CHICAGO – On the 74th day of his 100-day rooftop vigil to build a community center designed to provide opportunities to his community, Pastor Corey Brooks wished to share his thoughts on Black Lives Matter and Booker T. Washington
What follows has been lightly edited. We strongly encourage you to watch the accompanying video so you may hear the pastor in his own words.
Cancel me, do whatever the heck you want, but I’m always going to state the truth. And the truth today is that Black Lives Matter exploited the death of George Floyd and made millions off what they call the pain of black people. This is simply reprehensible.
I just read the Washington Examiner report that said millions are unaccounted for after all of the original three Black Lives Matter leaders quit. The amount given was $60 million. $60 million. I believe it was far more. If there is no accountability with the BLM board, and if there is such shadiness within the organization over all this money, then you can bet there’s even more money that’s being hid.
What angers me is how disrespectful and how selfish BLM is. They claim to care more about black people than anyone, but where the heck are they? I don’t see them around here. Believe me, we got plenty of work around here, and we would have no problem putting them to work. If Black Lives Matter really matters, then why aren’t they here? Do they not see the same weekly headlines that we all see?
What makes me especially mad is that we have had blacks like these who milked black pain for money ever since we came out of slavery. We called them trickster figures. When Booker T. Washington wrote these words over 100 years ago, he was describing BLM:
"There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs—partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs."
Let me repeat: "Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances."
Let that sink in, folks. You know who they are talking about? The folks right here. Right here in these streets. They want these folks to stay beaten down and downtrodden. They want to hold up the very people whose lives I’ve been trying to improve everyday for the last 20 years, and they want to hold these people up to Americans and say, see how bad you treat us, give us money.
That’s what Black Lives Matter does — while buying houses for themselves all over America!
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That article even said that BLM folks dropped nearly $26,000 for "meetings" at a Malibu resort. Dang, it hurts to say the word Malibu when I’m freezing my butt off in Chicago, trying to raise awareness for the real problems that my people are going through.
It shames me to see brothers and sisters exploiting our pain. It truly does. Let that be a dark mark on the heads of BLM. That jig is up.
Meanwhile, the work continues here everyday. We continue to mentor, we continue to counsel, we continue to offer pathways to opportunities, and we will never stop doing that. God Bless.
Follow along as Fox News checks in Pastor Corey Brooks each day with a new Rooftop Revelation.
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Eli Steele is a documentary filmmaker and writer. His latest film is "What Killed Michael Brown?" Twitter: @Hebro_Steele.
Camera by Terrell Allen.