United Black Family Scholarship Foundation

Bilal Tahlib Ali grew up in the streets of Oakland, California. Like many young African American men raised in the inner city, he succumbed to a life of crime as a means of survival. Eventually, his lifestyle caught up with him. In 1998, he was arrested and sentenced to 75 years to life for bank robbery. While incarcerated he would discover Islam which would provide him with a greater sense of purpose and allow him to become a community leader amongst his fellows. In 2022, after undergoing a transformative prison experience, he was resentenced and released. He currently assumes the Chief Development Officer position for the UBFSF.

James Ewing is project management director with proven technical abilities and an eye for design. He realized his passion for art late in life when he picked up a charcoal pencil and started drawing his first piece. He eventually produced a gallery exhibit under the pseudonym ShadedHues. This love of art guided his professional life by igniting a talent for web development.

Using his knowledge of frontend and backend development skills, James implements the latest coding languages and frameworks to translate beauty into code and create unique websites for organizations like the United Black Family Scholarship Foundation. He continues web development on a freelance basis and joined UBFSF to assist in delivering its invaluable services and opportunities on the web.

James currently works in the fintech industry as a project management director, translating business needs to technical solutions and driving those projects through to fruition.

Michel Braga is a Brazilian native with an undergraduate degree in geography and hospitality management, with emphasis on business administration. He’s taken a recent interest in learning about programming and system development. After 15 years in retail, he decided to focus on projects that have a bigger impact. He believes education is crucial for people and society to grow. With an interest technology, he dedicates his time to system and web development projects.

Dedicated to making a positive difference, Michel uses his education and experience to serve others. He enjoys the challenge and working on projects that make the future better. As an Assistant Web Director for the UBFSF, his goal is to support education and empowerment in communities through simple, effective initiatives.

Robert T. Chase is an associate professor of history. He is the author of We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners Rights in Postwar America; a national book award winner for Best Book for the Division of Critical Criminology and Social Justice of the American Society of Criminology. He is the co-director of the national organization Historians Against Slavery and editor of Caging Borders and the Carceral States: Incarcerations, Immigration Detentions, and Resistance.

His work has been published in numerous scholarly journals and anthologies. A renowned intellectual on the history of prison and policing reform and state violence, his work has been featured on MSNBC, CNN, NPR, Newsweek, Washington Post, and a number of other media outlets.

Zebulon Vance Miletsky, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Africana Studies and History. His articles have appeared in the Trotter Review, the Historical Journal of Massachusetts, the Journal of Civil and Human Rights, and the Journal of Urban History. He is an Executive Board member of the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History. He is a regular contributor to the award-winning blog Black Perspectives, hosted by the African-American Intellectual Historical Society. He has written op-eds for Diverse Issues in Higher Education and is a columnist for the BK Reader. His new book Before Busing: A History of Boston’s Long Black Freedom Struggle was published in December 2022 by the University of North Carolina Press.

Miletsky was the recipient of a 2020 “Game Changer” Award by the Long Island Area NAACP branch. In 2021 he was honored by the Town of Brookhaven Black History Commission “for leadership and service to the community as a role model to the next generation.” He lives in Brooklyn and works with the UBFSF as an editor for the 100 Prisoner Book Publishing Literacy Program.

Willie Mack is a Ph. D. candidate at Stony Brook University and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Black Studies Department at the University of Missouri-Columbia. His research interests focus on race, capitalism and the carceral state in twentieth-century United States. His dissertation takes a transnational approach to the development of the carceral state in Haiti and the U.S. during the 1970 through the 1990s. Will has had articles published with “Black Perspectives” the blog for the African Americans Intellectual History Society, the Society for U.S. Intellectual Society, and “Next Chapter,” the digital forum for the University of Chicago’s Race and Capitalism Project. He has also won the Organization of American Historians’ 2022 John Higham Research Fellowship Award for graduate students writing doctoral dissertation in American History.

Susan Scheckel is an Associate Professor of English. Scheckel earned her Ph.D. at the University of California-Berkeley in 1992. After teaching at the University of Memphis and, briefly, at the University of Southern California, she came to Stony Brook University in 2000. She’s committed to showing that education in the humanities provides invaluable training in the acquisition of real-world skills. She is the editor of The Insistence of the Indian: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Princeton University Press, 1998), which was the recipient of 1999 South Central Modern Language Association Book Award. She also co-edited Boundaries of Affect: Ethnicity and Emotion (Humanities Institute of Stony Brook Occasional Papers Series, 2007) with E. Ann Kaplan.

R.E.B.U.I.L.D. – Reinvesting in Every Black and Underserved Institution to Liberate and Diversify
Our Program & Public Policy Internship Program is an innovative program that allows student volunteers the opportunity to gain invaluable experience utilizing their education in political science, public administration, and other related fields to develop, direct and implement comprehensive program and policy development measures that have the potential to transform the dynamic in underrepresented communities.

Cheyenne Hughes is a 4th year at California State University, Los Angeles working towards a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science with an emphasis in Pre-Legal Studies. She aims to focus on improving education in disadvantaged communities to transform the norm of school to prison pipeline. This system is an ongoing challenge within the American education system, including a lack of resources and discriminatory policies directed toward students of color. Her goal is to encourage lawmakers to implement stronger school systems inside marginalized and socially excluded communities that incorporate work-based programs that encourage students to stay in school as well as promote increased skill sets to prepare students for life after school. Cheyenne volunteers as our R.E.B.U.I.LD. Volunteer & Service Coordinator.

Michael is a 3rd year political science student at the University of Michigan. He is studying political science with a minor in history. He has previously interned at the office of Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, where he worked writing legislative briefs and attending meetings with local officials and business people. He has also assisted in planning numerous charity events. Michael volunteers as our R.E.B.U.I.LD. Field Director.

Taos Washington is a current MPA student specializing in Policy Analysis at the University of Colorado Denver. During his undergraduate, Taos earned a Letter of Specialization in Data Analytics for Politics, Policy, and Legal Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Taos utilized the letter of specialization he had earned to compose a 100-page thesis on Federal Housing Policy and its impact on the black community and Eviction Policy and its impact on the black community as a continued cycle of marginalization. Taos also has experience in securing meetings with congressional leaders to advocate for policy and has been awarded an Ethics and the Common Good Scholarship for advocating for good policy. Taos volunteers as our R.E.B.U.I.LD. Research & Survey Coordinator.