period of struggle for Black Studies. He left Cornell in 1970 to teach at Malcolm X Liberation University in Greensboro. Following the closing of the school he remained in NC to do labor and community organizing. Whitfield lectures on issues of education and racism, has hosted a weekly radio talk show on community issues and has been a regular columnist in the local African American press writing an iconoclastic column on community, education and peace/justice issues. He has written a collection of essays on the 9/11 attacks and the issues of war and justice as well as a book on school diversity that is currently used in the Graduate School of Education at A&T State University. Ed is currently working on a book reexamining school integration in the light of the current discourse on "re-segregation."