Prominent activist, author, and theologian the Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou will give the annual Hibbert R. Roberts Lecture.
Sekou, who has been a central figure in the mobilizations and civil disobedience campaigns in Ferguson, Missouri, over the past year, will give a talk titled “A New Civil Rights Movement? Ferguson, Black Lives Matter, and the Future of Nonviolence” at 7 p.m. Thursday, October 15, in Capen Auditorium, inside Edwards Hall on the Illinois State University campus.
The lecture is free, open to the public, and sponsored by the Department of Politics and Government.
A St. Louis-raised activist, Sekou was a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Martin Luther King Education and Research Institute at the time of the police killing of Michael Brown. He traveled to Ferguson, Missouri, in mid-August last year, and continues to organize in St. Louis, alongside local and national groups on behalf of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
He has studied continental philosophy at the New School, systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary, and religion at Harvard University. In May 2015, the Rev. Sekou moved back to St. Louis full-time to support local groups in the ongoing struggle for economic and social justice, and an end to police brutality. He was recently made the inaugural Bayard Rustin Fellow by the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
Sekou has recently been featured in a number of national and local media outlets, including the New York Times, New York Review of Books, Boston Globe, Al Jazeera America, Yes Magazine, and Democracy Now.
The annual Hibbert R. Roberts Lecture is organized by the Department of Politics and Government in memory of Roberts, who was a faculty member in the department from 1969 to 1992. The lecture brings a leading academic or an activist to speak about his/her work on public policy related issues.
