November 8th 2014

The New Jim Crow

Speaker: Sekou Franklin

We meet at the home of

Kim Matthews

145 Jocelyn Hills Drive 37205

November 9th 6:30 pm

Bring your favorite finger food/drink

Martin Sir, facilitator

 



Sekou Franklin, Ph.D. Biography


Dr. Sekou Franklin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) and is the Coordinator of Urban Studies Minor Program at MTSU. Since arriving to MTSU in 2003, Dr. Franklin has given 35 presentations at academic conferences and gatherings. He has published works on race and political opinion, urban politics, social movements and community organizing, juvenile justice, civil rights, the death penalty, youth activism, Venezuelan politics, and state and local politics. He is the author of After the Rebellion: Social Movement Activism and Popular Mobilization among the Post-Civil Rights Generation (NYU Press, 2014), and is currently working on a manuscript tentatively titled, Race and the Volunteer State: The Political Status of African-Americans in Tennessee. He is the editor of the State of Blacks in Middle Tennessee (2010), a study sponsored by the Urban League of Middle Tennessee. He has also served on the National Conference of Black Political Scientists’ Executive Committee and on the Southern Political Science Association’s Committee of the Status of African Americans in the South. In 2010, he was trained as an expert witness by the Southern Coalition for Social Justice’s Community Census and Redistricting Institute. Currently, he provides expert reports for voting rights and redistricting cases.

Throughout his academic career, Dr. Franklin has been committed to marrying scholarship and activism. He was the Co-Founder of the Urban EpiCenter, a grassroots organization working in Nashville’s low-income communities, and was the Chair of the Board of Directors of the organization from 2007-2011. He has also served on the Board of Directors of the Tennessee Alliance for Progress and Tennessee Citizen Action. In 2004, he developed a popular education course for Tennessee Citizen Action’s voter and electoral organizing project. The ten-week “Social Movement Study Circle” taught grass-roots activists and community organizers theories of social movement activism, and earned him the “Advocate of the Year” award by the organization. He also worked with the Jobs with Justice of Middle Tennessee Chapter to author the report, Driving Toward Poverty: Taxi Drivers in the Athens of the South (August 2008), which was submitted to the Nashville-Davidson County’s Transportation and Licensing Commission. He further has provided trainings, assisted, and/or served in leadership roles with the Ad Hoc Committee for Equity, the TennCare Saves Lives Coalition, the Nashville Black Covenant Coalition, the Green-Collar Jobs Task Force of Nashville-Davidson County, the Workers’ Dignity Project, the Nashville Peace and Justice Center’s Leadership Institute, the “Shalom” Leadership Course at American Baptist College, the Nashville Organizing Institute, the Nonviolent Resistance and Social Justice Committee, the Center for Community Change, the Operation W.A.V.E. campaign for voting rights, the Pilgrimage Group, the Nashville NAACP’s Labor and Industry Committee, and the Tennessee NAACP State Conference, for which he is currently serving as a member of the Executive Committee. In 2010, he also a founding member of the Tennessean newspaper Advisory Board and has written several opinion columns for the Tennessean and other local newspapers. Furthermore, he was also part of a six-member Nashville delegation selected to attend the “Empowerment Congress,” a Kellog Foundation initiative on participatory democracy organized. In 2012, he received the “Green Hero” award from the Tennessee Alliance for Progress, and was given the “Political Action” Award by the Tennessee NAACP State Conference in 2013.

Dr. Franklin has been married to Tene’ Hamilton Franklin since 2003 and is the proud father of two daughters, Sojourner and Langston.

 
Dr. Sekou Franlkin