Douglas briefed National Press Foundation fellows in March 2022: When The Only Career Constant Is Change. 

Deborah D. Douglas is co-editor in chief of The Emancipator. She previously served as the Eugene S. Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Professor at DePauw University and senior leader with The OpEd Project, amplifying underrepresented expert voices and founding managing editor of MLK50. While teaching at Northwestern University, she spearheaded a graduate investigative journalism capstone on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and taught best practices in Karachi, Pakistan.

Douglas’ adventures in thought leadership were seeded at the Chicago Sun-Times where she served as Deputy Editorial Page Editor/Columnist. She is the author of the “U.S. Civil Rights Trail: A Traveler’s Guide to the People, Places, and Events That Made the Movement” (Moon, 2021), the first-ever travel guide to follow the official civil rights trail in the South, and a contributor to “Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019” (OneWorld, 2021).

Among her many awards, she received Chicago’s prestigious Studs Terkel Award and the Society of American Travel Writers 2021 Guidebook of the Year.