Black Lives Matter die-in protest against Saint Paul Police Department (Wikipedia Commons: Fibonacci Blue)
The father of Michael Brown and other activists in Ferguson, Missouri, are demanding $20 million from Black Lives Matter, the organization that became a national fixture amid the protests of the shooting death of the black teen by a white police officer.
In a video posted to Twitter, Ferguson "frontline organizer" Tory Russell charged BLM has not provided sufficient aid to activists in Ferguson and to others around the country where racial protests took place.
"Today, we hold Black Lives Matter accountable," said Russell in a video in which he appears alongside Michael Brown Sr.
The video was a response to news that BLM drew $90 million in donations last year while Michael Brown Sr. received only $500 from BLM.
"What kind of movement are we building when we say 'black lives matter' but the freedom fighters and the families are being left behind," Russell said.
"Where is our restitution?" he asked. "We're not begging for a handout, we're coming for what we deserve."
Three separate investigations, including by the Justice Department under Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, found the officer in the Michael Brown case acted in self-defense. And Obama's DOJ found the iconic "hand's up don't shoot" likely didn't happen.
In December, the Daily Caller noted, BLM received a letter from 10 of its local chapters demanding an account of how funds are distributed. In response, for the first time in eight years, BLM released detailed information about its finances.
Russell said he would use the $20 million he demands for Black Panther-style programs, annual commemorations of Michael Brown's life and the organizing of anti-racist fellowships and stipends.
See the video:
Today our co-founder, #Ferguson frontline organizer @VanguardTNT alongside #MikeBrown's father demands 20 million from #BlackLivesMatter in order to continue the work they and other have been doing since the uprising since 2014. pic.twitter.com/4rDA28ZKnB
— TheIBFA (@THEIBFA) March 2, 2021
In November, WND reported, Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors contended Joe Biden owed his victory to BLM and requested a meeting with the Democrat to communicate the movement's expectations.
"Without the resounding support of Black people, we would be saddled with a very different electoral outcome," Cullors wrote in a letter to Biden and Kamala Harris. "In short, Black people won this election."
The objective of the Black Lives Matter organization is much bigger than defunding police, according to Cullors and fellow co-founders Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi.
In a 2015 interview, Cullors said: "Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists."
Tometi befriended the Marxist dictator of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro. She wrote in 2015, before the nation's economic and social collapse, that in "these last 17 years, we have witnessed the Bolivarian Revolution champion participatory democracy and construct a fair, transparent election system recognized as among the best in the world."
One of Black Lives Matters' stated principles mirrors the historic collectivist objective of replacing the family with the state.
"We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear-family-structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and 'villages' that collectively care for one another," BLM declares.
In June, the president of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, Hawk Newsome, said in a Fox News interview, "I just want black liberation and black sovereignty, by any means necessary."
He said that if "this country doesn't give us what we want, then we will burn down the system and replace it. All right?"
Newsome added that he "could be speaking figuratively, I could be speaking literally."
"It's a matter of interpretation."
Rebutting the narrative
Black Lives Matter was launched in response to the jury acquittal of George Zimmerman in 2013 in the death of Trayvon Martin in Florida. BLM's founders call Zimmerman and the officer involved in the death of Michael Brown in 2014, Darren Wilson, "murderers." However, Zimmerman's acquittal was confirmed by an investigation supported by open records that uncovered witness tampering and perjury.
Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald has presented compelling empirical evidence rebutting the Black Lives Matter "systemic police racism" narrative.
She contends the claim that "policing in the U.S. is lethally racist" is provably false, presenting three types of evidence: the raw numbers, individual cases such as George Floyd's, and academic research.
"A police officer is up to 30 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer," she said, citing analyses by mainstream researchers of available data.
In 2015, under President Obama and Attorney General Holder, a Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. In 2016, the Washington Post reported a Washington State University study finding that police officers are three times less likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed white suspects.
Black leaders and scholars, such as Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams and Shelby Steele, who reject the claim that America is "systemically racist" point to the breakdown of families that has accompanied the rise in dependence on welfare since the 1960s. Boys are growing up fatherless, a major indicator of crime and poverty, with more than 70% of blacks now born out of wedlock.
Civil-rights era activist Bob Woodson offers a forum for voices such as Steele's to counter the narrative of the New York Times "1619 Project" called the "1776 Unites Campaign." And his Washington, D.C.-based Woodson Center helps support "more than 2,881 neighborhood leaders in 40 states who are tackling issues ranging from homelessness, addiction, to joblessness, youth violence and the need for education and training."
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