Dr. Frank Roberts
Creator, The Black Lives Matter Syllabus Project
Co-Founder, The National Black Justice Coalition
Assistant Professor of English and Black Studies , Amherst College

Dr. Frank Leon Roberts is an educator and political organizer on the frontlines of the contemporary movement for black lives. A Native New Yorker, he received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from New York University where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on James Baldwin. A winner of the Roddenberry Fellowship, Dr. Roberts is the Founder of Black Lives Matter Syllabus, the nationally acclaimed, public educational curriculum that provides resources for teaching BLM in classroom and community settings. Frank’s pioneering work as the “Black Lives Matter Professor” has been featured in Fader Magazine, NPR, CNN, and an extensive variety of other national media outlets.

Dr. Roberts is currently Assistant Professor of English and Black Studies at Amherst College. Prior to his current position, he served was on the faculty at New York University, where his course on the black lives matter movement was been widely acknowledged as the first college course of its kind. Committed to the idea of teaching as a radical form of community organizing, his courses continue to make headlines as national interventions. He has previously held teaching appointments at The New School for Public Engagement, The City University of New York (at both Hunter College and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice) and the W.E.B. DuBois Scholars Institute at Princeton University. Educated at New York University and Yale University, Frank has been the winner of NYU’s 2015 Michael Parkes Distinguished Alumni Award; the 2015 MLK Trailblazer Award (given in honor of the legacy of Martin Luther King), and a recipient of the Ford Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from the National Research Academies.

A New York City native, he lives in Harlem, NY and Amherst, Massachusetts. He is a member of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Inc.

Dr. Roberts is represented by Keppler Speakers, the nation’s leading professional speakers bureau. Initial inquiries can be sent to Dr. Roberts’s office directly at froberts@amherst.edu.  

Outside of academia, Frank’s career as a grassroots political organizer has spanned nearly two decades. He began his career as a teenager; mobilizing disenfranchised voters in the wake of the 2000 Bush/Gore Election. He then went on to serve as the special assistant to legendary civil rights attorney Johnnie Cochran, whom he worked with on the early legal movement for racial reparations.  In 2015, for his career long commitment to doing racial justice activist work in an intersectional paradigm, he received the 2015 Bayard Rustin Award at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. 

His expansive history as an organizer and thought-leader has landed Frank in The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Ebony, CBS, CNN, NPR, The Huffington Post and a wide range of publications. A dynamic public speaker, he has been the invited guest at literally hundreds of institutions and colleges around the globe.

Frank Roberts is represented by Keppler Speakers. Initial requests for booking panels, keynotes, and media quotes can be directed to frankroberts@nyu.edu.