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This past summer, the FBIs Counterterrorism Division, which investigates terrorist threats from groups such as al-Qaeda, invented a brand new label and a brand new threat. In an intelligence assessment written in August but first disclosed by Foreign Policy last week, the FBI designated a new group of domestic terrorists: Black Identity Extremists, or BIEs. The report broadly categorizes black activists as threats to national security. It uses unrelated acts of violence, such as the July 2016 shootings of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, as justification for targeting black dissident voices. And it labels black activists whose central demands are that government officials be responsible stewards of their power, accountable to the people who elect them and transparent about decision-making as a threat to national security.

According to sources close to the FBI, the term Black Identity Extremist didnt exist before the Trump administration. But while the designation is newly manufactured, the strategies and tactics behind it are not. For anyone who remembers how the FBI used extrajudicial means to target civil rights leaders and other activists through COINTELPRO, the pretext is clear: Neutralize people or organizations whose attitudes or beliefs the federal government perceives as threatening.

That technique was used against the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the Black Panthers against every major advocate for the rights of black people in the nations history. Those of us in existing resistance movements saw it coming, and we are warning the rest of you before it goes too far.

The history lesson couldnt have been starker, in fact. Just a few days before news of the new label broke, The Washington Post had reported on the cold case of a civil rights activist named Alberta Jones. Sixty years ago, Jones, the first black prosecutor in Louisville, was beaten over the head with a brick and drowned in the Ohio River. Despite sufficient evidence, her killers were never found and brought to justice.

Her death was just one of dozens of well-documented stories of civil rights leaders who were profiled, targeted and killed for insisting that black people receive equitable treatment under the law in a country whose Constitution guarantees it.

Decades later, unarmed black people are still disproportionately the victims of police shootings. Just since the Black Lives Matter movement got started, hundreds of us have been killed. But the FBIs report claiming how dangerous black activism is begins by asserting that violence inflicted on black people at the hands of police is perceived or alleged, not real. And it suggests that BIE ideology was birthed from frustrations after the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. a not-so-subtle reference to the sustained resistance of black leaders in that city, the Black Lives Matter Network, and the broader movement for black lives and our allies.

[I yelled Black lives matter! at a Trump rally. This is what happened next.]

In the four years since Brown was killed by police officer Darren Wilson, black organizers and allies have used protest, direct action and other forms of dissent to demand equitable treatment under the law, and equally important, to see our dead receive the dignity they were refused while alive. We have faced pushback from the start, but this new designation takes it up a notch by suggesting that it is our demand for less violence by the state against civilians that leads to more violence against the state by civilians.

Designating protesters as terrorists makes clear that the Trump administration thinks the government bears no responsibility to end deadly police violence and other state abuses of power against everyday Americans. It suggests that simply demanding the right to live free of police profiling and violence and to have equitable access to food, health care and education can land you on an FBI watchlist. And it raises a fundamental question: What constitutes a threat to national security and who decides?

Journalists and government officials have warned about the rising deadly threat of white supremacists in the United States for years, and even the Trump administration must surely be aware of the problem. A joint intelligence bulletin warned this spring that white supremacist groups had already carried out more attacks than any other domestic extremist group over the past 16 years and were likely to carry out more attacks over the next year.

Two months after the report, white supremacists descended on Charlottesville with firearms and tiki torches, killing anti-racist activist Heather Heyer and injuring 19 people. The FBIs Joint Terrorism Task Force said the white supremacist accused of killing Heyer James Alex Fields Jr. of Ohio will not face domestic terror charges. Shortly after, House Democrats called for hearings to examine racist fringe groups, including those that organized the deadly attack. But the Trump administrations allies in Congress have failed to take decisive or meaningful action.

[White people think racism is getting worse. Against white people.]

The warning from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security appears to be all smoke and mirrors. According to journalist and activist Shaun King, the FBI has done little to pursue the brutal beating of 20-year-old DeAndre Harris in a parking garage next to the Charlottesville police station.

And since taking office, President Trump and his administration have reversed Obama-era policies that would have otherwise protected everyday Americans from pervasive police violence. The administration has resumed giving police access to military surplus equipment typically used in warfare, such as grenade launchers, armored vehicles and bayonets. In February, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his hard-line sidekick,Steven A. Cook, catapulted America back decades by overturning hard-fought, bipartisan sentencing policies for nonviolent offenders. Instead, Sessions instructed federal prosecutors nationwide to seek the strongest possible charges and sentences against targeted defendants. And just last month,he withdrew the Department of Justices Community Oriented Policing Services program, which provided training and accountability measures for police departments plagued with cultures of violence. Taken together, these actions have dramatically increased the possibility of violence at the hands of police and decreased the security ofordinary Americans.

Yet the FBIs new designation sends a clear message to anyone, but especially to black organizers, who would dissent that we had better lay down and take it or else.

While this gaslighting approach targets black activists, we are certainly not the only ones. Resistance organizers working to keep Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients safe, those fighting back against fascism and white supremacy, Muslim communities and even animal rights organizers are being surveilled and threatened with jail time and deportation. Of course, none of this is novel to our current era of resistance. History has shown us that FBI tactics perfected against one movement can be used against other movements. This is why, together, we must stand up and say that we wont let it happen again.

Before she reached her quest for justice, Alberta Jones was murdered, and her killers went scot-free. History tells us that todays pattern of surveillance, harassment and violence against political activists is frighteningly reminiscent of her era. Must we wait for the bodies of todays black activists to fall before we take unchecked police and vigilante power seriously?

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Black America should stop forgiving white racists

Dont criticize Black Lives Matter for provoking violence. The civil rights movement did, too.

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We say black lives matter. The FBI says that makes us a ...

Ms. Baker considered the top-down, male-centered, charismatic model of leadership a political dead end. It disempowered ordinary people, especially women and low-income and working-class people, because it told them that they need a savior. If that person is assassinated or co-opted, the movement founders.

At the same time, local leadership is not a magic solution, since local leaders can also be dominant, hierarchical and self-aggrandizing. Group-centered leadership practices, where even celebrities in the movement are responsible to the will of rank-and-file members, help to keep organizations honest.

The lead organizers of the Movement for Black Lives have been influenced by 40 years of work by black feminist and L.G.B.T. scholars and activists. Their writings and practice emphasize collective models of leadership instead of hierarchical ones, center on societys most marginalized people and focus on how multiple systems of oppression intersect and reinforce one another.

This year, the Movement for Black Lives, with support from a team of strategists called Blackbird, coordinated three major days of action: two to commemorate Dr. Kings Beyond Vietnam speech and a day of national protests against symbols of white supremacy after the racist attacks in Charlottesville, Va. In each case, national coordinators kept a low profile, offering support while encouraging local groups to set their own agendas.

Critics argue that the Movement for Black Lives needs to tighten control of its messaging, discipline its local affiliates and shore up its brand. Its too bad they cant see the momentum happening at the grass-roots level. To paraphrase Ms. Baker, leaders who teach following as the only way of fighting weaken the movement in the long run.

Local organizers are not passive followers. They are leading creative campaigns in major cities. For example, the Black Youth Project 100, along with other local groups, is working to overturn the New York City Housing Authoritys permanent exclusion policy, under which people convicted of a crime can be barred from living in or visiting public housing.

Seshat Mack, a student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and a leader of the Black Youth Project 100s New York chapter, explained to me that the campaign, called Housing Over Monitoring and Eviction, has relied heavily on local leadership in particular, black New Yorkers who live in public housing.

In Chicago, one of the most segregated cities in the country, an expanded sanctuary campaign has brought together black people and Latino immigrants to demand an end to punitive practices like the citys gang database. Activists have argued that the criteria for inclusion is vague and that people often dont know theyre on the list. A lead organizer in that campaign, Maxx Boykin, underscores the importance of building trust between people and organizations, which can happen only on the local level.

The fight to end cash bail was bolstered by Mamas Bail Out Day, a campaign that is the brainchild of the Atlanta organizer Mary Hooks, a director of Southerners on New Ground, a queer social-justice organization. The organizers raised over $1 million to bail out more than 100 low-income black women on Mothers Day this year. The Movement for Black Lives umbrella group oversaw the effort by pulling in local bail-reform groups.

One of the most intense efforts within the Movement for Black Lives has been to develop an electoral strategy that can be applied locally. Recently, activists started a project to lay the groundwork for creating local black political power. According to Kayla Reed, a St. Louis organizer who helped develop the project, the goal is to transfer the clarity and radical vision brought to the protest lines to electoral campaigns. The organizers of the project are drawing lessons from the successful progressive mayoral campaigns of Chokwe Lumumba in Jackson, Miss., and Randall Woodfin in Birmingham, Ala., as well as the narrow defeat of Tishaura O. Jones in St. Louis.

Despite progress on many fronts, there is still work to do. The movement does need an easier way for people to get involved and more transparent collective decision-making, as well as space for broader ideological and policy debates.

The Movement for Black Lives is distinctive because it defers to the local wisdom of its members and affiliates, rather than trying to dictate from above. In fact, the local organizers have insisted upon it. This democratic inflection will pay off if they persevere. Brick by brick, relationship by relationship, decision by decision, the edifices of resistance are being built. The national organizations are the mortar between the bricks. That fortified space will be a necessary training ground and refuge for the political battles that lay ahead, as white supremacists inside and outside of our government seek to undermine racial and economic justice.

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Opinion | Black Lives Matter Is Democracy in Action

For all its talk of being a street uprising, Black Lives Matter is increasingly awash in cash, raking in pledges of more than $100 million from liberal foundations and others eager to contribute to what has become the grant-making cause du jour.

The Ford Foundation and Borealis Philanthropy recently announced the formation of the Black-Led Movement Fund [BLMF], a six-year pooled donor campaign aimed at raising $100 million for the Movement for Black Lives coalition.

That funding comes in addition to more than $33 million in grants to the Black Lives Matter movement from top Democratic Party donor George Soros through his Open Society Foundations, as well as grant-making from the Center for American Progress.

The BLMF provides grants, movement building resources, and technical assistance to organizations working advance the leadership and vision of young, Black, queer, feminists and immigrant leaders who are shaping and leading a national conversation about criminalization, policing and race in America, said the Borealis announcement.

In doing so, however, the foundations have aligned themselves with the staunch left-wing platform of the Movement for Black Lives, which unveiled a policy agenda shortly after the fund was announced accusing Israel of being an apartheid state guilty of genocide.

Released Aug. 1, the platform also calls for defunding police departments, race-based reparations, breaking, voting rights for illegal immigrants, fossil-fuel divestment, an end to private education and charter schools, a universal basic income, and free college for blacks.

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As far as critics are concerned, the grab-bag platform combined with the staggering underwriting commitment offer more evidence that Black Lives Matter is being used as a conduit for left-wing politics as usual.

Its about time people woke up to the fact that big money is using people as pawns to stoke racial hatred and further their global agenda, said the Federalist Papers Projects C.E. Dyer.

Bill Johnson, executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, said corporations and others may want to think twice about partnering with the Ford Foundation, the fifth-largest U.S. philanthropy with $12.4 billion in assets.

The Ford Foundation has traditionally been leftist, at least since the 1970s, on law-enforcement matters. So its not a huge surprise, but its certainly disappointing, said Mr. Johnson. I guess potential donors may want to look at the [Black Lives Matter] movement and see the damage, destruction and murders that theyve left in their wake.

For Black Lives Matter, the grant-making partnership isnt risk free, lending legitimacy to the movement but also credence to those who say it has strayed from the concerns of black Americans calling for equal treatment at the hands of police.

I think whoevers in charge of vetting a grant like that didnt do their homework, said Mr. Johnson. Or maybe this was already in the works before they realized what exactly they were dealing with before this platform came outbefore it became more apparent that its become todays Velcro for what the leftist-fringe movement desires.

And thats a shame, he said, because instead of having a serious movement that might have been a basis for dialogue and improving relations in communities, especially communities of color, its kind of become in some ways a very violent movement, in some ways a very, very far-left [movement] with an almost statist agenda.

Borealis and Ford did not return requests Wednesday asking for comment, but one of the newly launched funds partners, the Movement Strategy Center in Oakland, California, praised the foundations for bringing resources to this transformative movement.

Ensuring that all Black Lives Matter, in this land and around the world, will require an infusion of assets into Black communities, said the center in an Aug. 8 statement.

In their July 19 announcement, Ford Foundation program officers Brook Kelly-Green and Luna Yasui said that, Now is the time to call for an end to state violence directed at communities of color.

And now is the time to advocate for investment in public servicesincluding but not limited to police reformtogether with education, health, and employment in communities for people that have historically had less opportunity and access to all those things, they said. These are the reasons we support the Movement for Black Lives.

Ford and Borealis are hardly alone: They said the fund will complement the important work of charities including the Hill-Snowden Foundation, Solidaire, the NoVo Foundation, the Association of Black Foundation Executives, the Neighborhood Funders Group, anonymous donors, and others.

In addition to raising $100 million for the Movement for Black Lives, the Black-Led Movement Fund will collaborate with Benedict Consulting on the organizational capacity building needs of a rapidly growing movement.

Ford has locked horns over Israel before: In 2003, the foundation announced after years of criticism that it would not renew its funding for leftist causes through the New Israel Fund, according to Forward.

The Black Lives Matter movement exploded in August 2014 after an officer shot dead unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Since then, police shootings of black men have prompted rioting and protests in dozens of U.S. cities, as well as the deaths of eight officers in separate incidents this year at demonstrations in Baton Rouge and Dallas.

Mr. Johnson confirmed that his organization, an advocacy group for police, has no grant-making alliance with Ford.

We dont receive any funding from Ford. But yeah, thanks very much, he said with a laugh.

Not that he wouldnt take it. Of course it would come in handy look at whats going on across this country with the attacks on police, Mr. Johnson said. Were not looking for a handout from Ford, but it would be nice to see groups like that or George Soros try to give some nuts-and-bolts help for people who are hurting, instead of throwing money around on grand schemes.

Go here to read the rest:
Black Lives Matter cashes in with $100 million from ...

Helm, the so-called cofounder and core organizer of Black Lives Matter Louisville, explained in an article published at Leoweekly.com the things she says need to change.

White people, if you dont have any descendants, will your property to a black or brown family. Preferably one that lives in generational poverty, Helm writes in an article titled White people, here are 10 requests from a Black Lives Matter leader.

White people are asked, Give up the home you own to a black or brown family, pass on anyinherited property to a black or brown family, or re-budget your monthly so you can donate to black funds for land purchasing.

White women, especially, are urged to get a racist fired or get your boss fired cause they racist too, Helms writes.

She concludes, Commit to two things: Fighting white supremacy where and how you can (this doesnt mean taking up knitting, unless youre making scarves for black and brown kids in need), and funding black and brown people and their work.

During a press conference in New York City last Tuesday, President Donald Trumpcondemned the neo-Nazis and white nationalist protesters in Charlottesville.

Ive condemned neo-Nazis. Ive condemned many different groups, Trump said before calling the man who rammed a car intocounter-protesters andkilled a womana disgrace and a horrible murderer.

FollowJerome Hudsonon Twitter@jeromeehudson.

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Do Better is an op-ed column by writer Lincoln Anthony Blades, debunking fallacies regarding the politics of race, culture, and society because if we all knew better, we'd do better.

Patrisse Cullors one of the three original founders of Black Lives Matter was just nine years old when white Los Angeles Police Department officers were acquitted for beating Rodney King despite the clear videotape evidence. Patrisse, a Los Angeles native, watched black people take to the streets to scream the language of the unheard. Where others saw a riot, she saw an uprising.

"I hear stories about folks in New York...coordinating their own protests around Rodney King. I hear stories about people coordinating their own conversations and protests in Canada." She's right: In 1992, I was also nine years old, but I was in Canada, witnessing a black uprising in Toronto on Yonge Street, which took place just several days after the uprising in her home city.

Patrisse's ability to see hope amid chaos is what makes her a brilliant strategist and a courageous activist. She's now an author awaiting the release of her book, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir . As Black Lives Matter celebrates its four-year anniversary, new threats and challenges have appeared on the horizon, but Patrisse is no stranger to overcoming struggles and breaking new ground. She shared her goals, fears, and what's next for the movement with Teen Vogue .

Teen Vogue : What was your life like before activism?

Patrisse Cullors : I've been an activist since I was a teenager. I was always curious about what we would now call social justice. I remember just trying to navigate growing up poor in an overpoliced environment with a single mother and a father who was in and out of prison. I was trying to navigate "What does that mean about my life?" and "What does that mean about the world?"

TV : Black Lives Matter really took off with the Freedom Ride to Ferguson after Michael Brown was killed. What was the biggest immediate challenge you faced as attention to your organization grew?

PC : The first challenge was making sure that people knew who actually were the creators of Black Lives Matter pushing back against our own erasure. I have never felt the grips of patriarchy and its need to erase black women and our labor...so strongly until the creation of Black Lives Matter.

TV : Many people including black people say "Black Lives Matter doesn't do enough to speak about intraracial violence." What do you say to that?

PC : Every community has crime and violence; it's a part of being human. This idea that black communities are more violent than others is just false . But black folks fight the hardest for our communities. Before governments do, before other people do, we're the first ones to show up. We are the first ones to fight for our lives.

TV : BLM has been called a terror group. How did that make you feel?

PC : When I first heard that we were being labeled a terrorist group , I was taken aback. Then I looked back in history: Angela Davis was called a terrorist; Assata Shakur is on America's Most Wanted list. This is what comes with the territory of fighting for our freedom.

TV : Those are people who had to leave everything behind and had to go to Grenada and Cuba, respectively, to get away from their country. You went from one day creating a hashtag to being in that conversation how did that personally impact you?

PC : It's scary. There are many times where I've reconsidered if this country is safe for me and my new family. It's sobering. When I was younger, I had these romantic ideas about the Black Panther Party and what it meant to be a part of the civil rights movement. Then we're here, and it's dangerous. And it's dangerous to say, "Black lives matter."

TV : As we look forward to 2020, are there any mayors, senators, or congresspeople that appear to you to be serious about fighting white supremacy and enacting real reform of America's justice system?

PC : Chokwe Antar Lumumba in Jackson, Mississippi. Stacey Abrams , who will hopefully be the governor of Georgia. Nikkita Oliver didn't make it to be mayor of Seattle, but I followed her campaign closely, and I was really impressed by it.

TV : Would you like to see Black Lives Matter become a political party?

PC : It's premature for us to say that. I think what we do very well is developing new leaders and shifting culture. We created Black Lives Matter in the middle of an Obama presidency, when people didn't want to talk about race because they thought it was over white people in particular. We brought the conversation back up and said, "Actually, no, racism is well and alive. Look." We forced folks to look at the Democratic party as a party that has historically said it's on the side of black people but instead it hasn't been, and the policies have shown that.

TV : Any thoughts on a 2020 run from Senator Kamala Harris of California?

PC : I really appreciate Kamala and the work that she has done in backing Black Lives Matter. She has never strayed away from shoutin' us out and callin' us out in a loving and powerful way. I also think it's premature to put her out as a ticket for 2020.

TV : As Black Lives Matter celebrates its fourth anniversary, what makes you most proud?

PC : I am so proud that BLM has grown into a 40-chapter network across the globe. We have chapters in U.S. and Canada; we have chapters in the United Kingdom. We have people using Black Lives Matter in Australia. We have people using Black Lives Matter in South Africa and Brazil. I'm proud of the work that we've really been able to launch domestically but also globally, and there have been so many victories that we've been able to garner. I think the work of Black Lives Matter is timeless.

TV : What is your relationship with other activists who are in the spotlight?

PC : It's been challenging. It's less about [particular] activists, and more about patriarchy and what it does to our relationships to men, women, trans people. I think we live in a society that supports men and their work more often than it supports women or trans people in their work. It is not my job to fight with other black people; it's my job to fight with the state, and so I choose my battles. But patriarchy has made it really challenging to form relationships with other, male activists.

TV : So what can we expect from your memoir?

PC : I'm talking about what it means to grow up in the middle of the war on drugs and the war on gangs, and what led me personally to end up in this movement. What I tried to do is tell my story and how that story directly relates to the policies that, in a lot of ways, this government is trying to re-create and resurrect, and the impact that has on a young black girl. There aren't many stories of young black girls and our relationships to overpolicing and to overincarceration.

TV : What is the future of activism?

PC : We are tired of voting for people that don't represent us. The future of activism is in building political power, but I don't think we're naive about what that means. Part of what it means to build political power is to build it inside a larger movement, and so I think that's what you're gonna see from folks across our movement. And someone who is doing that really amazingly, who I always want to uplift, is Jessica Byrd from Three Point Strategies . She is a black woman [who has been] doing electoral work, and now that our movement is pivoting and seeing electoral work as another part of our work, she is someone that we've been utilizing as a resource day in and day out for these last several months.

TV : And what is the future for you, Patrisse?

PC : I'm in this work forever. This is where I've been, so I'm not going nowhere. My job, as I get older, is to develop new leaders and make way and space for new voices to help people.

I don't talk about it a lot I'm an artist. I use art and culture to talk about and build resilience bases for black people to talk about the impact the country has had on us. And so continuing to make and build art. I see my book as an art project, as a way to tell a story in an innovative and creative way to get more people involved, to get more people to show up for this moment.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Patrisse Cullors of Black Lives Matter Discusses the Movement ... - TeenVogue.com