by Andrew Kerr
A top Black Lives Matter activist called for an “independent investigation” into the group’s finances following a report that the group’s co-founder is in the midst of a multimillion-dollar real estate buying spree.
BLM Global Network Foundation co-founder and executive director Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a self-proclaimed “trained Marxist,” has purchased four homes across the U.S. since 2016 for a total of $3.2 million, according to the New York Post.
Khan-Cullors latest acquisition came on March 30 when she purchased a $1.4 million home in Los Angeles in the majority-white Topanga Canyon neighborhood. She purchased the home through a corporate entity under her control, according to Dirt, a celebrity real estate blog.
“If you go around calling yourself a socialist, you have to ask how much of her own personal money is going to charitable causes,” Black Lives Matter Greater New York City leader Hank Newsome told the Post. “It’s really sad because it makes people doubt the validity of the movement and overlook the fact that it’s the people that carry this movement.”
Newsome told the Post that “black firms and black accountants” need to audit BLM Global Network Foundation’s finances and “find out where the money is going.”
Khan-Cullors owns a total of three homes in the Los Angeles area, according to the Post.
The BLM co-founder purchased a $510,000 home in Inglewood in 2016 and in 2018 purchased a $590,000 home in a multi-ethnic Los Angeles neighborhood, according to the Post.
And in January 2020, Khan-Cullors and her spouse Janaya Khan purchased a $450,000 home about 30 minutes away from Atlanta, Georgia, in January 2020, the Post added.
The couple were also spotted in the Bahamas in 2020 looking for property in the elite luxury resort community of Albany, an unidentified real estate source told the Post.
“People who buy at the Albany are buying their fourth or fifth home,” a resort worker told the outlet. “This is not a second-home residence. It’s extremely high-end, and people are coming here for complete and total privacy.”
Khan-Cullors told The Real News Network in 2015, before her real estate buying spree, that she and her fellow BLM co-founders were “trained Marxists.”
“The first thing, I think, is that we actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and [Alicia Garza] in particular are trained organizers,” Khan-Cullors said. “We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many black folk.”
BLM Global Network revealed in February it raised over $90 million in 2020 thanks in large part to an outpouring of support following the police custody death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the Associated Press reported.
Ten local BLM chapters accused the group in November of providing no acceptable financial transparency surrounding the “unknown millions of dollars” it has raised since its founding in 2013.
The Daily Caller News Foundation reported in June that Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation spent $4.5 million on consultants, travel and compensation for its staff from July 2017 through June 2019 while at the same time providing only $328,000 to outside groups such as the local autonomous BLM chapters that carry out the movement’s work.
BLM Global Network Foundation did not return a request for comment.
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Andrew Kerr is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.
