As protests erupted across the country in the name of Black Lives Matter, the group’s co-founder bought real estate and acquired four high-rise homes for $ 3.2 million in America alone, according to property records.
Patrice Khan-Cullors, 37, also looked at property in the Bahamas at an ultra-exclusive resort where Justin Timberlake and Tiger Woods both have homes, The Post has learned. According to a local agent, luxury apartments and townhouses at the Albany resort outside Nassau are between $ 5 million and $ 20 million.
The self-described Marxist bought a $ 1.4 million home on a secluded road a short drive from Malibu in Los Angeles last month, according to a report. The property of 2370 square meters features ‘rising ceilings, skylights and many windows’ overlooking the gorge. The Topanga Canyon homestead, which contains two houses on a quarter of an acre, is just one of three houses Khan-Cullors owns in the Los Angeles area, public records show.
Some co-activists were stunned by the revelations in real estate.
Hawk Newsome, head of Black Lives Matter Greater New York City, has called for an independent inquiry to find out how the global network spends its money.
“If you call yourself a socialist, you have to ask how much of her own money goes to charity,” he said. “It’s really sad because it makes people doubt the validity of the movement and the fact that it’s the people who carry this movement that is overlooked.”
Last year, Khan-Cullors and husband Janaya Khan dared Georgia to acquire a fourth home – a “custom farm” on 3.2 acres in Conyers with a private aircraft hangar with a studio apartment above it and the use of a 2 500 ft ‘A’ paved / grass’ community runway for small aircraft.
The two-bedroom, two-bathroom home, about 30 minutes from Atlanta, has an indoor pool and a separate “RV store” that can house the repair of a garage or small plane, according to the property listing.
The Peach State Refuge was purchased in January 2020 for $ 415,000, two years after the publication of Khan-Cullors’ best-selling memoir, “When They Call You a Terrorist.”
In October, the activist signed a multi-platform agreement with Warner Bros. Television Group signed on to help produce content for ‘historically marginalized black voices’, she said in a statement.
It is not known how many Khan-Cullors received in one of the two transactions.
Khan-Cullors started her shopping tour in LA in 2016, a few years after the civil rights movement, she started a hashtag – #blacklivesmatter – with co-activists Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, which started pulling worldwide.
That year, she bought a three-bedroom, 1.5-bathroom home in Inglewood for $ 510,000. It’s now worth almost $ 800,000. Khan-Cullors added her wife, the co-founder of Black Lives Movement in Canada, to the act in a family trust last year. The couple were married in 2016.
Two years later, in 2018, Khan-Cullors bought a four-bedroom home in South Los Angeles, a multi-ethnic neighborhood. Khan-Cullors paid $ 590,000 for the 1,725-square-foot home, though the price has since risen to $ 720,000, according to public records.
Three of the homes were purchased in Khan-Cullors’ name and the property in Topanga Canyon was purchased under a limited liability company that it controls, according to public records quoted by ‘Dirt’, the property blog that made the purchase on 30 March for the first time reported. .
Last year, Khan-Cullors and Khan were spotted in the Bahamas looking for a unit in Albany, a real estate source who did not want to be identified told The Post. The elite enclave is set on 600 acres and features a private marina and designer golf course. Current homes for sale include a nearly 8,000-square-foot townhouse in six bedrooms with a media room and marina views. The price is only available on request, according to the resort’s website.
“People who buy in Albany are buying their fourth or fifth home,” said a local worker who did not want to be identified. “It’s not a second home. It’s extremely high tide, and people come here for complete and total privacy. ”
While it is not clear whether Khan-Cullors bought a property on the island resort for the super-rich, her sheer interest shows just how far she came from the difficult Van Nuys neighborhood in LA, where she spent her childhood with two brothers spent. a younger sister.
In her memoirs, Khan-Cullors describes growing up in a housing project less than a mile from the affluent and largely white neighborhood of Sherman Oaks, a community of wide lawns and pools where ‘there is nothing that does not look pretty and well-groomed. “The four children were mostly raised by her single mother who worked 16 hours a day to support the family,” she writes.
When he was growing up, Khan-Cullors lived in a two-story brown building where the paint was peeling and where there was a gate that did not lock properly and an intercom system that never worked, ‘she writes. “The only place in my hood to buy groceries is a 7-Eleven.”
Khan-Cullors adopted activism and Marxism at a young age. “It started with the year I turned twelve,” she writes. “It was the year I learned that black and poor define me more as bright and hopeful and ready.”
But she only became nationally known in 2013, when she and two other activists protested against the innocent verdict against George Zimmerman, who shot dead Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager in Florida.
Black Lives Matter protests erupted again in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd in May, who died after a Minneapolis police officer knelt at his neck during his arrest.
Donations and promises from corporations and individuals plunged into the movement at that point. In February, the BLM non-profit co-founder Khan-Cullors told the AP that they had raised $ 90 million in 2020, with $ 21.7 million committed to providing funding and 30 black-led groups across the land to help.
According to the AP report, Black Lives Matter leaders would not specify how much money they took in from prominent donors.
It is also not clear how much Khan-Cullors earns in salary as one of the leaders of the movement, as the finances are divided among non-profit and for-profit entities and difficult to track down.
The nonprofit Oakland, California-based BLM Global Network Foundation, founded by Khan-Cullors and another activist, Kailee Scales, was incorporated in 2017, claiming to have chapters in the US, UK and Canada, and ‘ a mission to exterminate White. supremacy and the building of power to intervene in violence inflicted on black communities. The group has no federal tax exemption and donations are filtered by ActBlue Charities and Thousand Currents, two non-profit organizations that manage the cash.
At the same time that the Khan-Cullors took over the non-profit organization, she also set up the similar BLM Global Network, a for-profit organization that does not need to disclose how much it spends or pays to its executives. .
Some criticized the lack of transparency.
Newsome from BLM in NYC said: ‘We need black businesses and black accountants to go there and find out where the money is going. He added that his group did not receive any financial support from the BLM Global Network.
Neither Khan-Cullors nor BLM Global Network Foundation has commented.