Follow the Money — BLM's Paper Trail

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From: Lurk More

There are three things called BLM: a hashtag used by millions, an organization that controlled the money, and a movement vastly larger than either. The conflation was strategically advantageous. The paper trail is public.
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In the summer of 2020, somewhere between 15 and 26 million Americans participated in protests following the murder of George Floyd. By every measure, it was the largest protest movement in American history. People who had never attended a march in their lives stood in the streets of cities they had never associated with racial injustice. The movement was genuine. Millions of people do not march for nothing.

Simultaneously, donations poured into an organization called the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. The organization shared a name with the movement. It shared a hashtag with the movement. It did not share a governance structure, a financial transparency policy, or, as it turned out, a commitment to spending the money on what donors thought they were funding.

The documented financial trail of BLMGNF is not a conspiracy theory. It is a matter of public record – tax filings, state attorney general actions, federal investigations, and the organization’s own admissions. What follows is the paper trail.

Three Things Called BLM

This distinction matters, and the failure to make it has poisoned every conversation about this subject for five years.

The hashtag was created in 2013 by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting of Trayvon Martin. It spread organically. By 2020, it was used by tens of millions of people across every social media platform on earth. The hashtag belongs to no one. It cannot be controlled, audited, or held accountable. It is a phrase.

The organization – Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, Inc. – was incorporated as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. It had a board. It had bank accounts. It filed tax returns. It received donations. It was, in every legal and financial sense, a corporation. The corporation controlled the money.

The movement was the vast, decentralized, leaderless groundswell of people who marched, organized, donated, posted, and demanded change. The movement was orders of magnitude larger than the organization. The movement had no bank account. The movement could not be audited because it was not an entity.

The conflation of these three things was strategically advantageous to the organization. When millions of people decided to “support Black Lives Matter,” many of them directed their support – including their money – to the organization, because the organization had the same name as the thing they were supporting. The organization did not discourage this conflation. The conflation was the business model.

The Founders

Patrisse Cullors described herself as a “trained Marxist” in a 2015 interview. This is her phrase, not an epithet applied by critics. She was mentored for over a decade by Eric Mann, a former member of the Weather Underground and founder of the Labor Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles. Alicia Garza was described by her own publisher, Penguin Random House, as “a queer social justice activist and Marxist.”

These biographical facts are relevant because they inform the organizational structure that was built. BLMGNF was not structured as a transparent charitable foundation. It was structured as a vehicle for radical political organizing, with governance concentrated in a very small number of hands, minimal external oversight, and fiscal arrangements that obscured the flow of money.

Thousand Currents

From 2016 to 2020, BLMGNF did not directly receive donations. It operated under a fiscal sponsorship arrangement with Thousand Currents, a San Francisco-based nonprofit. Thousand Currents collected donations on behalf of BLM, managed the funds, and provided administrative infrastructure.

The vice chair of Thousand Currents’ board of directors was Susan Rosenberg. Rosenberg was a member of the May 19th Communist Organization, an offshoot of the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army. In November 1984, she was arrested in Cherry Hill, New Jersey in possession of 740 pounds of dynamite, a submachine gun, and other weapons. She was sentenced to 58 years in federal prison. On January 20, 2001 – his last day in office – President Clinton commuted her sentence. She had served 16 years.

Snopes rated the claim that a BLM fiscal sponsor had a convicted terrorist on its board as TRUE. Thousand Currents deleted their board page from their website after this connection became public. The archived version is available through the Wayback Machine.

This is not guilt by association. This is a factual description of the governance structure of the organization that handled tens of millions of dollars in donations intended to support racial justice. The people who donated had a right to know who was managing their money. Most of them did not know.

The $90 Million

In 2020, BLMGNF received approximately $90 million in donations. The Associated Press obtained the organization’s financial snapshot for fiscal year 2020. Of that $90 million, the AP reported that approximately 33% went to charitable grants – grants to local organizations, chapters, and external groups. The remaining two-thirds went to operational expenses, staff compensation, consulting fees, and other overhead.

By November 2020, Patrisse Cullors was the sole board member and executive director of BLMGNF. One person controlled an organization that had just received $90 million. There was no independent board providing oversight. There was no external audit committee. There was Patrisse Cullors.

Her total reported compensation from BLMGNF was approximately $120,000. Her real estate purchases during the same period totaled $3.2 million, including properties in Los Angeles, Georgia, and a custom ranch in rural California. Cullors stated that the real estate purchases were funded by her book deal and other personal income, not by BLMGNF funds.

The $5.8 million Studio City mansion tells a different story.

The Studio City Mansion

In October 2020, a property in Studio City, California was purchased for $3.1 million by Dyane Pascall, Cullors’ financial manager. Six days later, the property was sold to BLMGNF for $5.8 million – a $2.7 million markup in less than a week. BLMGNF used donor funds for the purchase.

The property was described as intended for use as a “campus” for Black creators and activists. In practice, according to reporting by New York Magazine, it was used for personal events, including Cullors’ birthday party and a baby shower.

When the Studio City purchase became public, BLMGNF leaders organized a Signal messaging session to craft a public explanation. The encrypted messaging platform was chosen specifically because messages could be set to auto-delete. The use of disappearing messages by the leadership of a nonprofit organization that was already facing questions about financial transparency is, at minimum, not what transparency looks like.

The ActBlue Question

Donations to BLMGNF were processed through ActBlue, the Democratic Party’s primary online fundraising platform. ActBlue is a conduit – it processes donations and passes them to the designated recipient. It does not (in theory) redirect donations to other organizations.

The opacity of ActBlue’s reporting made it difficult for donors to verify that their contributions reached BLMGNF specifically. ActBlue processes billions of dollars annually for thousands of Democratic candidates and progressive organizations. The flow of any individual donation through the system is not publicly traceable. FactCheck.org confirmed that donations designated for BLM did go to BLM and were not redirected to the DNC, but also noted that the lack of granular disclosure made independent verification difficult.

State Attorney General Actions

The paper trail caught up.

The California Attorney General ordered BLMGNF to immediately cease fundraising in the state after the organization failed to file required annual financial disclosures for multiple years. The Washington State Attorney General issued a Closure Notice. BLMGNF’s charitable registration was revoked or suspended in at least eight states for failure to comply with reporting requirements.

A 501(c)(3) that receives $90 million in a single year and cannot file its paperwork in eight states is not suffering from administrative oversight. It is avoiding scrutiny.

The Chapters in Revolt

In November 2020, ten local BLM chapters issued a public statement demanding accountability from BLMGNF. The #BLM10, as they called themselves, accused the national organization of having “consistently prevented chapters from establishing financial transparency, collective decision-making, or any form of democratic process.”

The chapters – representing cities including Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Indianapolis – stated that they had received no financial support from the national organization despite raising tens of millions in its name. The money went to the national organization. The organizing happened at the local level. The locals never saw the money.

This is the internal critique, and it is devastating. The people who were doing the work – organizing protests, providing bail funds, running community programs – were publicly stating that the organization collecting money in their name was not sharing it with them.

The Criminal Cases

The organizational leadership’s financial problems are civil matters – state AG actions, IRS scrutiny, donor lawsuits. The criminal cases involve other people.

Sir Maejor Page, who ran an organization called Black Lives Matter of Greater Atlanta (not officially affiliated with BLMGNF), was sentenced to 42 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to wire fraud. He pocketed approximately $450,000 from over 18,000 donors, spending the money on personal expenses including a house, guns, and entertainment.

Tashella Dickerson was charged with 20 counts of wire fraud for allegedly stealing approximately $3.15 million from a BLM-affiliated bail fund in central Pennsylvania.

These are not BLMGNF cases. They are cases involving people who used the BLM name – freely available, uncontrolled, attached to no vetting process – to collect money and steal it. The brand’s lack of organizational control meant that anyone could claim it, and some of the people who claimed it were criminals.

The Foundation Money

The corporate and philanthropic response to the 2020 protests dwarfed BLMGNF’s $90 million.

The Ford Foundation committed $100 million in 2016 and $180 million in 2020 to racial justice organizations. The Open Society Foundations committed $33 million in 2016 and $220 million in 2020 – but critically, these funds went to BLM-adjacent organizations, not to BLMGNF directly. Corporate America pledged a combined $50 billion in “racial equity” commitments following the 2020 protests – overwhelmingly directed at internal corporate programs, not to BLMGNF.

The distinction matters. The narrative that “billions went to BLM” conflates foundation grants to hundreds of different racial justice organizations with donations to BLMGNF specifically. BLMGNF received $90 million. That is a large number. It is not $50 billion. The $50 billion was corporate America performing for shareholders, not writing checks to Patrisse Cullors.

The Federal Investigation

The Department of Justice opened a federal investigation into BLMGNF’s finances. As of early 2026, no federal charges have been filed. The investigation is ongoing. The IRS has separately scrutinized the organization’s tax filings.

BLMGNF, under new leadership following Cullors’ resignation in 2023, has filed amended tax returns and attempted to address the reporting deficiencies that triggered state AG actions. Whether these efforts satisfy federal investigators remains to be seen.

The Thesis

The money trail is documented. The real estate purchases are public record. The state attorney general actions are public record. The criminal convictions are public record. The internal revolt by ten chapters is public record. None of this requires speculation, inference, or conspiracy theory. It requires reading the filings.

The question is not whether BLM the movement was genuine. Millions of people marching in the streets in response to documented police violence against Black Americans is not something that needs defending or debunking. The movement was real. The grief was real. The anger was real.

The question is who captured the financial infrastructure of that movement and what they did with it. The answer, as documented by state attorneys general, investigative journalists, and the organization’s own filings, is that a very small number of people controlled a very large amount of money with minimal oversight, spent significant portions of it on personal expenses and a grossly overpriced mansion, used encrypted messaging to coordinate their public explanations, and failed to file legally required financial disclosures in eight states.

The movement deserved better stewards. It did not get them. That is not a commentary on the movement. It is a commentary on the people who saw an opportunity in the movement’s name and took it.

This essay draws from Lurk More, coming fall 2026.

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