#BlackLivesMatter
With the backing of national civil rights organizations and
Mr. Soros‘ funding, “Black Lives Matter” grew from a hashtag into a social media phenomenon, including a #BlackLivesMatter bus tour and march in September.
“More than 500 of us have traveled from Boston,
Chicago, Columbus, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Nashville, Portland, Tucson, Washington, D.C., Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and other cities to support the people of
Ferguson and help turn a local moment into a national movement,” wrote Akiba Solomon, a journalist at Colorlines, describing the event.
Colorlines is an online news site that focuses on race issues and is published by Race Forward, a group that received $200,000 from
Mr. Soros’s foundation in 2011. Colorlines has published tirelessly on the activities in
Ferguson and heavily promoted the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag and activities.
At the end of the #BlackLivesMatter march, organizers met with civil rights groups like the Organization for Black Struggle and Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment to strategize their operations moving forward, Ms. Solomon wrote. OBS and MORE are also funded by
Mr. Soros.
Mr. Soros gave $5.4 million to
Ferguson and Staten Island grass-roots efforts last year to help “further police reform, accountability and public transparency,” the
Open Society Foundations said in a blog post in December. About half of those funds were earmarked to
Ferguson, with the money primarily going to OBS and MORE, the
foundation said.
OBS and MORE, along with the Dream Defenders, established the “Hands Up Coalition” — another so-called “grass-roots” organization in Missouri, whose name was based on now-known-to-be-false claims that
Brownhad his hands up before being shot. The Defenders were built to rally support and awareness for the Trayvon Martin case and were funded by the Tides Foundation, another recipient of
Soros cash.
Hands Up Coalition has made it its mission to recruit and organize youth nationwide to start local events in their communities — trying to take
Ferguson nationwide.
) economic populism is fine but he needs to relate it better specifically to Black audiences
