• Rev. Dr. Walter Beach, III, former AFL & NFL football player, including the Browns’ 1964 NFL Championship. Beach, a pro football Hall of Famer, was also part of the group of black professional athletes who publicly supported Muhammad Ali's refusal to be inducted into the United States Army as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. Termed the Cleveland Summit, they demonstrated the power that black athletes possess when united against a specific cause. Beach, now nearly 89, has seen the evolution of athletic protest in the 50-plus years since the summit.

• Jonathan Eig, author of “Ali: A Life.” Hailed by Ken Burns as one of America’s master storytellers, Eig sheds important new light on Ali’s politics, religion, personal life and neurological condition through unprecedented access to all the key people in Ali’s life, more than 500 interviews, and thousands of pages of previously unreleased FBI and Justice Department files and audiotaped interviews from the 1960s. “Ali: A Life” is a story about America, about race, about a brutal sport, and about a courageous man who shook up the world.

• Kymara Seals, Alumni Board president, University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. Seals, a 1994 graduate of the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, serves as president of the UAPB/AM&N National Alumni Association Board of Directors. She is the policy director of the Arkansas Public Policy Panel, a nonprofit that addresses social and economic justice issues. In response to the national outcry against police brutality, she helped create a group called Pine Bluff Social Justice Activists, which is addressing issues of injustice and examining what equity should look like in the city. She is currently leading an effort on public safety measures and is a member of the gang reduction task force G.R.I.P. that addresses crime intervention and prevention.

• Leon Jones III, UAPB Student Government Association president. Jones is a political science major and mass communications minor who plans to practice solutions journalism. He is a member of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity Inc. Upon graduation, Jones will pursue a graduate degree in journalism.

• Chris Robinson, vice chancellor/athletics director, University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. One of the all-time greats in Golden Lion football history, Robinson was named UAPB’s director of athletics in June 2021 after serving as the executive senior associate athletic director. Previously, he spent eight years in the university’s Office of Recruitment. A 2014 UAPB Sports Hall of Fame inductee, Robinson earned his bachelor’s degree in management from UAPB and a master’s degree in business administration from MidAmerica Nazarene University.