Category Archives: Black Lives Matter

Barbara Broccoli & Phoebe Waller-Bridge Among 100 To Pen UK Government Letter Over Gross Violations Of Human And Womens Rights In Iran  Deadline

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Barbara Broccoli & Phoebe Waller-Bridge Among 100 To Pen UK Government Letter Over Gross Violations Of Human And Womens Rights In Iran - Deadline

Many see the slogan Black Lives Matter as a plea to secure the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all Americans, especially historically wronged African Americans. They add the BLM hashtag to their social-media profiles, carry BLM signs at protests, and make financial donations.

Tragically, when they do donate, they are likely to bankroll a number of radical organizations,founded by committed Marxists whose goals arent to make the American Dream a reality for everyonebut to transform America completely.

This might be unknown to some of the worlds best-known companies, which have jumped on the BLM bandwagon. Brands like Airbnb and Spanx have promised direct donations.

True, others like Nike and Netflix have shrewdly channeled their donations elsewhere, like the NAACP and other organizations that have led the struggle for civil rights for decades. These companies are likely aware of BLMs extreme agenda and recoil from bankrolling destructive ideas. But it requires sleuthing to learn this.

Companies that dont do this hard work are providing air cover for a destructive movement and compelling their employees, shareowners and customers to endorse the same. Just ask BLM leaders Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal TometiIn a revealing 2015 interview, Cullors said, Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. That same year, Tometi was hobnobbing with Venezuelas Marxist dictator Nicols Maduro, of whose regime she wrote: 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.

Millions of Venezuelans suffering under Maduros murderous misrule presumably couldnt be reached for comment.

Visit the Black Lives Matter website, and the first frame you get is a large crowd with fists raised and the slogan Now We Transform.Read the list of demands, and you get a sense of how deep a transformation they seek.

One proclaims: We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear-family-structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and villages that collectively care for one another.

A partner organization, the Movement for Black Lives, or M4BL, calls for abolishing all police and all prisons. It also calls for a progressive restructuring of tax codes at the local, state and federal levels to ensure a radical and sustainable redistribution of wealth.

Another M4BL demand is the retroactive decriminalization, immediate release and record expungement of all drug-related offenses and prostitution and reparations for the devastating impact of the war on drugs and criminalization of prostitution.

This agenda isnt what most people signed up for when they bought their Spanx or registered for Airbnb. Nor is it what most people understood when they expressed sympathy with the slogan that Black Lives Matter.

Garza first coined the phrase in a July 14, 2013, Facebook post the day George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering Trayvon Martin. Her friend Cullors put the hashtag in front and joined the words, so it could travel through social media. Tometi thought of creating an actual digital platform, BlackLivesMatter.com.

The group became a self-styled global network in 2014 and a fiscally sponsored project of a separate progressive nonprofit in 2016, according to Robert Stilson of the Capital Research Center. This evolution has helped embolden an agenda vastly more ambitious than just #DefundthePolice.

The goals of the Black Lives Matter organization go far beyond what most people think. But they are hiding in plain sight, there for the world to see, if only we read beyond the slogans and the innocuous-sounding media accounts of the movement.

The groups radical Marxist agenda would supplant the basic building block of societythe familywith the state and destroy the economic system that has lifted more people from poverty than any other. Black lives, and all lives, would be harmed.

Theirs is a blueprint for misery, not justice. It must be rejected.

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The Agenda of Black Lives Matter Is Far Different From the Slogan

Black Lives Matter protests on June 6

Sources: Crowd Counting Consortium, Edwin Chow and New York Times analysis | Note: The Times partnered with Edwin Chow, an associate professor at Texas State University, to count the protesters based on available aerial images from June 6 and added those estimates to data from the Crowd Counting Consortium. Counting efforts are still ongoing, so the map is not comprehensive and totals shown are an average of high and low estimates.

The recent Black Lives Matter protests peaked on June 6, when half a million people turned out in nearly 550 places across the United States. That was a single day in more than a month of protests that still continue to today.

Four recent polls including one released this week by Civis Analytics, a data science firm that works with businesses and Democratic campaigns suggest that about 15 million to 26 million people in the United States have participated in demonstrations over the death of George Floyd and others in recent weeks.

These figures would make the recent protests the largest movement in the countrys history, according to interviews with scholars and crowd-counting experts.

Note: Surveys are of the adult population in the United States

Ive never seen self-reports of protest participation that high for a specific issue over such a short period, said Neal Caren, associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who studies social movements in the United States.

While its possible that more people said they protested than actually did, even if only half told the truth, the surveys suggest more than seven million people participated in recent demonstrations.

The Womens March of 2017 had a turnout of about three million to five million people on a single day, but that was a highly organized event. Collectively, the recent Black Lives Matter protests more organic in nature appear to have far surpassed those numbers, according to polls.

Really, its hard to overstate the scale of this movement, said Deva Woodly, an associate professor of politics at the New School.

Professor Woodly said that the civil rights marches in the 1960s were considerably smaller in number. If we added up all those protests during that period, were talking about hundreds of thousands of people, but not millions, she said.

Even protests to unseat government leadership or for independence typically succeed when they involve 3.5 percent of the population at their peak, according to a review of international protests by Erica Chenoweth, a professor at Harvard Kennedy School who co-directs the Crowd Counting Consortium, which collects data on crowd sizes of political protests.

Precise turnout at protests is difficult to count and has led to some famous disputes. An amalgam of estimates from organizers, the police and local news reports often make up the official total.

But tallies by teams of crowd counters are revealing numbers of extraordinary scale. On June 6, for example, at least 50,000 people turned out in Philadelphia, 20,000 in Chicagos Union Park and up to 10,000 on the Golden Gate Bridge, according to estimates by Edwin Chow, an associate professor at Texas State University, and researchers at the Crowd Counting Consortium.

Source: EarthCam

Across the United States, there have been more than 4,700 demonstrations, or an average of 140 per day, since the first protests began in Minneapolis on May 26, according to a Times analysis. Turnout has ranged from dozens to tens of thousands in about 2,500 small towns and large cities.

Protests against racism and

police violence per day

Protests against racism and

police violence per day

Protests against racism and

police violence per day

Source: Crowd Counting Consortium

The geographic spread of protest is a really important characteristic and helps signal the depth and breadth of a movements support, said Kenneth Andrews, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

One of the reasons there have been protests in so many places in the United States is the backing of organizations like Black Lives Matter. While the group isnt necessarily directing each protest, it provides materials, guidance and a framework for new activists, Professor Woodly said. Those activists are taking to social media to quickly share protest details to a wide audience.

Black Lives Matter has been around since 2013, but theres been a big shift in public opinion about the movement as well as broader support for recent protests. A deluge of public support from organizations like the N.F.L. and NASCAR for Black Lives Matter may have also encouraged supporters who typically would sit on the sidelines to get involved.

The protests may also be benefitting from a country that is more conditioned to protesting. The adversarial stance that the Trump administration has taken on issues like guns, climate change and immigration has led to more protests than under any other presidency since the Cold War.

According to a poll from The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation, one in five Americans said that they had participated in a protest since the start of the Trump administration, and 19 percent said they were new to protesting.

More than 40 percent of counties in the United States at least 1,360 have had a protest. Unlike with past Black Lives Matter protests, nearly 95 percent of counties that had a protest recently are majority white, and nearly three-quarters of the counties are more than 75 percent white.

Percentage of population that is white

in counties that had protests

Percentage of population that is white

in counties that had protests

Percentage of population that is white

in counties that had protests

Percentage of population that is white

in counties that had protests

The New York TimesSource: 2018 Census via Social Explorer; Crowd Counting Consortium protests database; New York Times protests database

Without gainsaying the reality and significance of generalized white support for the movement in the early 1960s, the number of whites who were active in a sustained way in the struggle were comparatively few, and certainly nothing like the percentages we have seen taking part in recent weeks, said Douglas McAdam, an emeritus professor at Stanford University who studies social movements.

According to the Civis Analytics poll, the movement appears to have attracted protesters who are younger and wealthier. The age group with the largest share of protesters was people under 35 and the income group with the largest share of protesters was those earning more than $150,000.

Half of those who said they protested said that this was their first time getting involved with a form of activism or demonstration. A majority said that they watched a video of police violence toward protesters or the Black community within the last year. And of those people, half said that it made them more supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The protests are colliding with another watershed moment: the countrys most devastating pandemic in modern history.

With being home and not being able to do as much, that might be amplifying something that is already sort of critical, something thats already a powerful catalyst, and that is the video, said Daniel Q. Gillion, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has written several books on protests and politics.

If you arent moved by the George Floyd video, you have nothing in you, he said. And that catalyst can now be amplified by the fact that individuals probably have more time to engage in protest activity.

Besides the spike in demonstrations on Juneteenth, the number of protests has fallen considerably over the last two weeks according to the Crowd Counting Consortium.

But the amount of change that the protests have been able to produce in such a short period of time is significant. In Minneapolis, the City Council pledged to dismantle its police department. In New York, lawmakers repealed a law that kept police disciplinary records secret. Cities and states across the country passed new laws banning chokeholds. Mississippi lawmakers voted to retire their state flag, which prominently includes a Confederate battle emblem.

It looks, for all the world, like these protests are achieving what very few do: setting in motion a period of significant, sustained, and widespread social, political change, Professor McAdam said. We appear to be experiencing a social change tipping point that is as rare in society as it is potentially consequential.

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Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History

In the tragic, whirlwind year of 2020, with racial-justice protests prompted by the killing of Black men and women by police officers, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation raised $90 million, much of it small donations from rank-and-file supporters. A recent tax filing from the group shows that by the middle of last year, more than half of that money had been granted to smaller organizations or spent on consultants and real estate, leaving the foundation with $42 million in assets.

The foundations finances have been subjected to criticism both from participants in the Black Lives Matter movement and from their opponents. Many local groups that are part of the movement have called for more transparency and a greater role in making decisions, as well as more money for the organizations led by activists on the ground. At the same time, opponents of Black Lives Matter have tried to portray spending by one of the groups founders as evidence of widespread mismanagement in a manner that appears intended to impugn the cause of racial justice as well as the group.

No one expected the foundation to grow at this pace and to this scale, Cicley Gay, chair of the board of directors, said in a statement on Tuesday. Now, we are taking time to build efficient infrastructure to run the largest Black, abolitionist, philanthropic organization to ever exist in the United States.

Ms. Gay was one of three new board members that the group announced last month. In an interview on Tuesday, Shalomyah Bowers, another new member of the board, said the picture painted by the documents shows an organization retooling for the long haul.

As a new board, we are building policies that didnt exist, operational and administrative infrastructure that didnt exist. Were making it clear to Black people that were an institution and that were here to stay, said Mr. Bowers. In order to do that, we need to demonstrate that our financial house is in order.

During the fiscal year covered by the tax form, the only voting board member was Patrisse Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter. While such a structure is legal in Delaware, where the group is incorporated, charity experts say it is far from best practices, especially for a group with tens of millions of dollars in its coffers.

Imagine you have the equivalent of a cruise ship with no one at the helm, you have a massive organization, massive amounts of money, no structure, no accountability, no staff, said Ashley Yates, a St. Louis-born activist who was involved with Black Lives Matter nationally in its early years but has since spoken critically about lack of transparency within the group. Who even makes the decision on who writes the checks?

Ms. Cullors, who stepped down as executive director in May 2021, said in an interview last week with The Associated Press that within the group, they often referred to the experience of the past few years as building the plane while flying it.

The only regret I have with B.L.M. is wishing that we could have paused for one to two years, to just not do any work and just focus on the infrastructure, she said in the interview. Much of the outside critical attention on the group focused on her involvement.

Last month, New York Magazine reported that funds raised by the foundation were used to buy a house in California for nearly $6 million in cash in October 2020. The tax filing shows property worth $5.9 million, held by a Delaware company. The house was to be used, among other things, as an artist retreat, the filing said, but identifying information is not being released here due to safety and security concerns and threats to B.L.M.G.N.F.s leadership, staff and creators, the form said.

The tax form indicated that Ms. Cullors received no compensation during the fiscal year but instead served as an unpaid volunteer. A family member, Paul Cullors, was listed on the tax form as receiving payment for professional security services amounting to $840,993.

According to the tax filing, Ms. Cullors also paid the organization back for charter travel, saying that she voluntarily reimbursed subsequent to year end. She also repaid the nonprofit for personal use of its real estate, which appeared to refer to a birthday party for her son held at the $6 million house.

I think they are doing what a lawyer in this situation would advise them to do, which is be as open as you possibly can be and be as accurate as you possibly can be, said Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame who specializes in nonprofits. Theyre trying to be transparent. Theyre trying to right the ship. Theres still work to do.

The release of the tax filing, Internal Revenue Service Form 990 for the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, was the first time the group offered an official accounting of its finances. It is also a delayed snapshot. The form covers the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2021, nearly a year ago.

In 2021, the foundation released its own report, not a mandatory federal tax filing but a voluntary accounting of its funds, in which it said that it raised $90 million in 2020, with the average donation being $30.64. At that time, the group said that it spent $8.4 million on operating expenses while disbursing $21.7 million in grants to about 30 organizations and to 11 Black Lives Matter chapters around the country.

On the tax form, the foundation said that for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2021, it received contributions and grants totaling $76.9 million, with total expenditures of $37.7 million. Those expenses included grants of $500,000 each to Black Lives Matter groups in Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit and elsewhere.

Jacob Harold, a nonprofit expert, said he was struck in particular by the number of paid employees listed on the form, which was just two, versus the number of volunteers, which was 49,275. That ratio pretty much tells the story right there, Mr. Harold said. Two paid staff members would rarely be enough to manage a $90 million organization. This 990 tells a story of weak nonprofit governance, he said.

Justin Hansford, a professor at the Howard University School of Law, said the stakes were high because the public could not always differentiate between the Black Lives Matter movement and one specific organization. Its extremely important to have transparency and good governance at any organization with this level of global fame, said Mr. Hansford, who is also executive director of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center. The credibility of the entire movement is at stake based on these choices, for better or worse.

But he added, They deserve a little grace here. As protesters suddenly given a windfall of money, they had to learn how to manage a large nonprofit on the fly, and its a lot to ask.

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After Raising $90 Million in 2020, Black Lives Matter Has $42 Million ...

Counter-protesters carrying Black Lives Matter flags walk past a group of Trump supporters at the Michigan State Capitol building in November 2020 in Lansing, Mich. John Moore/Getty Images hide caption

Counter-protesters carrying Black Lives Matter flags walk past a group of Trump supporters at the Michigan State Capitol building in November 2020 in Lansing, Mich.

A Michigan man has pleaded guilty to hate crime charges after he intimidated supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement by leaving handwritten notes and nooses around his community, the Department of Justice said in a news release.

Kenneth Pilon, 61, pleaded guilty Tuesday in federal district court to two charges of hate crimes. Pilon specifically pleaded guilty to "willfully intimidating and attempting to intimidate citizens from engaging in lawful speech and protests in support of the Black Lives Matter movement" dating back to June and July 2020, according to officials.

Additionally, Pilon pleaded guilty to placing a noose inside a vehicle with an attached note reading: "An accessory to be worn with your 'BLM' t-shirt. Happy protesting!"

Pilon will be sentenced on March 23, according to officials.

In a news release from the Department of Justice, Pilon called nine Starbucks stores across Michigan, telling workers who answered his calls to tell any employees wearing Black Lives Matter T-shirts that "the only good n***er is a dead n***er."

Pilon is also accused of telling one of the employees, "I'm gonna go out and lynch me a n*****."

From June to July 2020, authorities say Pilon left four nooses in parking lots across Saginaw, Mich. with attached notes. Authorities say a fifth one was found inside a 7-Eleven in a beverage cooler.

"Specifically, Pilon intimidated and attempted to intimidate citizens from participating lawfully in speech and peaceful assembly opposing the denial of Black people's right to enjoy police protection and services free from brutality," according to a previous criminal complaint filed in April.

U.S. Attorney Dawn N. Ison said that Pilon's actions were "threatening to an entire community."

"We hope this conviction sends the message that this type of activity is criminal, and that we will take the necessary action to protect the people of our district," Ison said.

Since the protests following the murder of George Floyd, threats against Black Lives Matter protesters have become far too common.

Earlier this year, several Maryland police officers were caught talking via text message about killing Black Lives Matter protesters.

In a federal civil rights lawsuit filed in Maryland in March, a Black police officer alleged that several Maryland-National Capital Park Police officers made frequent comments through text messages that "talked about murdering Black Lives Matter protesters," NBC News reported.

In 2020, a Utah man was caught on video coughing on Black Lives Matter protesters and making threats to the administrator of a Facebook page, according to Salt Lake City TV station Fox 13. The suspect, Robert Brissette, 57, was arrested and booked on charges related to the threat of violence and electronic communication harassment, Fox 13 reported.

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Mich. man who targeted Black Lives Matter supporters pleads guilty to ...

I think they just saw a black girl: Author accuses bottle shop of racially profiling 12-year-old daughter  The Age

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I think they just saw a black girl: Author accuses bottle shop of racially profiling 12-year-old daughter - The Age

Biden Admin to Drop Half a Million on Artificial Intelligence That Detects Microaggressions on Social Media  Washington Free Beacon

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Biden Admin to Drop Half a Million on Artificial Intelligence That Detects Microaggressions on Social Media - Washington Free Beacon

Alicia Garza is not synonymous with Black Lives Matter, the movement she helped create, and thats very deliberate. The 39-year-old organiser is not interested in being the face of things; shes interested in change. We are often taught that, like a stork, some leader swoops from the sky to save us, she tells me over Zoom from her home in Oakland, California. That sort of mythologising, she says, obscures the average persons role in creating change.

Garza is also scornful of fame for fames sake and of celebrity activists. The number of people who want to be online influencers rather than do the work of offline organising knocking on doors, finding common ground, building alliances depresses her. Our aspiration should not be to have a million followers on Twitter, she says. We shouldnt be focused on building a brand but building a base, and building the kind of movement that can succeed.

That doesnt mean Garza doesnt care about her image: for our interview, she has sneakily avoided having her webcam switched on, but only because shes doing a [skincare] face mask before your shoot today, so I didnt want to scare you. While Garza is ferociously smart, laser-focused on pushing our political system to move from symbol to substance, she also has a lighter side. She laughs often, draws you in; her passion is infectious.

The origin story of Black Lives Matter is one of collective, collaborative action rather than individual glory. After George Zimmerman was acquitted of fatally shooting Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, in 2013, Garza wrote a Facebook post she called a love letter to Black people. Her friend Patrisse Cullors shared the post with the hashtag BlackLivesMatter. Another friend, Opal Tometi, designed the blacklivesmatter.com website and social media platforms, using the signature black and yellow colour palette. Seven years later, that rallying cry has changed our lexicon and landscape. Black Lives Matter has been chanted by millions of protesters around the world. It has been painted in giant letters on a road leading to the White House, and posted on windows in primary schools in Northamptonshire.

The evolution of Black Lives Matter, Garza says, has been deeply humbling, and super weird to watch. Particularly considering she was repeatedly told, by everyone from pundits to peers, that the name sounded too threatening. People said we should call it All Lives Matter or Black Lives Matter Too, if we wanted to get more people involved. There have been so many full-circle moments.

Four years ago, nobody talked explicitly about Black Lives Matter during the Democratic National Convention, for example. But, Garza says, you couldnt get through five minutes of this years without the movement being namechecked. Whats more, its being talked about with more substance than weve seen before. In the early days, many of the solutions being discussed in relation to the movement were relatively symbolic measures, like mandating that the police wear body cameras, requiring implicit bias training and setting up police reform taskforces. Now, however, there are serious discussions about defunding the police; about whether or not policing keeps us safe. And that is a huge, huge change. Those conversations arent just happening in the US, either; theyre happening around the world.

Garza attributes the movements global spread to two catalysts: Donald Trump and his overtly racist administration; and Covid-19, which meant people were more likely to be at home and glued to their screens when George Floyd was killed on camera. Black Lives Matter is now in the muscle memory of many of us, Garza says. And it was triggered by watching a man murdered by a police officer, who stared into the camera as he did it.

Garza has distilled the lessons she has learned from Black Lives Matter, and a decade of community organising, into her first book, The Purpose Of Power: How To Build Movements For The 21st Century. While the subtitle makes it sound like a how-to manual, one of its key lessons is that there is no quick and easy way to build a movement. As she writes, you dont just add water, oil and milk to a premixed batter; after 30 minutes in the oven, a movement is baked. Building movements, she stresses, means building alliances.

Garzas book starts with a history of one of the most successful movements of recent times: rightwing conservatism in the US. One reason the right has been so powerful, she argues, is that it has been very effective at building networks and alliances and coalitions that all agree on the purpose of power which is for them to keep it. The right are very good at bringing different groups together around a shared vision, and have been building power for the last three decades, Garza says, entrenching their agenda and values in the US. You can see it in the way conservatives have strategically, often surreptitiously, used the media to advance their ideology. Take Sinclair, for example, which late-night TV host John Oliver once called maybe the most influential media company you never heard of. Owned by a fervent Trump supporter, its the largest operator of local television stations in the US and has compelled its news anchors to parrot Trump talking points.

In particular, Garza says, the right has perpetuated the idea that success is purely a matter of personal responsibility. The message to poor people has been that its their laziness holding them back; the message to black people, that systemic racism doesnt exist the problem is their life choices. Worse, the narrative of personal responsibility for systemic failures has often been used by Black leaders to secure their seat at the table, Garza writes. That includes Barack Obama who, she notes, carefully avoided criticising law enforcement when Zimmerman was acquitted after the Martin shooting: He acknowledged that there is a long history of racial disparities in our criminal justice system while making sure to state that you cant blame the system. In adopting these rightwing talking points, she says, he capitulated to the same people who had called him and Michelle Obama Muslim socialists.

Obama isnt the only liberal hero Garza takes to task. Her book also analyses the way in which Bill Clinton ushered in legislation such as the 1994 federal crime bill, which greatly exacerbated mass incarceration. And she is unsparing about the racism of Hillary Clintons presidential primary campaign against Obama in 2008, citing an occasion when a photograph of Obama in traditional Somali dress was leaked to the media. (The Clinton campaign denied responsibility, but a Clinton supporter then went on MSNBC and said Obama shouldnt be ashamed of being seen in his native clothing.)

It is unusual to see a nuanced critique of Clinton and Obama, I say. Does Garza think liberals idolise certain politicians, treating them like celebrities rather than public servants? Absolutely, she says: Our political system functions around personalities rather than policies, symbol over substance.

One example of that interplay, she says, can be seen in the case of Breonna Taylor, who was shot and killed in her home in Kentucky earlier this year. The day before our conversation, a grand jury has brought no direct charges against the police for killing Taylor, sparking widespread anger.

For Garza, there is an irony in the announcement. The attorney general of Kentucky, Daniel Cameron, is a Black Republican, and lots of people would say its good that we have a Black person in this role, right? Thats the symbol. But in Camerons press conference, about not holding any of these officers accountable for her murder, he upheld and espoused racist ideas and policies. He announced that he was going to start a commission studying how they execute search warrants in Kentucky. So the symbol of a Black man in a position of power is not enough. Whats needed is people in power who will create substantive and systemic change for black people.

There is also a big difference between popularity and power, Garza says. DeRay Mckesson, who has amassed more than a million Twitter followers after gaining prominence as a community journalist during the 2014 Ferguson unrest, is a case in point. Mckesson is probably the leading example of the celebrity activist phenomenon Garza decries, and her book uses his 2016 failed bid to be mayor of Baltimore as a cautionary tale about the limits of online fame. Despite his celebrity friends and high profile Beyonc follows him on Twitter, and Rashida Jones donated to his campaign Mckesson won only around 2% of the vote in his home town. Garzas message is that you cant just tweet your way to political power; youve got to put in the work.

Mckessons high profile means he is often (wrongly) credited with launching Black Lives Matter, and with the work Garza and her co-founders started. Its a mistake, she notes, that he often doesnt seem overly eager to correct. She is not, I want to emphasise, being petty here. I get the impression shes far too much of a pragmatist for that. This is bigger than DeRay, she tells me. Its a question of how we see leadership and who we think deserves it. The people who we think deserve to be elevated tend to be men; meanwhile, black womens labour is often overlooked and erased.

Why, she asks, with a touch of frustration, are we holding on to a trope about leadership that is older than me? People are still looking for the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr when, actually, leadership of movements today looks more like Lena Waithe and Laverne Cox. Cox is the first openly transgender person to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy award in an acting category, for Orange Is The New Black; Waithe, a queer black writer, actor and producer, won an Emmy for the Netflix show Master Of None. The things that make us different, those are our superpowers, Waithe said in her acceptance speech.

Garza knows a thing or two about being different. She was raised by her black mother and Jewish stepfather in Marin County, a predominantly white San Francisco suburb. She describes herself as queer. Maybe its an outdated ass word, she laughs, but adds that its a useful umbrella term for being more fluid in who Im attracted to and who I build intimate relationships with. Garza is married to a trans man and activist, whom she met in 2003.

Difference, she notes, can be a source of strength and power; it can give you a vantage point with potentially more range and insight. Yet the NGOs for which she worked after graduating from the University of California, San Diego seemed to have little room for difference: while the staff were mainly people of colour, those running the show were white. She moved into more grassroots organising, fighting for affordable housing in San Franciscos black communities by building neighbourhood coalitions. This work, she says, changed the way she thought about politics. It was where she began to understand that winning is about more than being right; its about inviting people to be part of a change they may not have known they needed.

Black Lives Matter has certainly mobilised people; but its move into the mainstream hasnt been without its issues. Garza accepts that the phrase has become a generic term that gets attached to anything related to police violence or black people. The decentralised nature of the organisation has contributed to the confusion.

Mistakes were also made as Black Lives Matter grew. Its hard to build a plane while youre flying it, Garza notes, and the organisation missed opportunities, such as developing clear demands to take on the 2016 campaign trail. Following eight years of a black president who hadnt brought as much hope and change as hed promised, many within the network were disillusioned with electoral politics and focused on direct action instead.

So Garza has taken the insight she has gained from Black Lives Matter and channelled it into a new organisation called Black Futures Lab, which she launched in 2017. Protesting can only get you so far; now Garza wants politicians to feel as accountable to black people as they do to corporations. Our work is purely focused on making sure that Black people are powerful in politics, so that we can be powerful in every aspect of our lives, she explains.

Obviously Black voters are not a monolith, Garza says, so one of the first challenges has been to create a consistent and coherent agenda for a diversity of experiences. In 2018, Black Futures Lab initiated what Garza calls the largest survey of Black people in America in 15 years; the resulting data went into developing the Black Agenda, a policy platform reflecting the most common concerns within Black communities across the political spectrum. One policy point, for example, is raising the minimum wage to $15, a move 85% of respondents to the Black Census supported. Other demands include creating more opportunity for home ownership and limiting police presence in schools, to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline.

Now that a policy platform has been developed, Garza is building support for it ahead of this years presidential election. Weve had 60,000 Black voters pledging to support the Black Agenda. What [these voters] are saying is that they will be using the agenda as they make decisions about who to vote for.

The Black Futures Lab occupies much of Garzas time now; she hasnt been involved in the day-to-day of Black Lives Matter for a few years. It might seem odd to step away from a movement just as it goes mainstream, but Garza isnt someone who wants to bask in her past achievements; it frustrates her how many times shes been asked the same questions about Black Lives Matter. Shes focused on changing the future rather than rehashing the past.

That said, she hasnt completely cut herself off. Oh my God, of course, she says when I ask if she still hangs out with her co-founders. The three were recently in Los Angeles together for the Time 100: Most Influential People of 2020 photoshoot, she says warmly, and remain very much in touch.

Garza has had her camera off throughout our conversation; she isnt still wearing that face mask, I ask? Weve been talking for an hour and Im not sure how long you can leave those things on. I slipped it off, she reassures me. Now my face is nice and soft, and Im gathering my things for the shoot. Weve got to head over there in two minutes.

Before I let her go, I ask if she is anxious about the forthcoming election. Of course, she replies. But the way she handles that is by making sure Im doing everything in my power to get the country back on track. There was a time when she was a cynic and thought the US was beyond saving, but over the last 10 years she has become profoundly hopeful. Now is the time to fight and to engage. Voting, she says, can also be a movement.

This article was amended on 20 October 2020 to remove some personal details.

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Black Lives Matter's Alicia Garza: Leadership today doesn't look like ...

Black Lives Matter has been called the largest civil movement in U.S. history. Since 2013, local BLM chapters have formed nationwide to demand accountability for the killings of dozens of African Americans by police and others. Since the summer of 2020, when tens of millions in the U.S. and around the world marched under the Black Lives Matter slogan to protest a Minneapolis police officers murder of George Floyd, the movement has risen to a new level of prominence, funding and scrutiny.

BLM has long been seen as a coordinated yet decentralized effort. Lately, the movement and its leading organizations have become more traditional and hierarchical in structure. Public opinion is also changing, as BLM chapters call on the movements leaders to be more accountable to its grassroots groups. We caught up with two scholars of worldwide African communities and cultures Kwasi Konadu and Bright Gyamfi to discuss BLM as both a movement and an organization.

Black Lives Matter started in 2013 as a messaging campaign. In response to the 2012 acquittal of George Zimmerman for shooting and killing Black teenager Trayvon Martin, three activists Opal Tometi, Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors protested the verdict on social media, along with many others. Cullors came up with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, which gained widespread use on social media and in street protests.

Over the next several years as Black Lives Matter flags, hashtags and signs became common features of local, national and even international protests in support of Black lives this messaging campaign became a decentralized social movement to demand accountability for police killings and other brutality against Black people.

The movement remained decentralized, although some significant, formal BLM-related organizations emerged during this time. For instance, in 2013 Cullors, Tometi and Garza formed the Black Lives Matter Network to facilitate communication, support and shared resources among the dozens of locally organized and led Black Lives Matter chapters that were springing up around the United States.

In 2014, the Movement for Black Lives, or M4BL, formed as a separate but related coalition of dozens of organizations of Black activist and others, including the Black Lives Matter Network.

In 2017, the Black Lives Matter Network transformed into the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, co-founded by Tometi and Cullors, who was the executive director until she stepped down in May 2021. This group describes itself as a global foundation supporting Black led movements.

While the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation says it is decentralized, over time it has followed a pattern similar to other social movements driven by individuals and organizations. It has become more of a conventional hierarchical organization, centralizing its operations and leadership. Its founders have won awards, book deals and notoriety.

The BLM Global Network Foundation has not developed any publicly known independent source of funding, nor was a decision ever made to rely primarily on grassroots support or small individual donations. As a result, it is dependent on corporate and foundation money to pay for its operations and programs. Amid the George Floyd uprisings in 2020, the BLM Global Network Foundation generated some US$90 million in donations or grants from corporations and foundations.

The Movement for Black Lives, which calls itself decentralized and anti-capitalist, also raised millions in 2020, including $100 million from the Ford Foundation.

All told, corporations pledged close to $2 billion to BLM-related causes in 2020, though less is known about pledges for 2021.

Meanwhile, many frontline Black Lives Matters chapters have struggled to stay afloat. Some key chapters have begun calling for financial transparency and more democratic decison-making from national leaders at the BLM Global Network Foundation, as well as a share of the funds the national groups have raised.

Others have disavowed the Black Lives Matter Network and defected from it, focusing on local community fundraising and organizing to support their work.

Though the phrase Black Lives Matter has become a common sight, the movement is losing public support. According to a new Civiqs survey of 244,622 registered voters, support for BLM fell from two-thirds of voters in June 2020 to 50% in June 2021.

Some of this shift may be due to growing public awareness of the movements internal struggles, such as competing visions and competition over scarce resources, as well as questions about whether some BLM leaders have used donations for personal benefit.

Tensions and conflicts are part of the evolution of all social movements, including BLM.

Movements for peoples of African ancestry also face a distinct challenge: They often have to appeal for both funding and action from the same white power structure and corporate interests that participate in and benefit from the suffering of Black people.

For example, although President Lyndon B. Johnson is remembered for helping pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he routinely referred to the 1957 version of that act as the nigger bill in conversations with his Southern white supremacist colleagues.

Another example involves the McDonalds Corp. In 1968, after the death of Martin Luther King Jr., McDonalds partnered with U.S. civil rights organizations. The company claimed its African American-owned franchises were carrying on Kings civil rights agenda to empower the Black community.

According to historian Marcia Chatelain, however, instead of enabling economic freedom, McDonalds has burdened the Black community with low wages, relatively few franchises and high rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. McDonalds has benefited from a devoted African American consumer base, more so because African Americans consume more fast food than any other race, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Money shaping social movements, such as the civil rights movement, is not new. The civil rights movement, including the summer of 1963s March on Washington, was funded by white liberal organizations and foundations. In the summer of 2020, BLM protests also generated millions in similar funding. Indeed, the Ford Foundation and the Borealis Philanthropy recently formed the Black-Led Movement Fund, which raises money for the Movement for Black Lives.

Malcolm X, in his analysis of the 1963 March on Washington, brought attention to the influence white philanthropy and leadership held over black social justice organizations, especially regarding funding that was controlled by the white power structure. Siding with Malcolms analysis, James Baldwin also observed, the March had already been co-opted.

Based on our research on civil rights-Black power organizations and on Black internationalism, BLM would benefit from a starfish organizational structure.

Starfishlike organizations are decentralized networks with no head. Intelligence is spread throughout an open system that easily adapts to circumstances. If a leader is removed, new ones emerge, and the network remains intact.

In the U.S., BLM organizers work through various groups, yet all are tied to centralized hubs, like the Movement for Black Lives coalition. These organizational choices conform to a spider analogy. Compared to the starfish structure, spiderlike organizations operate under the control of a central leader, and information and power are concentrated at the top.

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In the wake of the 2020 mass protests against racism after George Floyds murder, many Republican-led states proposed a new wave of draconian anti-protest laws to stifle dissent. This suggests that BLM might be more resilient if it followed the starfish approach.

In their desire to appeal to a diverse public to end white supremacy, Black Lives Matters leaders fail to consider that pervasive anti-Black violence is the very engine that powers white supremacy and makes broad coalitions ineffective.

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Black Lives Matter: How far has the movement come?

The Black Lives Matter movement started a massive wave of Americans uniting to call for defunding the police and eradicating white supremacy to make positive changes for Black Americans. But experts reflecting on the movements scorecard in 2022 say Black America hasnt benefited.

"I would argue that, on balance, these communities are worse off because by [BLM] overemphasizing the role of police, they've changed police behavior for the worse," the Manhattan Institutes Jason Riley told Fox News Digital in a phone interview. "In other words, police do become more cautious. They're less likely to get out of their cars and engage with people in the community. And to the extent that police are less proactive, the criminals have the run of the place."

A protester waves a Black Lives Matter flag during a demonstration in Los Angeles April 20, 2021. (Stanton Sharpe/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Riley noted that "police brutality still exists, bad cops exist," and he has no "problem with raising awareness about police misconduct." But he argued that BLM is "over-focused" on police and does not take into account that "97, 98% [of Black homicides] do not involve police at all."

Manhattan Institute senior fellow Jason Riley (Fox News)

Dr. Carol Swain, a retired professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University, told Fox News Digital that "an intelligent observer would be hard-pressed to identify any area in American society where BLMs activism has benefited the Black community."

MASSIVE INCREASE IN BLACK AMERICANS MURDERED WAS RESULT OF DEFUND POLICE MOVEMENT: EXPERTS

"What BLM has done is pervert the criminal justice system by engaging in activities that have resulted in a growing trend of trials by media," Swain said. "BLM has intimidated juries and judges. Its leaders have no interest in due process or the presumption of innocence."

Black Lives Matter began with the social media hashtag #BlackLivesMatter and was officially founded in 2013 after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the fatal shooting case of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Chants of "Black Lives Matter" later rang out at protests following the police-involved killing of Michael Brown in Missouri in 2014 and continued to into the next year after the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore.

It ultimately grew to a vast movement by the summer of 2020 that swept the highest echelons of America, from corporate leaders to Hollywood icons to powerful sports figures pledging support.

BLM SILENT WHEN CONFRONTED WITH DATA SHOWING MASSIVE 2020 SPIKE IN BLACK MURDER VICTIMS

Defunding the police is a cornerstone of BLMs mission and remains on its list of seven demands on the groups website.

"We know that police dont keep us safe and as long as we continue to pump money into our corrupt criminal justice system at the expense of housing, health and education investments we will never be truly safe," BLM posted in July 2020.

But as the calls to defund rang out, violent crimes in the Black community skyrocketed. Murders in the 2010s first broke the 7,000 mark in 2015 after the highly-publicized deaths of Gray that same year and Brown in 2014, jumping by nearly a thousand in one year.

In 2020, the year George Floyd was killed during an interaction with Minneapolis police, Black murders jumped by a staggering 32% compared to 2019, according to FBI data. Overall, Black murders increased by 43% that year compared to the prior 10-year average. CDC data published Tuesday additionally showed that in 2020, Black Americans were disproportionally affected by gun-related homicides, increasing by 39.5% that year compared to 2019. Gun-related homicides rose by 35% overall that year, according to the CDC.

"Certainly, the protests and riots mid-2020 after the death of George Floyd followed a pattern of spiking violence that we've seen following past viral police incidents, such as the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray. This pattern has been termed the Ferguson Effect' police pull back while violent crime spikes precipitously," Hannah Meyers, director of the policing and public safety initiative at the Manhattan Institute, previously told Fox News Digital.

FBI DATA SHOWS LARGE INCREASE IN MURDERS IN 2020 NATIONWIDE

The Ferguson Effect unfolded again in 2020, according to experts, but polling showed the Black community wasnt on board with the calls to defund.

A Gallup poll from August 2020 found 81% of Black Americans wanted "police to spend [the] same amount of or more time in their area," compared to 19% reporting police should spend less time in their neighborhood.

Riley said that the polling shows "that these activists are not in step with the people who actually live in these violent communities."

"You have to remember the overwhelming majority of people who live in these communities are law-abiding. You're talking about a very small percentage, mostly men, and mostly young men that are causing all this havoc in these communities. Many of these people would leave these communities. They can't afford to move anywhere else, so they're forced to deal with this."

Swain added that "BLM focuses on scattered cases of police abuse," but ignores "the horrendous Black-on-Black crimes that take place daily in cities around the nation."

Carol Swain on Fox News primetime (Fox News)

"BLM does not want young Black men and women to know the importance of individual choice in determining how an encounter with police will end. Instead of modeling lawful behavior, BLM and progressive politicians in Congress seem to hold the regressive belief that Black people are always right even when they are clearly wrong," Swain said.

"Many progressives White and Black hold a dangerous belief that black people are justified in challenging and disobeying lawful police orders. This encourages a dangerous double standard that erodes the rule of law and contributes to more criminal behavior."

ACTIVISTS LOOK THE OTHER WAY AS BLACK AMERICANS PAY BLOODY PRICE FOR BLM, 'WOKE AGENDA': EXPERTS

Black Lives Matter activists, however, say they built a movement that positively changed how America talks about race at a national level down to the community level.

"The conversation around race didnt exist in a vast capacity until we saw the BLM movement, this surge," T. Sheri Amour Dickerson, executive director and core organizer of BLM Oklahoma City, told NBC in 2020. "Now difficult conversations, honest conversations, and even some discourse, have become part of the daily discussion here in Oklahoma, and I think that goes nationwide in many different factions. Its also become more intergenerational."

Hawk Newsome, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, argued on Fox News "Americas Newsroom" last month that the defund movement did not hurt the Black community when confronted with FBI data showing the increase in Black murders. He defined the defund movement as "taking money from the police and putting it in community centers, job opportunities and after-school programs So it wasn't like just get rid of this money for the police. It was invest in the community."

"Great things have come out of Black Lives Matter. We've had more black corporate hires than in the history of this country. We've passed progressive laws. The cops that killed George Floyd wouldn't have been prosecuted. So many of these cops, so many measures for accountability. It came as a result of that," Newsome said while denouncing controversies surrounding the co-founders of BLM.

Newsome said the "people who started the movement" must be separated "from the people who carried the movement."

The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation's press team and Black Lives Matter of Greater New York did not respond to Fox News Digital requests for comment regarding experts saying the BLM movement has not benefited the Black community.

Swain said that the Black community will see change "when enough of its leaders push for a return to the values and principles of older generations who appreciated the sanctity of human life and took pride in their communities and self-betterment through individual effort and ingenuity."

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"We need fewer chapters of BLM and more exemplary organizations like the Woodson Center, which has an outstanding record of changing lives and giving hope to the least among us," Swain said.

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BLM has left Black Americans worse off since the movement began ...