Last year's protests in Ferguson, Missouri were attended by hired protesters who were promised thousands of dollars per month to participate in the Black Lives Matter movement, but the hiring organization never paid those protesters, and now they are speaking out.
The Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE) group, which succeeded the now-bankrupt St. Louis branch of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), promised to pay protesters $5,000 per month to stir up civil unrest in Ferguson following the death of black teen Michael Brown at the hands of a white police officer, according to FrontPage Magazine.
MORE hasn't paid, and now the protesters are fighting back, staging a sit-in last week at MORE headquarters, and launching a Twitter campaign with the hashtag #CutTheCheck.
Much of the animosity appears to be directed at MORE executive director Jeff Ordower, who previously ran Missouri ACORN and oversaw ACORN's Midwest operations, according to FrontPage.
Millennial Activists United (MAU), an activist collective for youth organization, posted a letter on their Tumblr blog giving a little background and demanding that MORE pay up:
"Early in the movement, non-profit organization MORE, formerly known as the St. Louis chapter of ACORN, and local St. Louis organization Organization for Black Struggle created a joint account in which national donors from all over the world have donated over $150,000 to sustain the movement. Since then, the poor black people of this movement who served as cash generators to bring money into St. Louis have seen little to none of that money," the letter reads.
"Questions have been raised as to how the movement is to sustain when white non-profits are hoarding monies collected off of black bodies? When we will hold the industry of black suffering accountable? The people of the community are fed up and the accountability begins here and now."
It continues: "This isn't about MORE. This is about black lives in the Black Lives Matter movement who are literally broke and starving. There is an insidious strand of racism and white supremacy that exists in this movement and it is called the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. As a by-product, it provides decent salaries and comfort to many people who are not directly affected by the disparities that they are trying to address. This money is typically in the hands of white people who oversee the types of services that the non-profit provides, while having select token black people to spearhead the conversations within and to the community."
"In St. Louis, organizers and protesters depleted $50,000 of the available funds and dispersed it among people in the movement in no particular order. Jeff Ordower, executive director of MORE, stated that another $57,000 is expected in the next one to two weeks."
Liberal billionaire George Soros, the 27th richest man in the world, bankrolls MORE through his nonprofit Open Society Foundations (OSF), according tax filings seen by The Washington Times. The newspaper reported in January that Soros gave at least $33 million in one year to support groups actively involved in the Ferguson protests.
A number of protest groups from around the nation were reportedly paid to travel to Ferguson to participate in the unrest.
"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," Akiba Solomon of the group Colorlines told the Times.
