The adage “wherever there is power, greed and money, there is corruption,” seems to ring true for Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors.
As The Post reported last week, Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation tax documents filed (years late) with the IRS show Cullors used BLM funds to pay her graffiti-artist brother a whopping $840,000 for “security” services to the nonprofit and $970,000 to a company owned by her child’s father for “creative services.” Nepotism much?
Oh, and the foundation’s biggest single payout, over $2.1 million, went to a consulting firm owned by another of its current board members, Shalomyah Bowers.
Cullors admitted on an MSNBC podcast that she “made mistakes” after $90 million in “white guilt money” flooded to the group after George Floyd’s death, but complained that those mistakes are now being “weaponized” against her.
Yet she doesn’t consider it a mistake that the nonprofit bought a near-$6 million property in Los Angeles. Indeed, she instantly called the criticism of that purchase “racist and sexist.” It also gave $8 million to an allied Canadian charity (run in part by Cullors’ life partner), which spent $6.3 million on a downtown Toronto property. (Both nonprofits insist the luxury spaces are being used to forward the cause.)
Hmm: Cullors, a professed Marxist, also used BLM funds to book chartered flights throughout the pandemic and herself collected $120,000 from the charity for undisclosed “consulting fees.” Mysteriously, Cullors also went on a real-estate-buying binge herself, snagging four high-end homes for $3.2 million across the country.
She utterly denies the cash for that came from the charity, but still opted to step down as the foundation’s executive director after the news broke in May 2021. (Strangely, though, it seems no one has replaced her thus far.)
The tax docs show BLMGNF spent at least $37 million on grants, real estate, consulting and other undisclosed expenses this past year, leaving it still with tens of millions of dollars of that “white guilt” cash.
Strangely, it looks like an outfit founded after the death of Trayvon Martin only gave $200,000 to the Trayvon Martin Foundation, far less than it paid to Cullors’ brother and her son’s father.
To be clear: Cullors isn’t necessarily wrong to use the sneering term “white guilt money:” As Adam Coleman noted for The Post, Corporate America panicked after Floyd’s death at police hands in the summer of 2020; it was looking to buy “woke” credibility, plainly without worrying how much actual good the donations would do.
In short, there’s not a lot of honor to go around here, and we’d likely not approve of much that a bunch of Marxists decided to spend their windfall on.
The larger lesson applies to movements all across the spectrum: A vast influx of money will tempt leaders to spend big on priorities that have a lot more to do with themselves than the cause.
