Franklin Dalembert, April 26, 1958–April 21, 2024
Beginning more than three decades ago, when he led the Haitian Coalition of Somerville, Franklin Dalembert worked to help immigrants settle into Greater Boston as they sought opportunities they didn’t have in their homeland.
An immigrant himself, Mr. Dalembert’s goal was “to fight for the Haitian community to get the respect they deserve,” he said in a 1998 Boston Globe interview, speaking with a voice as quiet as it was intense. “As a community, we want to be treated as human beings.”
A respected problem-solver who helped immigrants find jobs one moment and set up classes to study for citizenship the next, Mr. Dalembert spent all day on April 20 making sure 50 new immigrants were fed and housed.
The next morning, he was preparing to welcome a group of immigrants for a visit in his Malden home when he became ill, called for medical assistance, and suffered an apparent heart attack. “He died while doing exactly what he wanted to do — be of service to the community,” said Geralde Gabeau, executive director of the Immigrant Family Services Institute, the agency where he worked.
Mr. Dalembert, who was 65 and days away from his birthday when he died April 21, moved to Greater Boston 35 years ago. And though the region’s immigrant community became his extended family while he led the Haitian Coalition and worked at IFSI, his sense of home reached beyond city, state, and national boundaries.
“We’re in Somerville, but still connected with Haiti,” he told the Globe in 2000.
When an earthquake devastated Haiti in 2010, he traveled there with computers and medical supplies, and worked with groups to provide humanitarian aid.
And he knew that Haitians forging new lives in the United States always kept an emotional toehold in the place they left behind.
Immigrants sometimes “thought we were trying to make people forget about their homeland,” he told the Globe in 1993 as he discussed efforts to help them seek US citizenship and gain political clout by registering to vote.
“But we live in Somerville, America. We have to deal with what is happening here to us every day,” he said. “Political things affect us here.”
In a subsequent interview, he spoke of how he sought “to get more immigrants involved in the political process. The only way for them to do this is to become citizens.”
After leading the coalition, Mr. Dalembert lived for several years in Florida, where he and his wife, Evelyne, moved for family reasons.
But his connections to Greater Boston’s Haitian immigrant community remained strong. In 2021, he returned to become assistant to the executive director of Immigrant Family Services Institute, dividing his time between Malden, where the organization has an office, and Florida.
“He was my right arm,” said Gabeau, the institute’s executive director.
“Franklin had a way of communicating with people with so much respect, so people were drawn to him,” she said.
Those abilities, she said, were essential for the organization, “a one-stop service center for new immigrants. Our mission is to do whatever it takes to expedite their movement into the community.”
In sometimes delicate negotiations among nonprofits and government agencies, funding groups and grant recipients, political supporters and opponents, Mr. Dalembert was known as a peacemaker.
“I’ve never seen him upset. Someone could come over screaming and by the time they left, they’d leave with a smile,” said Nunotte Zama, an IFSI staff attorney who affectionately called him “cool Franklin.”
Mr. Dalembert “could put everyone at the same table,” said Pastor Guival Mercedat of the Haitian Church of God of Unity in Everett. “Even if you were not friends, Franklin was someone who could bring you to the table for the community good.”
That ability to find common ground was based in part on Mr. Dalembert’s decades-long activism that left him on a first-name basis with seemingly everyone in the Haitian immigrant community.
“If you worked with Franklin 20 years ago, he remembered who you were: ‘Oh, so-and-so, how are you? It’s been a while,’ " Mercedat said.
Mr. Dalembert “had the charisma and composure required in a leader,” said Guerlince Semerzier, program director for the immigrant economic recovery initiative at the Massachusetts Immigrant Collaborative.
“Franklin was a fun guy. He had this way of connecting with people, no matter who you were. He listened with empathy and treated you with kindness, respect, and dignity,” said Semerzier, who considered him a mentor. He added that Mr. Dalembert was “a wonderful listener who was always giving you the opportunity to say the last word.”
Born in Limbe, Haiti, on April 26, 1958, Franklin Dalembert grew up in that community a few hours’ drive from Port-au-Prince.
His father, St. Louis Talabert, was a shoemaker. His mother, Victoria Manigat Talabert, grew food that was sold in the marketplace. A birth certificate spelling error accounted for Mr. Dalembert’s different last name, his family said.
Studying communications and linguistics, he graduated from the State University of Haiti and received additional degrees from Bunker Hill Community College and the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Already involved with community organizations while working in public access TV, he turned to nonprofits full time in the early 1990s as coordinator for the Haitian Coalition of Somerville, where he became executive director.
“Even though he was always helping people, he was also involved in everything the family was doing,” said his wife, Evelyne Jean-Baptiste Dalembert, whom he married in 1988 and who lives in Tamarac, Fla., where Mr. Dalembert spent time whenever he could after starting work at the Immigrant Family Services Institute in 2021.
“He has always been here for us,” said Evelyne, recalling how he encouraged her to pursue bachelor’s and master’s degrees to become a teacher, taking care of their young daughters while she studied and worked.
Wherever he went, “he could brighten up every room he walked into,” said his daughter Francesca of Camden, N.J. “He had a way to connect and make anyone and everyone laugh.”
—first published in the Boston Globe of April 28th 2024
His other daughter, Vanessa, who lives in Tamarac, said a friend referred to her father as “a Haitian Martin Luther King” — someone people of all ages turned to for guidance and as a role model.
“People have been telling me that I’m lucky to have a father like Franklin,” she said, “because they didn’t have an experience like that.”
In addition to his wife and two daughters, Mr. Dalembert leaves two brothers, Guerlain Talabert of Malden and Dario Talabert of Montreal; and a sister, Magalie of Montreal.
Because so many people want to attend Mr. Dalembert’s wake and funeral, his family has established the franklindalembert.com website, on which they posted his calling hours, 4 pm. Friday in Doherty Funeral Home in Somerville, and his 10 am service Saturday in St. Ann Church in Somerville.
The website also includes information for a simulcast site and will list details of the post-service reception when they are available.
“A beacon of light and hope, Franklin’s legacy is etched in the countless lives he touched and the profound impact he made,” wrote Zama, the IFSI attorney, in a tribute to her friend and colleague, which she shared in an email.
“His presence was a reassuring constant, a steady hand in turbulent times,” she said, adding that “Franklin’s voice resonated with reason and wisdom, serving as a guiding light for those fortunate enough to know him.”
