Kamau Franklin
Kamau Franklin is the founder of Community Movement Builders a grassroots organization dedicated to creating sustainable Black communities through organizing and cooperative development. Kamau has been a dedicated community organizer for over twenty-five years, first in New York City and now based in the south. He has worked on various issues including youth organizing and development, police misconduct, community cop-watch programs, freedom school programs for youth, electoral and policy campaigns, large-scale community gardens, and alternatives to incarceration programs.
Kamau is a former co-chair of the National Conference of Black Lawyers and a former member of the New York Executive Committee of the National Lawyers Guild. He was the first Legal Program Director of New York City Police-Watch, establishing the first watchdog accountability organization of its kind in New York. He formerly was the South Regional Director of American Friends and Service Committee, Civic Engagement Director of the MS, NAACP, the Racial Justice Fellow/Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, concentrating on federal class action litigation against the New York Police Department on racial profiling.
He was the first campaign manager for Chokwe Lumumba’s successful mayoral election, in Jackson, Ms. and the campaign director for the first elected Black Sherriff in Hinds County, MS… he regrets this last one.
Kamau Franklin was in private practice as an attorney from 2000-2007 with a diverse range of entertainment, business, and activists clients. He has worked in a variety of legal areas including criminal, federal civil rights, human rights issues and contract law.
He has written articles and has been interviewed for various online publications, including Daily Kos, Truthout, Atlanta Black Star, Black Agenda, Left Turn, the Real News, TeleSur, Organizing Upgrade and others. His essay entitled “An Ivory Tower Assassination of Malcolm X” appeared in the book, A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable’s Malcolm X. His essay “A New Southern Strategy” was published in the book Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, MS.
Kamau graduated from Baruch College with a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and Marketing Management, a master’s from Brooklyn College in Political Science, and his Juris Doctorate from Fordham Law School. He is married and has a daughter and son.