A devotee of anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan secured a senior role at Black Lives Matter Grassroots to lead "special projects" for the group as it prepares to resist President-elect Donald Trump’s second term.
Black Lives Matter Grassroots announced in a New Year's message to its supporters on Thursday that it hired Yonasda Lonewolf, a rapper and activist with close ties to Farrakhan, as a "special projects specialist" to help the group as it works to "claim victory over the white-supremacist systems designed to kill our people." Black Lives Matter Grassroots said in the message it would enter 2025 with "the revolutionary spirit of our Haitian forebears" and featured an image of Haitian revolutionaries in the early 1800s lynching French military officers.
Lonewolf doesn’t shy from her devotion to Farrakhan, who has praised Adolf Hitler as a "very great man" and casts Jews as "termites" and "enemies" who control black people. She professed her love for Farrakhan in a 2016 Facebook post and later, in a 2020 Instagram post, described the minister as "my grandfather Min. Farrakhan who also eased my spirit." In 2023, Lonewolf attended Farrakhan’s annual keynote address, where she told the ministry’s propaganda website that she felt "rejuvenated" by his message.
"We are all under attack right now, and it’s the fight against good and evil, at the end of the day," Lonewolf told the Final Call, the Nation of Islam's official publication. "The fact that we still have a great leader amongst us is a testament that he’s standing, that we need to be able to continue." Other Farrakhan devotees interviewed in that article praised the Nation of Islam leader's stand against "the Satanic Jews" and "the Jewish powers that be."
Black Lives Matter Grassroots is an offshoot of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the charity that raked in $80 million during the George Floyd riots in 2020. Black Lives Matter Grassroots broke away from the Global Network Foundation in 2022 after the latter faced intense blowback over using its windfall to purchase ritzy mansions and enrich the friends and family of its founder, Patrisse Cullors.
Black Lives Matter Grassroots now says the Global Network Foundation is run by "thieves" and that it was the rightful leader of the movement. It tried and failed to sue the Global Network Foundation for $10 million in 2022, with a California judge throwing out the lawsuit and ordering Black Lives Matter Grassroots to repay its progenitor’s legal fees of over $700,000.
The Global Network Foundation has since rebranded as an organization in an effort to put its financial misdeeds in the past, dedicating its efforts primarily to art, education, and culture with some on-the-ground organizing in the mix.
The rhetoric in Black Lives Matter Grassroots’s New Year’s message suggests it seeks to be the new standard bearer for the divisive protests that defined the movement during the first Trump administration. In addition to invoking the spirit of the Haitian revolution, which culminated in 1804 with a massacre of most of the European population in Haiti, Black Lives Matter Grassroots invoked the words of Angela Davis, a radical communist activist who was involved in a California terrorist attack in 1970 that left four people dead, including a judge. Davis owned the weapons used in the attack but was acquitted after spending a year in jail. And despite its rhetoric about the "thieves" running the Global Network Foundation, nepotism is alive and well at Black Lives Matter Grassroots.
The group also announced in its New Year's message that it hired Thandiwe Abdullah as a communications specialist. Abdullah is the daughter of Black Lives Matter Grassroots director Melina Abdullah, who in 2024 joined forces with independent presidential candidate Cornel West as his running mate.
West and Melina Abdullah came in a distant seventh, securing just over 81,000 votes. Fortunately for West, she hooked him up with a job on the board of Black Lives Matter Grassroots after their loss, the group revealed in its Thursday message.
Black Lives Matter Grassroots did not return a request for comment.