Representative Anthony Daniels
House Minority Leader Anthony Daniels Jr. is in his second term in the Alabama House of Representatives. He represents Alabama’s 53rd District, which is located in the Huntsville area. Representative Daniels has served as minority leader since 2017, the youngest and first African American to hold the position. Under his leadership, House Democrats successfully fought for and passed multiple measures to make the state more competitive in areas from education to economic development.
Awards and Achievements:
- Graduated cum laude from Alabama A&M University with a bachelor’s degree in elementary education in 2005.
- Master’s degree in special education, also from Alabama A&M University
- Completed a certification in education fundraising from Dartmouth College
- In 2013, he was the first African American to be elected chairman of the National Education Association (NEA) Student Program in Washington, D.C.
- Ran and won for the Alabama House of Representatives in 2014.
- In 2018, Leader Daniels sponsored a bill to create the Alabama School of Cyber Technology and Engineering, a residential and tuition-free state magnet school located in Huntsville. The school opened in August 2020.
- In 2019, Daniels was selected as a Delegate to the Academy of Achievement.
- 2016 Business Champion Award from the Alabama Business Council.
Quin Hillyer
Quin Hillyer is a Senior Commentary Writer and editor for the Washington Examiner and a Contributing Editor of National Review magazine, and a nationally recognized authority on the American political process. He has won mainstream awards for journalistic excellence at the local, state, regional and national levels. He has been published professionally in many dozens of publications, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, the San Francisco Chronicle, Investors Business Daily, and The New Republic Online. He is a former editorial writer and columnist for the Washington Times, the Mobile Register, and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and a former Managing Editor of Gambit Weekly in New Orleans. He is a frequent guest analyst on local and national TV and radio.
Hillyer also served for five years as press secretary for U.S. House Appropriations Committee Chairman Bob Livingston of New Orleans. He was an original executive board member of the internationally acclaimed Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, formed to halt the then-meteoric political rise of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.
Hillyer also has volunteered in leadership roles for numerous church, civic, and educational organizations and government commissions. He is a cum laude graduate of Georgetown University, and is a Fellow of the Loyola University (New Orleans) Institute of Politics and of Leadership Coastal Alabama. He is married to the former Therese Robinson of Mobile.
Dr. Errol Crook
Errol D. Crook, M.D. is currently Director of the Center for Healthy Communities and Abraham A. Mitchell Professor and Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of South Alabama College of Medicine. A native of Monroeville, Alabama, Dr. Crook received his undergraduate degree from Yale College and his Doctorate of Medicine from the Vagelos College of Physician and Surgeons of Columbia University in New York. He trained in internal medicine and nephrology at the University of Alabama – Birmingham Hospitals.
His research focus has been in health disparities and has evolved from bench research on diabetes and its complications to translational research in diabetic and hypertension related kidney and cardiovascular disease to the community engaged research he and his colleagues perform today. He has authored or co-authored over 100 manuscripts and book chapters and has been an invited speaker at several institutions. Prior to moving to Mobile Dr. Crook was on faculty at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, MI, where he served as interim chairman of the Department of Internal Medicine, and the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson.
Cynthia Tucker
Cynthia Tucker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist. Her weekly column, which appears in newspapers around the country, focuses on political and cultural issues. Tucker has spent most of her career in newspapers, working as a reporter and editor. For seventeen years, she served as editorial page editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She also worked as a Washington-based political columnist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
After leaving the newspaper, she spent three years as a visiting professor at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, where she was also a Charlayne Hunter-Gault writer-in-residence. She is currently the journalist-in-residence at the University of South Alabama, where she specializes in political communication, media literacy and narrative non-fiction. Over the course of her career, Tucker has received numerous awards and honors. Her column was a finalist for the Pulitzer in the commentary category in 2004 and 2006 before winning the prestigious honor in 2007. In 2006, she was named Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists. Tucker was inducted into the Alabama Academy of Honor in 2017.
