The co-founder of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, Patrisse Cullors, was the protégé of a communist-supporting domestic terrorist for over a decade, spending years training in political organizing and absorbing the radical Marxist-Leninist ideology which shaped her worldview.
Eric Mann, who mentored Cullors for over a decade in community organizing, was a member of radical-left militant groups: Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground, which bombed government buildings and police stations in the 1960s and 1970s.
In a newly resurfaced video from 2015, Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors reveals that she and her fellow BLM founders are “trained Marxists.”
In the video, Cullors is interviewed by Jared Ball of the Real News Network and discusses the direction of the BLM movement.
“The first thing, I think, is that we actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers,” she 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.”
In previous interviews in 2018, while promoting her then-new book titled, “When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir,” Cullors describes her introduction to and affinity for Marxist ideology.
In an interview with Democracy Now!, Cullors describes how she became a trained organizer with the Labor/Community Strategy Center, calling it her “first political home” and the center’s director, Eric Mann, her personal mentor.
She told The Politic that it was there that she was trained from her youth and grew as a leader.
The Labor/Community Strategy Center describes it’s philosophy as “an urban experiment,” utilizing grassroots organizing to “focus on Black and Latino communities with deep historical ties to the long history of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, pro-communist resistance to the U.S. empire.”
The center teaches and studies the history of the “Indigenous rebellions against the initial European genocidal invasions,” the “Great Slave Haitian Revolution of the 1790s,” and the “Great Slave Rebellions that won the U.S. civil war for the racist north.”
The center also expresses its appreciation for the work of the U.S. Communist Party, “especially Black communists,” as well as its support for “the great work of the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, Young Lords, Brown Berets, and the great revolutionary rainbow experiments of the 1970s,” while flaunting its roots in the new communist movement.
Speaking with ACLU’s At Liberty weekly podcast, Cullors described the center as her “foundation,” claiming it was there that she developed the skills which helped her found the Black Lives Matter movement, after having been recruited by its director, Eric Mann.
By JOSHUA KLEIN
