Award-winning journalist Charles E. Cobb Jr. is senior analyst for allAfrica.com, the leading online source of news from and about Africa. In 1962 he worked as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the Mississippi Delta and was a major architect of the 1964 Freedom Schools. He is also a visiting professor at Brown University where he conducts an undergraduate seminar titled The Organizing Tradition of the Southern Civil Rights Movement.

He is the author of On the Road to Freedom, a Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail published by Algonquin Books in January 2008. Cobb is also coauthor of Radical Equations, Civil Rights From Mississippi to the Algebra Project (Beacon Press, 2001) with civil rights organizer and educator Robert P. Moses. He was a co-editor of the book, No Easy Victories, American Activists and African Liberation Movements Over a Half century, 1950-2000 (African World Press 2008).

Cobb is a founding member of the National Association of Black Journalists. He began his journalism career in 1974 as a reporter for WHUR Radio in Washington, DC. In 1976 he joined the staff of National Public Radio as a foreign affairs reporter, bringing to that network its first regular coverage of Africa.

After leaving NPR in 1979, he worked as a freelance writer and reporter. From 1985-97 Cobb was a member of the Editorial Staff of National Geographic magazine—that magazine’s first black staff writer—contributing stories on Panama, Haiti, Eritrea, South Africa, Grenada, Jamaica, Bangladesh, Miami, Bahia Brazil, Russia's Kuril Islands, the Outer Banks of North Carolina, Central Mexico, as well as articles on ionizing radiation around the world, and of pollution and rising water levels on the Great Lakes. 

On July 24, 2008 the National Association of Black Journalists honored Cobb’s work by inducting him into their "Hall of Fame."