Aaron Dixon & Prof. Alondra Nelson at Columbia University

Aaron Dixon is one of the co-founders of the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party. He has since founded Central House, a nonprofit that provides transitional housing for youth, and was one of the cofounders of the Cannon House, a senior assisted-living facility. Aaron ran for US Senate on the Green Party ticket in 2006.

Nelson is the author of Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), which received the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award from the American Sociological Association (Section on Race, Gender, and Class) and the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. Body and Soul is the first book-length exploration of the radical organization’s health-focused activities. Through its activism, Nelson argues, the Black Panther Party advanced a “social health” frame—a distinctive, expansive conceptualization of well-being that articulated biological wellness with both economic justice and racial equality and that would anticipate contemporary debates about racial health disparities.