BLM Co-Founder Patrisse Cullors says she's thriving. No shit.

by Don Hall

The timeline is pretty clear. 

In 2013, Black Lives Matters comes on the scene with the goal to reform the country’s policing of black people. Right idea, right time. Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Melina Abdullah Are the co-founders but decide, in line with their socialist political leanings, to remain decentralized with no leadership. That said, donations were coming in and these three were in charge of banking it.

In May of 2020, George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin. That summer, all hell broke loose with the single largest global protest in history.

White people encouraged other white people to march but, if they wouldn’t march, put a black square on their Instagram feeds and donate to BLM. The money poured in. Epic amounts of money for a relatively untested charity, let alone for a nonprofit that had ignored the legal paperwork used to designate them as a nonprofit. The amounts vary in reporting (in part because the paperwork was never filed so fiscal accountability is not a priority) but the mid-range number is somewhere north of $90 million. That’s a lot of juice to be distributed to protest movements, the families of the victims whose names were repeated to encourage more donations, grassroots policy committees working with municipal policing organizations. Imagine the good that cash can do in the hands of the movement people were donating to.

Just shy of a year from Floyd’s death, news that Cullors purchased four homes purchased over the course of five years: a three-bed, one-and-a-half-bath Inglewood home for $510,000 in 2016; a four-bedroom residence in South L.A. for $590,000 in 2018; a three-bed home on several acres in the Atlanta suburb of Conyers for $415,000 in 2020; and, most recently, a “Topanga Canyon compound,” which she reportedly purchased for $1.4 million.

Cullors and her partner (BLM Canada cofounder Janaya Khan) spent nearly $3 million on homes inside of four years. Cullors left BLM in 2021 likely over increased scrutiny over her finances and it was reported this week that the group’s umbrella foundation bought a $6 million house in Studio City and then attempted to hide the purchase from the public.  They call this mega-mansion ‘the Campus.’

In an emailed statement on April 1, Shalomyah Bowers, a BLMGNF board member, said that the organization bought Campus “with the intention for it to serve as housing and studio space for recipients of the Black Joy Creators Fellowship.” The fellowship, which “provides recording resources and dedicated space for Black creatives to launch content online and in real life focused on abolition, healing justice, urban agriculture and food justice, pop culture, activism, and politics,” was announced the following morning.

None of this is unusual for big money nonprofits. Party houses for the upper management is pretty standard. I mean, can you conceive of the Red Cross without the series of party mansions dotted across the nation for the top shelf to relax, have some drinks, swim in the pool, and create personal branding?

It’s a grift and when you’re suddenly in charge of $90 million in donations and can leverage your position as the head of a virtuous cause to build up your brand as a personality rather than, you know, use the money for its intended purpose, who’s there to stop you?

I mean, sometimes you just gotta buy a $6 million house.

Most major corporations who put that BLM banner on their websites and corporate Instagram accounts likely made a lot more than that signaling their support without actually contributing a dime to help out the victims of police abuse. Why not bilk the millions of well meaning white liberals so you can buy some high-end property, start a Youtube channel, write a book about your struggles, sell your name to Warner Bros. and become a media mogul?

The problem isn’t that Cullors and Co. used the facade of a good cause to enrich themselves. The problem is that she isn’t the only one to do this under the guise of BLM.

A high-profile social justice activist in Boston and her husband used a nonprofit they founded to scam at least $185,000 from donors who included a Black Lives Matter chapter and the local district attorney’s office, federal authorities allege.

Monica Cannon-Grant and Clark Grant allegedly treated their Violence in Boston organization as a personal piggy bank to pay for rent, shopping sprees, delivery meals, visits to a nail salon and a summer vacation trip to Maryland.

Cannon-Grant, 41, and Grant, 38, established the nonprofit in 2017, the same year she made headlines for helping organize a “Fight Supremacy” march in Boston following the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va.

It’s also looking pretty grim for other chapters across the country:

“It appears that the house of cards may be falling,” says Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the legal entity that snarfs up most cash donated to the BLM movement. Indeed, “this happens eventually with nearly every scam, scheme or illegal enterprise.”

It’s not just Indiana: The states of Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina and Virginia have all revoked BLMNGF’s charitable registration, while California and Washington are threatening to hold the nonprofit’s officers personally liable for its lack of financial transparency.

Just recently, I’ve watched a three or four (I’m losing count) Netflix series on scammers taking advantage of people for personal gain. Probably the best one was Inventing Anna but The Tinder Swindler villain is still out there grifting despite the film about him.

We tend to glorify these sorts of criminals. The Wolf of Wall Street. Breaking Bad. The Sopranos. We love our antiheroes. We don’t care much for them in real life but it’s just a matter of time—Cullors has signed with some big media recently so the Amazon Prime series on her is probably in development right now. If Shonda Rhimes showruns, Cullors will be played by Stacey Dash in a career reviving role.

In the patio video marking the anniversary of George Floyd’s death, the conversation among Cullors, Garza, and Abdullah turned to the people who have faulted their leadership online. “Who the fuck are you? You ain’t done shit,” Abdullah said. Garza added that she discounted criticism from people she didn’t know personally. “I don’t need to be accountable to you,” she said. “I don’t know what accountability looks like with people that I don’t know and have never talked to.”

Cullors told the women at the table, “My therapist told me, she said, ‘What you’ve been through, most people would not survive’ … And I don’t feel like I’m just surviving. I feel like I’m really thriving.”

Sitting by the pool at the Campus, I can’t imagine she’d feel any other way.

Nothing screams irony than a declared Marxist living in a $6 million home in a neighborhood of almost entirely white capitalists making videos to celebrate her black joy.

“Follow the money,” they say. Yup. Follow the money and the rhetoric falls away like the scales on St. Paul’s misogynist eyes.