Welcoming Tawanda Mutasah as AJWS’s new President and CEO

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Some Exhibits to Come – One Hundred Years of Jim Crow

Bibliography – One Hundred Years Of Jim Crow

Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

Freedom’s Heroes During Jim Crow: Flossie Bailey and the Deeters

Souvenir Portrait of the Lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, August 7, 1930, by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. Courtesy of the Indiana Hisorical Society.

An Iconic Lynching in the North

Claxton Dekle – Prosperous Farmer, Husband & Father of Two

Ancient manuscripts about mathematics and astronomy from Timbuktu, Mali

Some Exhibits to Come – African Peoples Before Captivity

Shackles for Adults & Children from the Henrietta Marie

Some Exhibits to Come – The Middle Passage

What I Saw Aboard a Slave Ship in 1829

Life After Hate: A Former White Power Leader Redeems Himself

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January 21, 2026

I am reaching out with an exciting update: Tawanda Mutasah will be the next President and CEO of American Jewish World Service (AJWS) starting in February 2026. Tawanda was unanimously affirmed by the Board of Trustees as AJWS’s next leader after a robust global search.

Tawanda is a globally respected executive, human rights leader, and philanthropic strategist with three decades of senior leadership experience across complex, mission-driven international organizations and deep ties within the human rights and humanitarian assistance sector. His career reflects a distinctive blend of CEO-level operational leadership and management, large-scale grantmaking and fundraising credibility, institution-building, and a deep commitment and proximity to grassroots, rights-based social change.

Tawanda joins us from Oxfam America, and his tenure will begin as AJWS celebrates our 40th anniversary and deepens our roots in the global south and around the world. Tawanda is a human rights lawyer who holds three law degrees and has taught human rights law in Europe and North America. He was born in Zimbabwe and has lived and worked around the world, including in Southern Africa, the U.K., France, and, for the past 18 years, the United States.

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