Barbara Speaks
Author, Speaker, and History Maker
ABOUT DR. REYNOLDS
The Reverend Dr. Barbara A. Reynolds is an award- winning journalist, activist and educator. She has more than 50 years of experience as a journalist/writer with some of the major media institutions in America, such as Ebony magazine, Essence Magazine, The Chicago Tribune and Playboy magazine. In addition, she was a Founding Start-Up Editor with USA Today where she was an editorial board member and columnist for more than 13 years. She has served as religion columnist for the National Newspaper Publishers Association, which reports a readership of 10 million. She was also an activist in the King Movement helping to register blacks to vote in 1965.
Reynolds is author of seven books, including NO I Won’t Shut Up: 30 years of Telling It Like It is; Out of Hell and Living Well, Healing From the Inside Out; Doing Good in the Hood, the Life, Legacy and Leadership of Bishop Alfred Owens; Jesse Jackson, the Man, the Myth and the Movement; And Still We Rise: Interviews with 50 Black Role Models. Her recently published memoirs of Coretta Scott King, My Life, My Love, my Legacy is a New York Times Bestseller and on April 4, 2018, she was cited by Time Magazine as one of the top historians in the country.
In 2018, her Coretta Book project took her on a tour to the UK where she spoke in Parliament in the Palace of Westminster March 14, 2018.; On March 19, 2018 at the University College of, London hosted by The UCL Culture & Institute of the Americas and at the University of Birmingham, Cadbury Centre for the Public Understanding of Religion.
The Coretta Book earned her many accolades:
Named a Washington Post Book to Read
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
A USA Today “New and Noteworthy” Pick
A Read It Forward Favorite Read
A Parade Magazine Pick
A Publishers Weekly “Notable African-American Titles”
Time Magazines’ celebration of MLK week
Recently she was a columnist for the Washington Post Newspaper and presently writes for the Informer Newspaper and the Trice-Edney Wire Service. She is also chaplain for Black Women for Positive Change, a national progressive civil rights and humanitarian network and has for 20 years presided over the Harriets, a spirit-led mentoring movement at Greater Mt. Calvary Holy Church in Washington DC. The ministry is named after Harriet Tubman, the famed former slave who helped lead hundred of slaves to freedom.
In 2014, she was inducted into the Board of Preachers at Morehouse College, for her exemplary work emulating the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., one of Morehouse’s most distinguished graduates.
Reynolds is also an educator. In 2009 she directed the Honors Program and taught journalism at Central State College in Wilberforce, Ohio. She has held the Jessie Ball DuPont Chair in Journalism at Shenandoah University in Winchester, VA and was a Freedom Forum Scholar for the 1997 school year in journalism at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee and has taught journalism at the Howard University School of Communications. She has taught prophetic ministry at the Howard University School of Divinity and the Black Presence in the Bible and Eschatology at the Calvary Bible Institute. She is one of 12 founders of the Kingdom Building Equipping School headquartered in Norfolk, VA and teaches on eschatology (the end times) online. IN 2019, she introduced a new curriculum at the Calvary Bible Institute in Washington DC: TECHNOLOGY: Highway to Heaven or Pathway to Hell?
Born in Columbus, OH, she received her BA in journalism from The Ohio State University, her master’s degree from Howard University School of Divinity in 1992 and her Doctorate in Ministry from the United Theological Seminary in Dayton, OH in 1998. She also has been awarded honorary doctorates in humane letters from Shenandoah University and her alma mater, Ohio State University. Bishop Alfred A. Owens, Jr. ordained her an elder at the Greater Mt. Calvary Holy Church in 1995.
