Each panelist will focus on a different theme and method of resistance by African Americans. The presentations will provide historical facts, yet also demonstrate the impact of those histories on the present day. The panel chair has a personal motto that "Yesterday’s histories explain today's mysteries.

Dr Tani Sanchez of the University of Arizona's Africana Studies Dept, will reveal Migration and Education as resistance strategies that worked in the history of her own family's genealogy. While this was a successful path of resistance in earlier generations, there are new obstacles to this method of resistance.

A historical type of resistance during the enslavement industry was self-liberation, or the phenomenon of what were once called "runaway slaves." The medical establishment branded Dr Christopher Willoughby will discuss "Drapetomania Aethiopica," a psychotic diagnosis attributed to enslaved people who attempted escape from the chains of bondage. Wanting to escape was considered crazy. Willoughby will speak to the enduring obstacles caused by concept of incurable mental illness among African Americans in the carceral and psychiatric systems.

Pamela Mays McDonald (panel chair) will speak to the lasting artistic and cultural influences of the Black Panther Party for Self-defense and its founding in Oakland, California. The San Francisco Bay Area was the ideal incubator for the formation and dissemination of this groundbreaking organization of personalities and ideals, which created long-lasting iconography that remains influential around the world and across generations, in film, visual arts, performing arts, fashion, music, poetry and literature

The "Oakland Black Panther" panel in particular has a local perspective, ideal for a conference located in San Francisco. It lends towards onsite local tours for convention-goers, which will be co-sponsored by the local Host Committee.

The final panelist is Dr. Waldo E Martin of the University of California, Berkeley, who will speak about the 100+ documented slave rebellions in US History, starting with the 1712 Coromantee Rebellion at the Wall Street slave market in colonial Manhattan, through the Stono Rebellion, the thwarted Denmark Vesey Rebellion in Charleston, South Carolina, and the Nat Turner Rebellion. Similarities and differences between key rebellions will be explored, as well as reactions by enslavers in the creation of laws to create barriers to resistance. The nature of these rebellions is reflected in rebellions since Emancipation, including demonstrations during the recent #BlackLivesMatter movement, joined by millions of people worldwide, which have generated backlash and reactions from social institutions.