Patrisse Cullors

Patrisse Cullors

: Photo from Wikimedia Commons / Author of Photo: The Laura Flanders Show

Overview

* Co-founder of Black Lives Matter
* Views America as a racist, sexist nation


Radical Roots

A self-described “artist, organizer and freedom fighter” who seeks to reform America’s allegedly racist jail-and-prison system, Patrisse Cullors was born in Los Angeles in 1984. When she was a child, her father was incarcerated numerous times for drug offenses. In a February 2015 interview with Vice.com, Miss Cullors said that at age 16 she “came out as queer,” “was kicked out of home,” and subsequently formed close connections with “a bunch of other young queer women of color” who, like her, were dealing with the challenges of “poverty [and] being black and brown in the USA.”

Ties to Former Weather Underground Terrorist Eric Mann, Who Taught Her About Marxism, Maoism, & Leninism

Identifying strongly with the famed abolitionist Harriet Tubman, Cullors traces her impulse toward activism back to 1999, when her older brother Monte was allegedly beaten by a group of L.A. deputies while he was in their custody. At age 18, Miss Cullors began volunteering with the Bus Riders Union, a public transportation advocacy group organized by a Los Angeles-based communist think-tank known as the Labor and Community Strategies Center (LCSC). A few years later, the Center hired Cullors to train high-school students in political organizing tactics. Cullors herself was trained to be an activist by former Weather Underground leader Eric Mann, the founder of LCSC. She worked for LCSC from 2001-12.

In a January 2018 interview with Democracy Now!, Cullors described how, under the tutelage of the aforementioned Eric Mann, she had become a trained organizer with the Labor/Community Strategy Center (LCSC), which she identified as her “first political home.” LCSC characterizes its philosophy as “an urban experiment” that aims to use community organizing to “focus on Black and Latino communities with deep historical ties to the long history of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, pro-communist resistance to the U.S. empire.” The Center also lauds the work of the U.S. Communist Party, “especially Black communists,” as well as the Party’s support for “the great work of the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, Young Lords, Brown Berets, and the great revolutionary rainbow experiments of the 1970s.”

When she was asked in an April 2018 interview to discuss the skillset required to build a successful movement,” Cullors replied: “I went through a year-long organizing program at the National School for Strategic Organizing (NSSO), and it was led by the Labor Community Strategy Center,” founded by Eric Mann. “We spent the year reading, anything from Marx, to Lenin, to Mao, learning all types of global critical theory and about different campaigns across the world, and most importantly every day, five days a week we were out on the ground actively recruiting people into the organization we were in, as a way to learn how to bring people in, how to keep them in an organization. There’s an entire skillset to this.”

Reverence for Mao Zedong

In a speech that Cullors gave at an LCSC gathering in about 2010, she spoke in highly positive terms about the famous Communist publication titled Mao’s Red Book, also known as Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, a collection of sayings and writings by Chinese Communist Party dictator Mao Zedong. During China’s Cultural Revolution, the red-covered book had been widely distributed to nation’s people, who were forced to memorize and recite its contents. Cullors said in her 2010 speech, “I was speaking to this young person from Arizona who is trying to fight S.B. 1070 [a 2010 Arizona bill designed to thwart illegal immigration], and he grabbed a book [written by Eric Mann] and he said, ‘It’s like Mao’s Red Book.’ And I was like, ‘Man, that’s what I was thinking.’ And it was just really cool to hear him make that connection.” Cullors said that she had urged the young man to purchase “10-15 of these books” and organize a youth group “where you talk about it and you really try to engage this.” “I think I have a really important role speaking to youth, maybe it’s because I came to the movement at 17 1/2, so I have just a knack for knowing how to organize young people,” she added in her speech.

Left Forum

In 2011 Cullors was a guest speaker at the annual Left Forum convention in New York City.

Condemning America’s “Stae Violence” and “Genocide”

In 2012 Cullors earned a degree in religion and philosophy from UCLA. She thereafter completed a fellowship at the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership (at Kalamazoo College), where she: (a) organized and headed a think tank on “state and vigilante violence,” and (b) produced and directed a theatrical piece titled “POWER: From the Mouths of the Occupied,” which accused the U.S. of perpetrating “state violence” and “genocide” against African Americans.

Founder of Dignity and Power Now, a Marxist-Leninist Front Group

Also in 2012, Cullors became interested in a civil-rights lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union alleging that gangs of deputies in the L.A. Sheriff’s Department had been systematically beating and abusing inmates. Before long, Cullors and five likeminded friends began organizing protests against these alleged transgressions. As membership in her group grew to more than four-dozen people, Cullors named it Dignity and Power Now (DPN). She continues to serve as a lead organizer for the group. Dedicated to “protecting incarcerated people and their families in Los Angeles,” DPN today is sponsored by the L.A.-based nonprofit group Community Partners. DPN is also a front group for the Marxist-Leninist Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO).

Co-Founder of Black Lives Matter

In 2013 Cullors collaborated with Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi to co-found Black Lives Matter (BLM), an online platform designed to stoke black rage and galvanize a protest movement in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, a white man who was tried for murder and manslaughter after he had shot and killed a black Florida teenager named Trayvon Martin in a highly publicized February 2012 altercation.

Supporter of Nicolas Maduro

On April 18, 2013, Cullors spoke at a Los Angeles rally titled “Urgent Call to Defend the Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.” The event was rooted in the belief that “right-wing elements backed by U.S. imperialism are attempting a coup against constitutional rule in Venezuela.”

BLM “Freedom Ride”

In one of her more high-profile undertakings, Cullors in the fall of 2014 led a group of some 600 fellow BLM protesters in a “Freedom Ride” from St. Louis to Ferguson, Missouri. Their purpose was to protest a white Ferguson police officer’s recent killing of an 18-year-old black male named Michael Brown.

Advocate of Defunding or Abolishing the Police

Cullors is committed to fighting what she calls “the current system” of “white supremacy” and “anti-blackness” that inflicts “state violence” on African Americans. As she told The Feminist Wire in December 2014, she views BLM as a vehicle for promoting “major policy” geared toward “decriminalizing Black lives,” “reducing the law-enforcement budget,” and forcing some police departments to be “disbanded or abolished.” “With a reduction of law-enforcement money,” Cullors elaborates, “we can then be putting it back into Black communities”—i.e., into government programs that provide “black folks” with “jobs,” “housing,” and “healthy food.” Moreover, she vows that until “a victim’s bill of rights” is passed to protect blacks from abuse by police officers, she and her fellow activists are “gonna shut shit down.”

Cullors’ Anti-Israel & Anti-Semitic Orientation

In January 2015, Cullors joined representatives from the Dream Defenders as well as a number of likeminded anti-police-brutality protesters in taking a 10-day trip to the Palestinian Territories in the West Bank. Their objective was to publicly draw a parallel between what they defined as Israeli oppression of the Palestinians in the Middle East, and police violence against blacks in the United States. The other delegates who made this trip were five Dream Defenders (Phillip Agnew, Ciara Taylor, Steven Pargett, Sherika Shaw, Ahmad Abuznaid); Tef Poe and Tara Thompson from Ferguson/Hands Up United; journalist and professor Marc Lamont Hill; Cherrell Brown and Carmen Perez of the Justice League NYC; Charlene Carruthers from the Black Youth Project; poet and artist Aja Monet; and USC doctoral student Maytha Alhassen.

  • Cullors said that what she immediately noticed when she arrived in the West Bank was “apartheid”: “This is an apartheid state. We can’t deny that and if we do deny it we are apart of the Zionist violence. There are two different systems here in occupied Palestine. Two completely different systems. Folks are unable to go to parts of their own country. Folks are barred from their own country.”
  • Cullors also stated: “I believe the Black Lives Matter movement can benefit greatly by learning about struggles outside of the U.S., but particularly the Palestinian struggle. I want this trip to be an example for how Black folks and Arab communities can be in better solidarity with one another.”

In April 2015, Cullors participated in a Harvard Law School panel titled “Globalizing Ferguson: Racialized Policing and International Resistance.” There, she said: “Palestine is our generation’s South Africa, and if we don’t step up boldly and courageously to end the imperialist project that’s called Israel, we’re doomed.” Cullors also also encouraged her audience to support the Hamas-inspired Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and the Islamic terrorist Rasmea Odeh, who had masterminded a 1969 bombing that killed two Israeli university students in a Jerusalem food market.

In August 2015, Cullors was one of more than 1,000 black activists, artists, scholars, politicians, students, “political prisoners,” and organizational representatives to sign a statement proclaiming their “solidarity with the Palestinian struggle and commitment to the liberation of Palestine’s land and people”; demanding an end to Israel’s “occupation” of “Palestine”; condemning “Israel’s brutal war on Gaza and chokehold on the West Bank”; urging the U.S. government to end all aid to Israel; and exhorting black institutions to support the Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions movement against the Jewish state. Key passages from the statement included the following:

  • “Palestinians on Twitter were among the first to provide international support for protesters in Ferguson, where St. Louis-based Palestinians gave support on the ground. Last November, a delegation of Palestinian students visited Black organizers in St. Louis, Atlanta, Detroit and more, just months before the Dream Defenders took representatives of Black Lives Matter, Ferguson, and other racial justice groups to Palestine. Throughout the year, Palestinians sent multiple letters of solidarity to us throughout protests in Ferguson, New York, and Baltimore. We offer this statement to continue the conversation between our movements.”
  • “We remain outraged at the brutality Israel unleashed on Gaza through its siege by land, sea and air, and three military offensives in six years. We remain sickened by Israel’s targeting of homes, schools, UN shelters, mosques, ambulances, and hospitals. We remain heartbroken and repulsed by the number of children Israel killed in an operation it called ‘defensive.’ We reject Israel’s framing of itself as a victim. Anyone who takes an honest look at the destruction to life and property in Gaza can see Israel committed a one-sided slaughter.”
  • “Israel’s injustice and cruelty toward Palestinians is not limited to Gaza and its problem is not with any particular Palestinian party. The oppression of Palestinians extends throughout the occupied territories, within Israel’s 1948 borders, and into neighboring countries. The Israeli Occupation Forces continue to kill protesters—including children—conduct night raids on civilians, hold hundreds of people under indefinite detention, and demolish homes while expanding illegal Jewish-only settlements.”
  • “Our support extends to those living under occupation and siege, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the 7 million Palestinian refugees exiled in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine. The refugees’ right to return to their homeland in present-day Israel is the most important aspect of justice for Palestinians.”
  • “Palestinian liberation represents an inherent threat to Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid, an apparatus built and sustained on ethnic cleansing, land theft, and the denial of Palestinian humanity and sovereignty. While we acknowledge that the apartheid configuration in Israel/Palestine is unique from the United States (and South Africa), we continue to see connections between the situation of Palestinians and Black people.”
  • “Israel’s widespread use of detention and imprisonment against Palestinians evokes the mass incarceration of Black people in the US, including the political imprisonment of our own revolutionaries.”
  • “U.S. and Israeli officials and media criminalize our existence, portray violence against us as ‘isolated incidents,’ and call our resistance ‘illegitimate’ or ‘terrorism.’ These narratives ignore decades and centuries of anti-Palestinian and anti-Black violence that have always been at the core of Israel and the US. We recognize the racism that characterizes Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is also directed against others in the region, including intolerance, police brutality, and violence against Israel’s African population.”
  • “We know Israel’s violence toward Palestinians would be impossible without the U.S. defending Israel on the world stage and funding its violence with over $3 billion annually. We call on the U.S. government to end economic and diplomatic aid to Israel. We wholeheartedly endorse Palestinian civil society’s 2005 call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel and call on Black and U.S. institutions and organizations to do the same. We urge people of conscience to recognize the struggle for Palestinian liberation as a key matter of our time.”
  • “[W]e aim to sharpen our practice of joint struggle against capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and the various racisms embedded in and around our societies.”

Other notable signatories of the August 2015 statement included Angela Davis, Cornel West, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and rapper Talib Kweli.

Visiting Michelle Obama at the White House

On February 20, 2015, Cullors visited the White House, where she met with First Lady Michelle Obama.

Lauding the “Black Spring” Riots of 2015

In May 2015, Cullors characterized the recent protests and riots in Baltimore—which had erupted after a local black criminal named Freddie Gray had died under disputed circumstances while in police custody—as “Black Spring” demonstrations akin to the massive “Arab Spring” actions that had threatened and/or toppled a number of Middle Eastern regimes beginning in 2011. “Black Spring,” she said, “is about really looking at this moment, as not these isolated incidences.… Black people are not a monolithic group, but what we are facing is something that’s extreme—and that’s poverty, that’s homelessness, that’s higher rates of joblessness, that’s law enforcement invading our communities day in and day out—and we are uprising. And so this Black Spring is about really talking about a national uprising.”

Netroots Nation

In July 2015, Cullors spoke at the annual Netroots Nation convention in Phoenix.

“We Are Trained Marxists”

In 2015 as well, Cullors openly acknowledged BLM’s Marxist influence, proclaiming on video: “We actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia [Garza] in particular, we’re trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. We are super versed on ideological theories.” In the same video, Cullors revealed that for more than a decade she had been the protégé of mentor Eric Mann, a communist revolutionary and a domestic terrorist who in the 1960s and ’70s was a member of the Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground. Mann trained Cullors in Marxist-Leninist ideology and the tactics of political organizing.

Cullors’ Growing Influence

In March 2016, Fortune magazine named Cullors and her two BLM co-founders to its list of the “50 of the most influential world leaders.”

Marriage to Janaya Khan

In 2016 as well, Cullors married the Canadian social activist Janaya Khan, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Toronto. Since then, Cullors has sometimes been referred to as Patrisse Khan-Cullors.

Cullors’ Wealth and Multiple Homes

In 2016, Cullors purchased a three-bedroom, 1.5-bathroom home in Inglewood, California for $510,000.

In 2018, she paid $590,000, in cash, for a four-bedroom, 1,725 square-foot home in South Los Angeles,.

In January 2020, she paid $415,000 for a three-bedroom, two-bath “custom ranch” on 3.2 rural acres in Conyers, Georgia. The house included a private airplane hangar with a studio apartment above it; an indoor swimming pool; the use of a 2,500-foot community runway capable of accommodating small airplanes; and a large “RV shop” where a mobile home or small aircraft could undergo maintenance or repair.

In April 2021, it was reported that Cullors had purchased her fourth home, a secluded mini-compound in Los Angeles’ semi-remote Topanga Canyon, for more than $1.4 million.

It was also reported in April that Cullors had recently looked at property in an ultra-exclusive resort in the Bahamas, where luxury beachfront apartments and townhouses were priced in the range of $5 million to $20 million.

In June 2021, it was reported that Cullors had spent $35,000 to have contractors install wooden fencing around the entire perimeter of her Topanga Canyon home. They also installed an electronic gate at the driveway portion of the property.

Likening President Trump to Hitler

In an August 2017 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Cullors said that BLM would never talk with President Donald Trump because he was akin to Adolf Hitler: “We wouldn’t as a movement take a seat at the table with Trump because we wouldn’t have done that with Hitler. Trump is literally the epitome of evil, all the evils of this country — be it racism, capitalism, sexism, homophobia…. And if I’m thinking about what I want my children to know in 30, 40, 50 years, I want them to know that I resisted a president at all costs, because this president literally tried to kill our communities, and is killing our communities.”

Asserting That White “Hate Speech” Is Not Protected by the First Amendment

In an August 2017 interview with MSNBC, Cullors argued that hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Said Cullors: “David Duke and the white supremacists who showed up to Charlottesville [the site of a recent Virginia rally that included some self-identified neo-Nazis], that is Trump’s base. And that base is not isolated. It’s not — it’s directly related to Trump’s policies and the policies that have continued to harm and kill black people and our allies. I think we’re seeing a movement of white nationalists rising up because they’ve been emboldened by Trump and his government…. And hate speech, which is what we’re seeing coming out of white nationalist groups, is not protected under the First Amendment rights.”

Activist with Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (BOLD)

In addition to her work with BLM, Cullors is also active in a network called Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (BOLD), which teaches black activists how to help build a “black social justice infrastructure.”

Unethical Financial Dealings by Cullors

In 2019, Janaya and Patrisse Consulting — a consulting firm run by Cullors and her spouse, Janaya Khan — received a number of payments totaling a combined $191,000 from a Los Angeles jail-reform initiative called Reform LA Jails, also known as “Vote Yes on R.”  On those payments, Cullors was listed as the “principal officer” and “business owner” of Reform LA Jails.

On May 6, 2021, the Daily Caller reported that Cullors had funneled a great deal of business to Trap Heals, an art company led by Damon Turner, the father of Cullors’ only child. According to business records, interview transcripts, and an archived version of Trap Heals’ website, Trap Heals served as BLM’s “lead developer of the art & cultural efforts.” In 2020, three activist groups co-founded and led by Cullors — the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the Black Lives Matter PAC, and Reform LA Jails — combined to pay Trap Heals at least $238,000 for consulting services and the production of an election-night livestream.

Laurie Styron, executive director of the watchdog group CharityWatch, pointed out the ethics-related implications of Cullors’ interrelated financial dealings with BLM, Trap Heals, and Reform LA Jails: “To maintain public trust, it is vital that leaders not only avoid any impropriety in practice, but also avoid the appearance of it. In other words, even if the consultant or vendor hired is the best one for the job, if that vendor has a personal relationship with the leader who hired them, additional steps should be taken to prove to the public that this arrangement is in the best interest of the charity and was made at arm’s length.”

Doug White, a former director of Columbia University’s Master of Science in Fundraising Management program, said of Cullors’ activities: “I feel personally and from an ethical perspective, there are a huge number of problems here. Self-dealing is when someone is in a position to direct money and who uses it on his or her own behalf. That’s basically what it boils down to, and this fits that largely, that definition.”

Cullors & BLM Spend $26,000 for Conference at Luxury Resort in Malibu

In the summer of 2019, a consulting firm owned by Asha Bandele — who co-authored Cullors’ 2018 biography When They Call You a Terroristpaid nearly $26,000 on behalf of Reform LA Jails (RLAJ) — the jail-reform initiative chaired by Cullors — for its use of a 200-acre luxury beach resort in Malibu, California as the venue for a series of RLAJ “meetings.” That sum included two separate payments: $10,179 for “meetings and appearances” at the Calamigos Guest Ranch and Beach Club, and $15,593 for use of the Malibu Conference Center owned by the resort.

Guest Speaker at the 2020 Democratic Party Convention

Addressing the Democratic National Convention’s virtual party platform meeting on July 27, 2020, Cullors, in the name of the “fight for black liberation,” exhorted the Democratic Party to make “sea changes” to its platform and to adopt a variety of radical legislative measures including the closure of all federal prisons and immigration detention centers. Her remarks also included the following:

“Until and unless our leaders become signatory to the BREATHE Act — to legislation that eliminates the federal government’s ability to give multi-million dollar grants to militarize police forces; dismantles punitive [agencies] like ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], Border Patrol, and the DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency]; ends the use of surveillance systems being used to target protesters; and bans the use of police agencies to suppress political dissent — the Democratic Party of today will be remembered as the party of complicity. The party that refuses to sacrifice its own creature comforts and material securities to ensure it walked the walk. So before you leave today, I want you to answer this question for yourselves: Which side of history is my party actually on?”

Moreover, Cullors warned that if the Democratic Party did not seize the “opportunity right now to right the course of history,” it would “miss its greatest opportunity” to lead the U.S. to the “true American revolution.”

Deal with Warner Brothers to Produce Race-Focused Projects

In October 2020, Cullors signed a production deal with the Warner Bros. Television Group to produce content including animation, scripted and unscripted projects, longform series, and digital projects to be aired on streaming services, television, and film. In an interview with Variety magazine, Cullors said: “Black voices, especially Black voices who have been historically marginalized, are important and integral to today’s storytelling. Our perspective and amplification is necessary and vital to helping shape a new narrative for our families and communities. I am committed to uplifting these stories in my new creative role with the Warner Bros. family. As a longtime community organizer and social justice activist, I believe that my work behind the camera will be an extension of the work I’ve been doing for the last twenty years. I look forward to amplifying the talent and voices of other Black creatives through my work.”

In January 2022, Cullors announced that she was working on several documentary-type projects for Warner TV. One was a project arguing in favor of racial reparations for blacks, and the return of land to Indigenous peoples. Another was a program examining the emotional and psychological “toll” that black Americans were forced to pay as a consequence of living in a “system that doesn’t see us, or makes us hyper-visible and also hyper-invisible at the same time.” Said Cullors: “My art practice and political practice are extensions of my abolitionist views. Any project I’m working on, whether it’s art or writing, all my work now with Warner Brothers — what I have framed it as is ‘abolitionist aesthetics.’ The way that white supremacy, the way that the prison system and the police system has aestheticized itself, I want to aestheticize abolition.”

In October 2022, Warner Brothers allowed its TV production deal with Cullors to expire without renewal, in light of the fact that she had not yet produced any content whatsoever.

Cullors’ Ties to the Democratic Party & the Anti-Trump Movement

On November 7, 2020 —  the same day that several mainstream media outlets declared Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 presidential election — Cullors sent a letter to Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris. Cullors signed the letter “on behalf of the Black Lives Matter Global Network,” and began by congratulating Biden and Harris on their reported victory. She then wrote: “We are requesting a meeting with you both to discuss the expectations that we have for your administration and the commitments that must be made to Black people. We want something for our vote. Without the resounding support of Black people, we would be saddled with a very different electoral outcome. In short, Black people won this election. Alongside Black-led organizations around the nation, Black Lives Matter invested heavily in this election. ‘Vote and Organize’ became our motto, and our electoral justice efforts reached more than 60 million voters. We want something for our vote.”

Cullors then reminded Biden and Harris: “[B]oth of you discussed addressing systemic racism as central to your election campaigns. Both of you also expressed regrets regarding your record on issues impacting Black people.” She closed the letter by writing, “We look forward to meeting with you at your convenience to begin the immediate work of Black liberation. We would like to be actively engaged in your Transition Team’s planning and policy work. Again, congratulations on your win. Let’s get to work!”

Cullors Uses BLM Mansion for Private Parties, Including Biden Victory Celebration & a Birthday Party for Her Son

Two weeks after BLM’s former fiscal sponsor, Thousand Currents, had transferred $66.5 million into BLMGNF’s possession in October 2020, a woman named Dyane Pascall — in a transaction that would be kept secret for the next 18 months — took nearly $6 million that had been donated to BLMGNF and used it to pay cash for a vast Southern California estate that included a 6,500 square-foot mansion with several fireplaces, a soundstage, a pool and bungalow, and parking facilities to accommodate more than 20 vehicles. Pascall was: (a) the financial manager for Janaya and Patrisse Consulting, a Limited Liability Corporation run by BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors and her spouse, Janaya Khan; and (b) the chief financial officer for Trap Heals, a nonprofit organization headed by Damon Turner, the father of Patrisse Cullors’ only child.

Within a week after the aforementioned purchase of the Southern California estate, Pascall transferred ownership of the property to a Delaware LLC that had been established by Perkins Coie, the law firm that in 2016 had been paid by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign to fabricate an election-interference conspiracy theory tying Donald Trump to Russian political operatives.

After the October 2020 ownership transfer of the Southern California estate to the Delaware LLC, BLM leaders began using the mansion for a variety of different purposes — including as a set for recording personal and recreational videos. Cullors, for her part, used the house as a venue for her son’s birthday party, and for a January 2021 gathering to celebrate President Biden’s inauguration.

“That Was a Lot of White Guilt Money”

Reflecting on the $90 million in donations that BLM collected during 2020, Cullors said in May 2022: “That was a lot of White guilt money. There’s a lot of White folks being like, ‘We just got to put the money.”‘

Cullors & BLM Pay Enormous Sums to Cullors’ Brother & to the Father of Her Child

A May 13, 2022 tax filing indicated that during the fiscal year of July 1, 2020 through June 30, 2021, Cullors and BLM had used donated funds to pay $840,000 to Cullors Protection, a company owned by Ms. Cullors’ brother, graffiti-artist Paul Cullors, for “professional security services.”

The same tax filing also showed that BLM had paid more than $969,000 for live-event, design, and media production to a Los Angeles-based entertainment and clothing company called Trap Heals LLC, whose founder, Damon Turner, was the father of Patrisse Cullors’ child.

Demanding the “Abolition” of Policing & Prisons, and Advocating Reparations

After a Minneapolis jury on April 20, 2021 convicted former police officer Derek Chauvin of having murdered George Floyd 11 months earlier, Cullors wrote on her Instagram page that  while the verdict was a “victory in accountability,” it “was not a victory towards abolition” of the entire criminal-justice system: “While we watched Derek Chauvin be convicted for murder, a black child named Ma’Khia Bryant was murdered by police, proving there is no justice. We must fight for abolition because in an abolitionist world, we would still have George Floyd and Ma’Khia Bryant.”

In January 2022, Cullors released her newly published book, titled An Abolitionist’s Handbook: 12 Steps to Changing Yourself and the World.

Cullors Steps Down from Leadership Post with BLM

On May 27, 2021, Cullors announced that she would be stepping down as executive director of the BLM Foundation the following day. She claimed that her resignation had been in the works for more than a year and was unrelated to criticism she had received from conservatives vis-a-vis her enormous wealth and her various property acquisitions. “Those were right-wing attacks that tried to discredit my character, and I don’t operate off of what the right thinks about me,” Cullors said.

Criticism from Parents of Black Youngsters Who Were BLM Cause Celebres

In late May 2021, after Cullors stepped down as a leader of BLM, some women whose sons had been killed by police officers accused the organization of profiting from their grief. “I don’t believe she [Cullors] is going anywhere,” said 44-year-old Samaria Rice, the mother of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy shot and killed by Cleveland police in November 2014. “It’s all a facade. She’s [Cullors is] only saying that [she is leaving BLM] to get the heat off her right now.” Ms. Rice, who said she had exchanged a few emails with Cullors over the years but had never been granted a face-to-face meeting, added: “They are benefiting off the blood of our loved ones, and they won’t even talk to us.”

Fifty-two-year-old Lisa Simpson, a Los Angeles-based woman whose son, Richard Risher, had been killed by police in July 2016, also condemned Cullors: “Now she doesn’t have to show her accountability. “She can just take the money and run.” This was not the first time that Ms. Simpson had criticized BLM or its leaders. In March 2021 she accused the organization of “raising money in our dead sons’ names and giving us nothing in return.” BLM’s Los Angeles chapter raised $5,000 for her son’s funeral but never gave any of it to Simpson, the woman claimed. In a March 2021 joint statement, Ms. Simpson and Ms. Rice said: “We never hired them [BLM] to be the representatives in the fight for justice for our dead loved ones murdered by the police. The ‘activists’ have events in our cities and have not given us anything substantial for using our loved ones’ images and names on their flyers. We don’t want or need y’all parading in the streets accumulating donations, platforms, movie deals, etc. off the death of our loved ones, while the families and communities are left clueless and broken.”

Cullors Delivers Commencement Address at UCLA

On June 11, 2021, Cullors was the commencement speaker at the virtual graduation ceremony of UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs.

Cullors Is Appointed Los Angeles County Commissioner

In October 2021, Los Angeles County Supervisor Holly J. Mitchell, a Democrat, appointed Cullors to the Los Angeles County Arts Commission.

“Modern Artist” Posing Nude

In October 2023, it was reported that Cullors had launched a new endeavor as a “modern artist” who posed in the nude. (Click here for photos.)

Additional Resources:


Further Reading: “Patrisse Cullors” (PatrisseCullors.com, LinkedIn.com, KeyWiki.org); “Activist Battles L.A. County Jailers’ ‘Culture of Violence’” (Los Angeles Times, 4-14-2014); “We Spoke to the Activist Behind #BlackLivesMatter About Racism in Britain and America” (Vice.com, 2-2-2015); “A Conversation with Patrisse Cullors and Darnell L. Moore” (The Feminist Wire, 12-1-2014).

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