DEBORAH D. DOUGLAS is co-editor in chief of The Emancipator, a collaboration between Boston University and The Boston Globe that centers critical voices, debates and evidence-based opinion to reframe the national conversation on racial equity and hasten racially just outcomes. She has served as the Eugene S. Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Professor of Journalism at DePauw University and a senior leader with The OpEd Project, leading fellowships and programs that include the University of Texas at Austin, Dartmouth, Yale, Columbia, University of Illinois, Northwestern, University of Kansas, Urgent Action Fund in South Africa and Kenya, and Youth Narrating Our World (YNOW).

Douglas is author of “U.S. Civil Rights Trail: A Traveler’s Guide to the People, Places and Events That Made the Movement.” (Moon Travel, 2021). She is among 90 writers and thought leaders who contributed to “400 Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019.”

An award-winning journalist, Douglas won the 2019 Studs Terkel Award, Chicago’s highest industry honor. She has won several Lisagor Awards from the Chicago Headline Club and was recognized for her opinion writing by the Chicago Journalists Association. In 2018, she won an award from the Skin Cancer Association for her Oprah magazine article, “Save Our Skin.” In 2020, she shared a team award with MLK50: Justice Through Journalism: Investigative Editors & Reporters awarded the outlet its highest honor for its transformational results in its “Profiting From the Poor” series with ProPublica.

While teaching at her alma mater, Northwestern University’s Medill School, she created a graduate investigative journalism capstone on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Handpicked students spent the summer researching, reporting and traveling across the country to document how the civil rights movement still has implications for people and policy today. In 2017, she taught best practices in Karachi, Pakistan, as part of a Northwestern University teaching exchange. She participated in the university’s Changemakers initiative to enhance faculty approaches to diversity and inclusion.

Douglas is founding managing editor of MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. She led coverage teams reporting on the 50th commemoration of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis. In covering poverty, power and policy, Douglas and the MLK50 team shifted the journalistic paradigm to center everyday people, not established power, as a matter of practice. In addition to working with writers, Douglas coordinated the 2019 Living Wage Survey, and she wrote powerfully about Memphis magazine’s choice to run a disturbing caricature of 2019 mayoral candidates. The magazine was pulled from shelves almost immediately. She also led fundraising efforts and helped build up the nascent publication from launch into a fully funded concern. She has worked in newsrooms across the country, from Missouri to Michigan to Connecticut to Mississippi.

Her own adventures in thought-leadership include writing culturally relevant essays and opinions on health, policing, race, gender and more. She has been published in many publications, including Nieman Reports, Columbia Journalism Review, Gateway Journalism Review, Time, VICE, American Prospect, Pacific Standard, the Chicago Tribune, The Crisis, The Root, The Grio and more.

A Northwestern University graduate, Douglas is Chicago-born and Southern-reared, giving her a soft sensibility with an urban edge.