Statues | Munk Debates

Cornell William Brooks

“When you have commemoration, as opposed to education, it leads to misinformation. And it literally debilitates our ability to grapple with the past in order to come to grips with the present.”

As well teaching at the Harvard Kennedy School, Cornell William Brooks leads as Director of The William Monroe Trotter Collaborative for Social Justice at the School’s Center for Public Leadership and serves as Visiting Professor of the Practice of Prophetic Religion and Public Leadership at Harvard Divinity School. Brooks is the former president and CEO of the NAACP, a civil rights attorney, fourth-generation ordained minister, writer, orator, writer, and the executive producer of two films. 

Prior to leading the NAACP, Brooks was president and CEO of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice. He also served as senior counsel and acting director of the Office of Communications Business Opportunities at the Federal Communications Commission, executive director of the Fair Housing Council of Greater Washington, and a trial attorney at both the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the U.S. Department of Justice. He was also the executive producer of the CNN docuseries The People v. the Klan.  

Brooks holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was a senior editor of the Yale Law Journal and member of the Yale Law and Policy Review, and a Master of Divinity from Boston University’s School of Theology, where he was a Martin Luther King, Jr. Scholar. 

George Will

“My worry is about the question of control. I don't want to control the past. I want the past to be faced as what it was, and not controlled for any political agenda, good, bad or indifferent."

George F. Will's newspaper column has been syndicated by The Washington Post since 1974. Today it appears twice weekly in more than 440 newspapers. In 1976 he became a regular contributing editor of Newsweek magazine, for which he provided a bimonthly essay until 2011. In 1977 he won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in his newspaper columns.

In 1981, Mr. Will became a founding panel member on ABC television’s "This Week" and spent over three decades providing regular commentary. Then followed three years with Fox News where he appeared regularly on "Special Report" and "Fox News Sunday." 

In June 2019, Mr. Will released his most recent work, The Conservative Sensibility. Altogether eight collections of Mr. Will's Newsweek and Washington Post columns have been published, the most recent being One Man’s America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation (2008).