Who Is Dr. Frank?
Dr. Frank Leon Roberts is an award-winning educator and social justice activist with over twenty-five years of experience as a professor, political organizer, producer and changemaker.
An expert on the life, literature, and legacy of American writer James Baldwin, Dr. Frank is the author of the forthcoming book James Baldwin’s Critical Stages and is the creator of the critically acclaimed literary podcast, Finding James Baldwin: The Magpie Years. Dr. Frank is a professor at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts where he teaches courses in African American literature, culture, and history.
The founder of multiple award-winning social justice organizations (including The National Black Justice Coalition based in Washington, D.C. and The Baldwin Hansberry Project based in Harlem, NY) Dr. Frank made history in 2015 as the first professor in America to teach a university course on The Black Lives Matter movement in collaboration with the Black Lives Matter Global Network. From 2015-2018, the course’s accompanying public curriculum “The Black Lives Matter Syllabus” was adopted at over 2,000 college campuses and community centers across America.
Hailed by the SF Gate as “The Black Lives Matter Professor,” Dr. Frank is a popular fixture on the college lecture circuit and has served as the Keynote Speaker at hundreds of colleges ranging from the Harvard Kennedy School and Columbia University Law School to The University of Notre Dame and Indiana University, to name just a few.
“Recent keynote speaking engagements:
• Harvard University Kennedy School of Government
• Brown University
• University of Notre Dame
• University of Alaska
• University of Alabama
• Indiana University
• Wake Forest University
• Providence College
• The Ohio State University
• Texas A & M University
• University of California Berkeley
• Quinniapiac University
• University of Southern California
• University of Southern Florida
• The Head Royce School
• Bellevue College
• Wikipedia (The Wikimedia Foundation)
• Washington State Students of Color Association
• Earlham College
• Kalamazoo College
• Emzingo Group
• Columbia Law School
• Broadway4BlackLivesMatter
• Musagetes Foundation/Ammirato Culture House: (Lecce, Italy)
• Arika Tramway (Glasgow, Scotland)
• Duke University
• University of Rochestor
• AfroLatino Festival of New York City
• The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
• Hunter College
• John Jay College of Criminal Justice
• The Shirley Chisholm Project
• People of Color in Crisis
• Princeton University
• Spelman College
• University of California, Santa Barbara
• The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights
• Fashion Institute of Technology
• Yale University
• Camille A. Brown Dance Company
• Brooklyn College
• San Francisco State University
• Reach Los Angeles
• National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense Fund
• The National Action Network
• Union Theological Seminary
• Drew University
• The Leadership Alliance
• The National Black Justice Coalition
• New York University
• New York City Council
• The City University of New York
• The Nuyorican Poets Cafe
• The New Black Fest
• The Museum of Modern Art (MoMa)
”
Outside of academia, Dr. 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.
Dr. Frank is represented by Keppler Speakers Bureau ™
