Fayetteville Roots Festival, Center for Multicultural and Diversity Education Present Rev. Sekou

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Join us on campus for two days of a dynamic homecoming concert and live recording followed by a dynamic and emotional lecture and book signing reception when the Rev. Osagyefo Sekou makes a campus visit on April 25 and 26.

"I am honored to be returning home to perform for the first time. It is an added blessing to record a live EP at the flagship of Arkansas education, the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville," Sekou said. "The blues of the Arkansas Delta courses through my veins. I was raised in the Arkansas Delta in the 11-house hamlet of Zent, which only had about 35 residents. My grandfather Richard Braselman played piano for two Arkansas' greatest sons, Albert King and Louis Jordan. My other grandfather Elder James Thomas was a Pentecostal preacher as am I. He preached in churches as the godmother of Rock and Roll, Sister Rosetta Tharpe riffed on the electric guitar. All that I am, ever hope to be was natured in the holy soil of Arkansas."

Sekou's music is a unique combination of north Mississippi hill country music, Arkansas Delta blues, Memphis soul and Pentecostal steel guitar. In May 2017, he released In Times Like These, produced by the six-time Grammy-nominated North Mississippi Allstars. Afropunk.com heralded the "deep bone-marrow-level conviction" of his first album, The Revolution Has Come. The single, "We Comin'" was named the new anthem for the modern Civil Rights movement by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

An accomplished author, Sekou is releasing five books with Chalice Press — a publisher of progressive religious thought. Chalice Press is republishing Sekou's Urbansouls: Meditations on Youth, Hip Hop, and Religion and Gods, Gays, and Guns: Essays on Religion and the Future of Democracy. His new titles are The Task of the Artist in the Time of Monsters; This Ain't Yo' Daddy's Civil Rights Movement: Ferguson, Black Lives Matter and the Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.; and A Liberation Theology of Ferguson. He has written widely on the 2011 killing of Mark Duggan by British police and the subsequent London riots, and is the author of the forthcoming Riot Music: Race, Hip Hop and the Meaning of the London Riots 2011 (Hamilton Books). 

Concert will be at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 25, in the Jim and Joyce Faulkner Performing Arts Center. Doors open at 6:30. Tickets are free, but registration is required. Reserve your tickets for the concert at the Jim and Joyce Faulkner Performing Arts Center website.

The lecture and book signing reception will be held at 11:30 a.m. on Thursday, April 26, in the Reynolds Center. This event is free and open to the public. The first 30 students who check in will receive a free book written by Rev. Sekou.