* Melissa Harris-Perry’s first book, titled Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought, won the 2005 W. E. B. Du Bois Book Award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. It also won the 2005 Best Book Award from the Race and Ethnic Politics Section of the American Political Science Association.

* Harris-Perry is an advisory board member of Chef’s Move!, a program whose mission is to diversify kitchen management by providing training, experience and mentorship to minority applicants from New Orleans.

* Harris-Perry is affiliated with the Anna Julia Cooper Project, Auburn Theological Seminary, the Center for Peace and Justice, the Journal of Politics and Gender, the Meadville-Lombard Theological School, the Newcomb College Institute, and Opportunity Agenda.

* In May 2013 Harris-Perry, a resident of Louisiana, charged that members of her state’s Republican-dominated legislature, who supported Second Amendement gun rights, “are thinking of Louisiana as a sportsman’s paradise and not thinking about or caring about the 10-year-old children in my neighborhood who are shot while walking down the street.”

* In July 2013, when Texas’s state senate was debating a bill that sought to ban abortions after the 20th week of a pregnancy, Harris-Perry derided security personnel at the state capitol for searching the bags of all observers who entered the gallery and confiscating any tampons or maxi pads therein, so as to prevent pro-abortion activists from throwing them at state senators. One evening, she went on the air donning earrings shaped like tampons, as way of demonstrating her support for “reproductive rights.”

* In August 2013 Harris-Perry said that “in the U.S. military … an epidemicof sexual assault is met with an unwillingness to protect soldiers who have been victimized and a reluctance to prosecute their cases outside the chain of command.”