Nyle Fort

ABOUT

Nyle Fort is a minister, activist, and scholar. His work addresses issues of racial and social justice through cutting-edge scholarship, community-based organizing, and large-scale social movements.

In his hometown of Newark, New Jersey, Nyle co-founded the Maroon Project (TMP). The organization works with students, community organizers, and local residents to impact issues of social justice through political education, civic engagement, and leadership development. Since its formation in 2014, TMP has provided hundreds of free books and healthy meals to youth and families; established a Freedom School for middle school and college students; and, most recently, partnered with Masks for the People and Rutgers University to distribute thousands of face masks and bottles of hand sanitizer to the most vulnerable populations.

After years of organizing in his local community, Nyle entered a doctoral program to study the issues he was seeking to address. As a graduate student, he organized his department’s first annual conference, which brought together academics, activists, and artists from across the world to think about questions of policing, protest, and pathways toward justice. On the heels of the gathering, Nyle launched the Organizing Praxis-Lab to connect the ideas of the conference to the crises we face as a country. The year-long training provided political education programs and community organizing workshops for students interested in learning about and participating in the growing movement around police brutality and social inequality.

Nyle began graduate school in the wake of several high-profile police and vigilante killings of African Americans, including Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Angry at the recurring spectacle of state-sanctioned violence and premature black death, he traveled to Ferguson to support the growing Black Lives Matter movement and its effort to eradicate police violence and systemic racism. In addition to helping organize protests, Nyle created Strange Fruit Speaks: an innovative church liturgy commemorating the last words of black Americans killed at the hands of law enforcement. The service, which began in local churches, spread throughout universities, seminaries, and faith-based organizations across the nation.

Nyle’s commitment to social justice has led him from local communities to college campuses to countries across the world. In 2012, he served as an International fellow at the St. Andrew’s Centre in Southern India where he taught and created curriculum around the shared experiences of Dalits and African Americans. In 2014, Nyle worked in Amsterdam and Belgium as the International Fellowship of Reconciliation’s inaugural Beloved Communities fellow, where he helped build a multinational effort to challenge global racialized violence. And, in 2016, Nyle traveled to Rome to participate in the Vatican’s World Meeting of Popular Movements: a joint initiative of Pope Francis and the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace to end poverty and promote international human rights.

Nyle has spoken at numerous academic, cultural, and religious institutions including Harvard University, Yale University, Stanford University, New York University, Swarthmore College, Vassar College, the University of Amsterdam, the Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz Center, the British Library, and the historic Riverside Church. His writing and public commentary is featured in the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, Socialism and Democracy, the Guardian, the Nation, Boston Globe, Essence, Ebony Magazine, PBS, MSNBC, and Black Agenda Report. And his scholarship has been funded by the Ford Foundation, Forum for Theological Exploration, University of Pennsylvania, the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, and the Atlantic Fellowship for Racial Equity.

Nyle earned his B.A. from Morehouse College and his Ph.D. from Princeton University. He is an incoming professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University.