OAKLAND — Big crowds are expected at City Hall for the free Oakland Book Festival, which this year, its third, will take over hearing rooms and the plaza outside on May 21.

If previous years are any indicator, 5,000 to 7,000 people will attend, filling eight rooms for panel discussions featuring, in the words of organizer Timothy Don, “some of the top historians, philosophers and intellectuals in the nation.”

“Our goal is not just to present a series of authors reading their latest work,” he said in an interview. Instead, he said, the festival aims to put authors, activists, artists, intellectuals and historians together for conversations about problems their work addresses, he said. “Ideally, panelists won’t agree,” he added.

“It’s a mix of local luminaries and intellectual talent. The program speaks for itself,” he said.

Forty panel discussions will look at “Equality and Inequality” through diverse perspectives. Among topics of panel discussions are a free press, education inequality, indigenous people’s rights, gentrification and feminism.

The discussions begin promptly at 11 a.m. and run continuously through 6 p.m. They will be held at City Hall, Laurel Book Store on Broadway, the Chamber of Commerce office on 14th Street and the Dalziel Building in Frank Ogawa Plaza.

Organizers warn people to arrive early, as the panel sites in previous years have consistently filled up, Don said.

Among the opening panels at 11 a.m. is “Trump and the Working Class,” with writer Arlie Hochschild and Mother Jones magazine editor Clara Jeffery.

Simultaneously, writer Ishmael Reed and others will take on “Race, Ethnicity and the New American Literature.” There will be five other discussions starting then, too: “What Is Social Justice?” “State of Confusion,” “The Future of the Economy,” “Memes and the Mediascape” and “The Revolution Will Be Accessible.”

Outside, there will be performances; activities for children, including readings hosted by the public library; programs staged by Children’s Fairyland and Project 510; and a book-making activity courtesy of the Oakland Museum of Children’s Art. Publishers and booksellers will staff tables.

At 12:30 p.m. Angela Davis will address inequality with Judith Butler, who is, in Don’s words, “one of the great contemporary feminist theorists.” She is a UC Berkeley professor of comparative literature and critical theory. The conversation will be moderated by Ramona Naddaff, also of UC Berkeley, whose writings include studies of censorship, artistic collaboration and music torture.

The panel “Prison: Race, Terror and Injustice” brings together an author who wrote about racism and injustice in Chicago’s court system with two others who helped a pair of the Bosnian “Algerian Six” tell their tale of seven years spent at Guantanamo Bay. The two prisoners were never charged with a crime before being released.

Another panel including Reed and poet Quincy Troupe will look at the legacy of James Baldwin.

Other panels will focus on racial profiling, black radical aesthetics, arts advocacy in the wake of the Ghost Ship fire and arts equity.

New to the festival this year are two artists in residence. Sheryl Oring will set up manual typewriters on City Hall’s mezzanine to take dictation for postcards to the president from noon to 4 p.m.. Sherrill Roland, who spent a year in prison before being exonerated, will be circulating in an orange jumpsuit similar to what he wore there to spark discussions on the criminal justice system and the effects of incarceration.

The day before, on Saturday, Harvard University’s Danielle Allen, a MacArthur fellow, will give an address at 5 p.m. in council chambers. In her studies of the Declaration of Independence, she has described it as “a brilliant account of the meaning of political equality and how to get it.”

From 6:30 to 8 p.m. Saturday, there will be a fundraising reception at the Starline Social Club, 2236 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, with more than 100 novelists, journalists, philosophers, poets, artists and editors on hand.

For the reception, the only ticketed event, go to the festival’s Kickstarter site, http://kck.st/2pOrH2P, and donate at the $125 “Faith of Men” level. Donations can also be made through the festival’s website, www.oaklandbookfestival.org.

At 8 p.m., the venue opens up to general admission festivities, including “mercifully few readings, many musical performances and nonstop dancing,” Don said.

Contact Mark Hedin at 510-293-2452, 408-759-2132 or mhedin@bayareanewsgroup.com.