Daryle Lamont Jenkins is Speaking at James Madison University
800 S Main St
Harrisonburg, VA 22807
USA
One People’s Project Founder and Executive Director Daryle Lamont Jenkins will be speaking at James Madison University, and the event is open to the public! Recent events have prompted many to ask what direction are we going in as a people, and most importantly, how do we make sure that direction isn’t backward. That’s why the name of this talk is Replacing Them: How Society is Putting Hate Politics on the Trash Heap of History! DLJ has been a doing this antifascist thing for thirty years, but it is only in recent years that people have been taken notice with him appearing on numerous news programs on MSNBC, CNN and Fox News, being awarded the Daniel Pearl Multimedia Award by the Pocono Mountains Film Festival just this month and soon being played by Bryan Tyree Henry (Paper Boi from the FX TV program Atlanta) in a new movie called Skin, which is based on the life of Bryon Widner a former neo-Nazi who left that life thanks to DLJ. We hope to see you there!
About Daryle Lamont Jenkins
Daryle Lamont Jenkins is the founder and Executive Director of One People’s Project (OPP), a Philadelphia-based anti-hate organization that researches, monitors and reports on right wing groups and individuals that seek to polarize communities. OPP’s mission has been to encourage those communities to come together and be proactive against hate groups and diminish their ability to function in a diverse society.
Born in Newark, NJ and raised in nearby Somerset, Jenkins served in the Air Force in the late eighties and upon returning home spent the nineties in the underground music scene documenting local bands on video and producing public access programs that spotlighted the punk rock scene and the people that played a part of it. One show was called Channel X which was produced from 1992 to 1995, and it profiled local unsigned acts of the day, some eventually becoming big names in music. From 1996 to 2000, he produced another, The Life We Lead with Pedro Angel Serrano, and it focused primarily on the punk scene and the culture surrounding it. Eventually, that program was handed over to producers in Boston who continued the show for another seven years. He even tried his hand in performing in a few bands and musical projects, but many of them could not even get out of the rehearsal space before falling apart.
Around the same time that he was in the New Jersey music scene, Jenkins also had worked as a reporter for the City News, a now-defunct weekly newspaper in New Jersey that covered African-American issues, and briefly as an editor for his hometown weekly, the Somerset Spectator. This was conflicting for him however, and although he has wanted to be a journalist since he was a boy, felt he could not provide the objectivity that one needed for such work however and moved on to mediums that fit him best.
Much of the reason why there was a conflict was because he was involved in political activism, participating in groups like the New Jersey Freedom Organization (NJFO) and the New Brunswick (NJ) Coalition Against Police Brutality. He recognized the power of media, however, and he used his journalistic skills to advance the issues that concerned him. He began writing letters to the editor of his local newspaper and calling and debating local radio talk show hosts on their call-in programs. From 1994 to 1995, he began writing op-ed pieces for the Courier-News and from 1996 to 2000 the Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy) news line.
In 2000, a White supremacist rally in Morristown, NJ was planned for the Fourth of July and it prompted Jenkins and others to organize a counter-protest under the banner of the One People’s Rally. After the rally, it was decided that the coalition and website be maintained to continue monitoring the various hatemongers that were not only working on the fringes of right wing politics but also in the mainstream of society as elected officials, academics or otherwise important figures. That coalition eventually became One People’s Project. Working under the motto “Hate has consequences”, OPP became a go-to resource on such individuals, and has been instrumental in removing them from their positions, shutting down their events such as concerts and conferences to when the hosting venues were made aware of the true intent of those events, and in addition helping individuals leave neo-Nazi politics behind and become productive members of society. One such story is featured in the documentary Erasing Hate, which is soon to become a major motion picture starring Jamie Bell (Turn, Billy Elliot) and Danielle MacDonald (Patti Cake$), with with Bryan Tyree Henry (Atlanta) playing Jenkins.
Since the rise of Donald Trump, OPP was important in helping America understand the so-called “alt-right” and in particular White supremacist Richard Spencer, who the organization had been monitoring since 2006. OPP continued being a resource on those individuals with Trump’s ascension to the White House and during the tragic events of Charlottesville, VA last summer which Jenkins was there to witness.
Needless to say, Jenkins and OPP has been the subject of scorn from those on the right who prefer to remain in the shadows. He has been the subject of smear campaigns and bogus lawsuits, and one neo-Nazi band even recording a particularly weird song about him! On the other hand, he and the organization has received praise from those who are trying to beat that element of society back. Jenkins has appeared on A Current Affair, the Montel Williams Show, Fox News, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show and AM Joy with Joy Reid, ABC’s 20/20 and in countless newspaper and magazine articles.