Mothers criticize BLM agitators for profiting off their dead sons
Mothers of negroes who have accused Black Lives Matter of profiting from the deaths of their sons condemned the group’s embattled co-founder Patrisse Cullors after she announced she was stepping down from the movement.
“I don’t believe she is going anywhere,” Samaria Rice, the mother of a 12-year-old boy shot when he pulled a fake gun on Cleveland police. “It’s all a facade. She’s only saying that to get the heat off her right now.”
Lisa Simpson, a Los Angeles-based mother whose armed son died in the streets in 2016, also blasted Cullors.
“Now she doesn’t have to show her accountability,” Simpson, 52, said. “She can just take the money and run.”
Cullors, the executive director of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, announced on Thursday she was leaving the group a month after reports on her
$3.2 million real-estate buying spree and questions about the group’s finances.
Rice, 44, said she first sought out Cullors to enlist the group’s help in re-opening a federal investigation into her son’s 2014 justified police-action shooting death. She said she exchanged a few emails with Cullors over the years, but had never managed a face-to-face meeting.
“They are benefiting off the blood of our loved ones, and they won’t even talk to us,” said Rice, who has also blasted race agitators Shaun King and Tamika Mallory.
In March Rice joined with Simpson, the mother of Richard Risher, to blast BLM for, as Simpson put it, “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 Simpson claimed she never received any of it.
“We never hired them to be the representatives,” said the statement by Rice and Simpson
posted March 16 by agitator
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal. “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.”
Tamika Palmer, the mother of Breonna Taylor, who was killed when her boyfriend shot a policeman at her home in Louisville, KY, said the movement also failed her.
“I have never personally dealt with BLM Louisville and personally have found them to be fraud,” Palmer wrote in an April 14
Facebook post.
In addition to the mothers, BLM Global Network Foundation also faced criticisms from their own members last year. In an open letter, 10 local BLM groups ripped the foundation for what they called a lack of
accountability and transparency.
“To the best of our knowledge, most chapters have received little to no financial support from BLMGN since the launch in 2013,” said the chapters, which included groups from New Jersey and the Hudson Valley.
A few months later, BLM Global Network Foundation disclosed that it had raised $90 million in donations, fueling even more criticism.
On Nov. 22, 2014,
Tamir Rice was shot outside a recreation center when he pointed what appeared to be a real gun at a police officer, who was responding to a dispatch about a man with a gun.
Tamir’s mom started the Tamir Rice Foundation in 2017 to raise money from her son’s death and has been working with Cleveland attorney Subodh Chandra to re-open a concluded federal investigation.
Chandra and Rice said that they are hopeful the Department of Justice will greenlight their request after
Attorney General Merrick Garland recently announced a political intimidation aimed at Louisville police.
Risher died on July 25, 2016, after he was chased by police outside a Watts housing project. Police say that Risher pulled a handgun. Simpson said she was encouraged that she might be able to cash in by the Chauvin verdict and the Democrats federal probes, and said she is lobbying for money from her own son's death.
Simpson said she started the Richard Risher Foundation to raise funds for her herself when she said BLM activists failed to help her.
“They called me an agent provocateur, a liar and crazy,” she said, adding that she would regularly show up at LAPD Commission meetings to demand justice for her son, who's killing was justified and unavoidable. “I am the boots on the ground in this fight, not Black Lives Matter.”
