EDITOR, The Tribune.

American political writer Kenneth R Timmerman claimed in his hard-hitting exposé of Rainbow PUSH Coalition founder and African American civil rights activist Jesse Jackson, Sr, that Booker T Washington forewarned that there will come a time when hucksters will seek to enrich themselves at the expense of the Negro population. Timmerman alleged that certain unscrupulous elements within the Black community have played the race card to intimidate and exploit multimillion dollar corporations, owned by White people, to donate huge sums of money to their civil rights organisations. Any refusal to donate would be interpreted as racism. And with White fragility at an all-time high, economic blackmail of these huge corporations is easy for unscrupulous civil rights activists.

Titled “Shakedown,” Timmerman’s book would undoubtedly bring to mind the cofounders of Black Lives Matter (BLM), particularly Patrisse Khan-Cullors, who is alleged to have gone on a house buying binge in recent years. In the wake of the tragic death of George Floyd in early 2020, BLM made a staggering $90m, with $21.7m being set aside in financial grants to official and unofficial BLM chapters; and $8.4m being earmarked for administrative, operating and staffing costs in 2020, with over $60m remaining in its coffers. Indeed, 2020 was a boon year for BLM, which has cashed in on the tragic deaths of Floyd and Trayvon Martin. BLM received nonprofit status from the IRS last December, which allows the organisation to receive tax deductible donations directly, according to the Los Angeles Times.

In 2017, Khan-Cullors made the shrewed business decision to incorporate her Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, which sends a message to celebrity donors that her organisation is every bit as much a legitimate civil rights organisation as Dr Martin Luther King, Jr’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. While BLM cofounders Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi have shifted their focus elsewhere, Khan-Cullors has assumed the role of executive director of the organisation. With her best selling memoir, “When They Call You a Terrorist,” and lucrative television deal with Warner Bros Television Group, Khan-Cullors, a self-professing “trained Marxist,” has failed to live up to the purported ideals of Marxism, like politician Bernie Sanders. Both preach Marxism, while taking full advantage of the free market system, which is rank hypocrisy. Growing up with a single mother, who worked 16 hours a day, in a housing project in Van Nuys, Los Angeles, Khan-Cullors is now living high on the hog, thanks to White America. In 2016, she purchased a three bedroom, 1.5 bathroom house in Inglewood for $510,000. In 2018, Khan-Cullors bought a four bedroom house in South Los Angeles for $590,000. In January 2020, the BLM cofounder bought a three bedroom, two-bath house in Georgia, at a price of $415,000. And in March of 2021 she spent $1.4m on a house near Malibu, Los Angeles. While the average American typically has to enter into 25-year mortgage agreements with banks, Khan-Cullors purchased her homes outright, apparently without having to go to the banks with cap in hand.

Over the past five years, Khan-Cullors has splurged $3.2m on homes – homes out of the financial reach of probably 90 percent of the African American population she claims to represent. And to add injury to insult to BLM supporters, a reputable media source in the United States is alleging that Khan-Cullors was eyeing a unit in the mega rich Albany community on New Providence. According to Fox Business, homes in Albany are priced between $5m and $20m. Albany is the Mar-a-Largo of The Bahamas. Only super rich Bahamians, who are few and far between, can afford to live there. The same can be said of Black Americans. In 2019, according to the United States Census Bureau, the poverty rate among African Americans was 18.8 percent in 2019. While Blacks represented only 13.2 percent of the population, they made up 23.8 percent of the poverty population.

Conversely, while Non-Hispanic Whites made up 59.9 percent of the American population, only 41.6 percent lived in poverty. With $3.2m in real estate in the United States, Khan-Cullors is clearly within the top one percent annual income threshold of $538,926, unlike millions of her BLM grassroots supporters who have railed at White America and its “exploitive” free enterprise. While railing at capitalism, the BLM troika is laughing all the way to the bank, while failing to produce a workable plan on eliminating the wide economic disparity between Black and White Americans.

That Khan-Cullors would even entertain thoughts of purchasing real estate in the gated community of Albany is perhaps an indication that she is overcompensating for her impoverished upbringing. Also worth noting is that of the three homes Khan-Cullors bought in California, not one is in Crenshaw, Watts or Compton. Those communities have large Black and Hispanic populations – the very ethnic minorities BLM is supposedly fighting for. When King was fighting the housing discriminatory practices of White owned banks in 1966, he took his Freedom Chicago Movement campaign to Chicago’s West Side by living in a slum apartment on 1550 S Hamlin Ave.

When Khan-Cullors spoke about one of BLM’s major goals being economic justice for African Americans, she must have been referring to herself and the other BLM cofounders. Compared to her opulent lifestyle, King, Malcolm X and Washington lived like the Amish people. All three of the civil rights icons must now be rolling over in their graves when BLM is mentioned. Washington predicted the very thing that BLM is doing to the Negro population in the United States.

KEVIN EVANS

Freeport, Grand Bahama.

April 15, 2021.