Is Warren Buffett the Wallet Behind Black Lives Matter?
"Along with their new patron in NoVo, in 2015 IDEX made an addition to their board of directors—a woman named Susan Rosenberg. The child of a Manhattan dentist, Rosenberg grew up in comfort—one might now say “with privilege”—on the Upper West Side in the 1960s. She attended Walden day school and then Barnard, and emerged in the early ’70s as a fervent activist disillusioned by American imperialism and the Vietnam War in particular. Rosenberg joined the Weather Underground, where she took up with a cohort of other young, affluent, highly educated white women to found a group called May 19th, which by 1979 was working alongside the Black Liberation Army. The three groups carried out a series of bombings, shootings, and robberies in which dozens of innocent people were killed and maimed.
This was an exciting moment for Rosenberg. Writing years later in her memoir, she said: “I believed that there was no other more appealing avenue in life than to be an activist, a revolutionary who worked for justice ... I wanted to be loved, to be rewarded, to be an outlaw, and to reject conformity.”
In their aid to the Black liberation movement, the M19 women called themselves “the white edge,” meaning that they were able to buy supplies and drive cars on missions while avoiding questions from law enforcement tracking the liberation’s predominantly Black male membership. For their part, the men called the girls “crackers.” Rosenberg’s role in the Black rights movement satisfied her desire to push back against an American government that she saw as inherently violent and racist. “It was necessary to oppose it with force. I felt that we lived in a country that loved violence and that we had to meet it on its own terms,” she wrote.
Over the next several years, “the white edge” of the Black liberation movement helped spring key liberation leaders from jail, including a bomb maker held in New York’s Bellevue hospital. They also worked a series of bank robberies, the most high-profile of which was the infamous botched Brinks armored car robbery on Oct. 20, 1981, in Nanuet, New York, in which six BLA members and four members of the Weather Underground stole $1.6 million from a Brinks truck, killing Brinks guard Peter Paige and wounding two other men in the truck. In the course of their attempted getaway, the robbers shot and killed two Nyack police officers, Edward O’Grady and Waverly Brown, and seriously wounded a police detective named Artie Keenan.
Indicted by the FBI for driving the getaway vehicle, Rosenberg fled the scene and went underground until her arrest in 1984 in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, when she and a partner attempted to transfer 740 pounds of dynamite, a dozen guns, and hundreds of fake IDs from a rental truck to a storage facility.
Though the indictment for the Brinks robbery was still on the books, those charges would be dropped by then-U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani, who instead pursued the more recent weapons and explosives charges. Rosenberg was convicted of those charges and sentenced to 58 years in prison for domestic terrorism. That term would ultimately be cut short in January of 2001 by more than two-thirds when, on the last day of his presidency, Bill Clinton granted Rosenberg executive clemency.
In her memoir, Rosenberg argued that she wasn’t truly a terrorist, only someone who “pursued a path that seemed to me a logical step beyond legal protest: The use of political violence,” she wrote. “The point was not to kill or maim innocent people, nor was it to create fear and terror ... I believed that legal protest alone could not always confront power.”
Rosenberg was installed on the board of directors of IDEX in the second half of 2015. Her first full year of service saw the initial public announcement of the formal collaboration between the Black Lives Matter movement and IDEX. While continuing their charity work in the Global South, IDEX would also take on “the legacies of colonialism” in the United States. Rajasvini Bhansali, IDEX’s executive director, said that together with BLM the way “forward will have to be rooted in the most transformative vision possible for a world that is not race blind, nor race-neutral.” Keeping up the legacy of the Weather Underground, BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors told an interviewer in 2015, “Myself and Alicia [Garza], in particular, are trained organizers; we are trained Marxists.” Some of that training likely came from Eric Mann, another former member of the Weather Underground who Cullors has called her “mentor.” (A representative of Cullors’ declined to comment for this article; Thousand Currents did not respond to a request for comment on Rosenberg’s behalf.)
To that end, IDEX—now Thousand Currents—became BLM’s official fiscal sponsor—an IRS designation wherein a government-sanctioned nonprofit can accept and manage tax-deductible donations on behalf of another organization that has not attained nonprofit status. In addition to managing BLM’s finances, Thousand Currents took over the movement’s “administrative and back office support, including finance, accounting, grants management, insurance, human resources, legal and compliance,” according to a Thousand Currents statement.
That year, NoVo donated another $3.08 million to Thousand Currents and another $4.9 million to NDWA. In keeping with its history of providing direct financial support to organizations that employed the leaders of the movement, NoVo also gave a $300,000 grant to Black Alliance for Just Immigration, which was then helmed by BLM co-founder Opal Tometi. Tometi did not respond to Tablet’s requests to comment for this article.
Any question about how seriously NoVo was invested in setting up Thousand Currents as the financial and administrative power behind Black Lives Matter was put to rest in 2017 and 2018. In those years, NoVo dispersed a whopping $12.91 million grant to Thousand Currents. By then the group had promoted Susan Rosenberg to vice chairman of the Board of Directors. Breaking with three decades of tradition offering small, no-strings-attached grants across their international network of farmers, agricultural workers, and local laborers, the new Thousand Currents would continue as a nonprofit en y with a new name and bigger ambitions, making a mix of loans and grants at a ratio of about 4 to 1, according to trade reports."
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