Osagyefo sekou biography books

Reverend Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou is an emerging leader in the new Civil Rights Movement and an acclaimed activist, theologian, author, documentary filmmaker, and musician.

Sekou was a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Martin Luther King Education and Research Institute at the time of Michael Brown Jr.’s killing, and traveled to Ferguson in mid-August 2014 on behalf of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the country’s oldest interfaith peace organization, to organize alongside local and national groups.

Urbansouls: Meditations on Youth, Hip Hop, and Religion (Chalice Press 2016) and Gods, Gays, and Guns: Essays on Religion and the Future of Democracy (Chalice Press 2016).

With the Deep Abiding Love Project, he has helped trained over five thousands activists in militant nonviolent civil disobedience through the United States. He lectures widely, including at Princeton University, Harvard Divinity School, the University of Virginia, University of Paris IV - La Sorbonne, and Vanderbilt University. Recorded at the storied Zebra Ranch Studio, a barn in Coldwater, Mississippi, the album features the six-time Grammy nominated North Mississippi Allstars.

Pastor for Theology and Arts

As the Pastor of Theology and Art at Valley and Mountain Fellowship.

NPR’s Bob Boilen commented that Rev. Sekou delivered one of “the most rousing Tiny Desk performances”. Rev. Sekou has lectured widely, including at Princeton University, Harvard Divinity School, the University of Virginia, University of Paris IV - La Sorbonne, and Vanderbilt University, and is a former Professor of Preaching in the Graduate Theological Urban Studies Program at the Seminary Consortium of Urban Pastoral Education, Chicago, IL. 

Reverend Sekou served as Pastor for Formation and Justice at First Baptist Church in Jamaica Plain, Boston.

He faced years in prison for his role in the Ferguson Uprising and spent six weeks on the ground in Charlottesville, VA training clergy in response to the Unite the Right rally. He was formerly Senior Pastor of Lemuel Haynes Congregational Church in Queens, served as Special Assistant on Social Justice to the Bishop for the Church of God in Christ, Senior Community Minister at New York’s Judson Memorial Church, and Social Justice Minister at Middle Collegiate Church, New York.

Currently, is a MPhil/PhD candidate in Religious Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Born in St. Louis and raised in the rural Arkansas Delta, Sekou has studied at the New School, Union Theological Seminary, and Harvard University.

With the Deep Abiding Love Project, he has helped train over thirteen thousand clergy and activists in militant nonviolent civil disobedience throughout the United States.

Rev. Sekou holds a Bachelor of Liberal Arts from The New School in New York where he concentrated in creative writing and continental philosophy. His dissertation title is “Being and Somebodiness:  The Ferguson Uprising and the Making of Black Pentecostal Liberation Theology”.