'Black Foot Soldiers' Blog Network Cheers Murders of Police Officers
A network of bloggers that may include the remnants of a black supremacist religious cult is savaging police around the nation
On Nov. 29, 2009, a fugitive identified by police as Maurice Clemmons walked into a Lakewood, Wash., coffee shop and shot four police officers to death execution-style. Two days later, Clemmons was shot to death by a Seattle police officer.
The shocking case made national headlines, mostly scrutinizing former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, whose decision to reduce Clemmons' 108-year prison sentence for a string of felonies during his teen years led to the convict's release in 2000. But the case also generated a second controversial story line: While most people were saddened by the tragedy, one shadowy group of extreme fanatics cheered the officers' deaths.
The day after Clemmons died, two blogs — The Last Crusade and Black Male Felon — announced that the Seattle chapter of a little-known organization called the National Black Foot Soldiers Network (NBFSN) would hold a rally to celebrate Clemmons as a "Crowned BOW (Black on White) martyr" who did his part to destroy the "white terror racist police regime."
The story raced through the blogosphere, where outraged writers — including nationally syndicated right-wing columnist Michelle Malkin, who wove the announcement into a baseless screed accusing the political left of launching a "War on Cops" — sounded off.
There was no rally. It's possible no one had ever seriously contemplated one. While the NBSFN is memorable for its bloodthirsty rhetoric, it's unclear what kind of a street presence it is capable of mounting. Several requests to the network for comment went unanswered by press time. But at a minimum, what the critics had run across was one tentacle of a sprawling network of viciously anti-white black nationalist bloggers whose forte is celebrating the deaths of white people and police officers.
Black Male Felon is one of at least 18 blogs in the National Black Foot Soldiers Network bearing such names as Shittycop, Amerikkka the Beautiful, Ultraviolet Holocaust and Mass Media Killers. The authors use pseudonyms such as "Slaughter Lightfoot," "Creaux Steele" and "Antioch Hades." Even the network itself goes by multiple names: National Black Foot Soldiers Network, the New Day Nigrescent Hebrew Pagans, Black Hebrew Pagans, the Yacub (or Yakub) Muslims, the Yacub 7 Ali Sun Worshipers and The Yacub 13 X Sun Worship Movement, among others.
By all appearances, the bloggers in the network are mainly involved in E-talk — but it's racially charged trash talk of the highest caliber. Their writings, usually styled as journalistic reporting or press releases, refer to a set of institutions, holy men, experts, and individuals that only rarely appear on the Internet. The ideology, such as it is, is a mish-mash of ideas drawn from the religious doctrines of various black nationalist groups of the past century. It is those ideas that provide a key clue as to the identity of those behind the NBFSN. They are likely the remnants of a group with a violent history.
God Damn America Day
The NBFSN lays out some of its thinking on Collective Underground, a site that links to several blogs in the network and says it is a part of the "Underprivileged Media Network." Among other things, NBSFN claims to be a "non religious movement whose mission and ideology are rooted in securing reparations for the unrestituted for crimes committed by America against the millions of descendants of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade."
The substance of the network's message can be distilled into four themes.
Whites owe reparations for centuries of oppressing blacks. Blacks who commit crimes against whites are sometimes referred to as "slave avengers" or "reparations protestors."
White police are "state commissioned racial terrorists." Black officers are viewed as race traitors.
The people who call themselves Jews today are actually impostors and "birthright thieves." Black people are the "real" descendants of the Hebrews of the Bible, the true chosen people. (This idea, commonly known as Black Hebrew Israelism, is widespread among black nationalist groups and is one of many that give the lie to the network's self-description as a "non religious movement.")
God hates white people and, in a 2012 cataclysm that the bloggers call the "Ultraviolet Holocaust," all whites will die. They declare that ultraviolet light — because of its link to skin cancer — "is the Fire of the 2nd Rapture of God." "The Sun of God," they say, "hates white people."
The bloggers certainly hate America. On its 2008 announcement of "God Damn America Day," memorializing New York City's police officers' accidental shooting of a young black man, the network offered a prayer including the lines, "Lord bless neither this land nor her people. Not even her itty bitty children are worthy to be saved. Won't you send another flood and wash them all away? … Let the sun stay in the sky, in fires let them fry."
God Damn America Day, the network claimed falsely, was endorsed by a host of prominent black individuals, including Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan (whose black supremacist theology does contain some similarities to the network's but who does not celebrate cop killers and the like), activist Rev. Al Sharpton, former NAACP Chairman (and current Southern Poverty Law Center board member) Julian Bond, liberal radio host Tom Joyner, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — who died 40 years before allegedly "signing off" on the festivities.
The God Damn America Day observance, like the Clemmons celebration, never happened.
'DEAD AT LAST!'
Of the blogs in the NBFSN, Shittycop most often catches the public's attention; it is where the pseudonymous Creaux Steele aggregates the network's "press releases" celebrating the deaths of law enforcement officers. These writings never explicitly call for violence — in fact, Shittycop states that it "does not advocate violence or hatred. Shitty Cop advocates justice." They prefer to rejoice in their purported enemies' demise after the fact.
One example: Victor Decker was a 25-year-old bicycle patrol officer in Norfolk, Va., who was murdered by an unknown assailant in 2010. About a year and a half earlier, Decker had killed 19-year-old suspect Marlon D. Sanders during a shootout that Sanders initiated. Sanders was black. Decker was white.
After Decker's death, Shittycop took the opportunity to dance on his grave: "Norfolk's 2009 Pig Of Year, Racist Police Regime Terrorist Victor Decker OUT OF THERE! 'DEAD AT LAST! DEAD AT LAST! THANK GOD ALMIGHTY, HE'S DEAD AT LAST!' … 'F--- Decker Funeral Protest Party' Reportedly 'In Works.'"
Another example: St. Petersburg, Fla., police officer David S. Crawford was fatally shot while responding to a call about a suspicious person this February. A grand jury has indicted 16-year-old Nicholas Lindsay, who is black, for first-degree murder. Crawford was white.
Shittycop crowed the day after Crawford died: "Another One Bites The Dust! … Let Us Show The City, County & State No Respect As They Mourn This Devil Dressed As Pig Death & Introduce Them To N------ & The Ghetto on the Day of His Funeral."
On the ground, no funeral protest materialized.
Coming to Nuwaubia
Although there may be many NBFSN bloggers, there are certain features of their writings — capitalizing every letter in their headlines, referring to themselves by colorful noms de plume, calling their faith by multiple names, and most of all, their heterodox, pseudo-Islam-themed theology — that are common and point to a common source.
They are, in fact, trademarks of a man who has over the years used dozens of names including Malachi Z. York, As Sayyid Isa al Haadi al Mahdi, Chief Black Eagle, and many more. At various times he has claimed to be a space alien, a prophet, and God in the flesh.
To the law, however, he is a federal inmate named Dwight York, currently serving a 135-year sentence for multiple counts of child molestation, racketeering, and other crimes. For more than four decades, York served as supreme leader of the Ansaaru Allah Community (AAC), a black separatist cult that came to be known as the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors in the 1990s, when many of its members moved from New York to a rural Georgia compound.
The bloggers do not explicitly identify themselves as followers of York, a former Black Panther who had already done three years in prison when he founded AAC in Brooklyn in 1970. There is an "official" Nuwaubian website, Nuwaubianfacts.com, but the NBFSN does not appear to link to it directly.
Still, allusions to York's highly unusual theology are sprinkled through the network, and there is plentiful use of his distinct phraseology. Based loosely on the teachings of the Nation of Islam, the religion is a concoction of elements plucked from myriad versions of black nationalist theology, plus a large dose of York's own musings on life and the universe. A central tenet of Nuwaubianism — like the ideologies of NBFSN and other black nationalist formations including Farrakhan's Nation of Islam — is that whites are the devil incarnate.
The Nuwaubians remained in New York through the early 1990s, when an FBI report accused the group members of participating in a spectrum of criminal activity including trafficking in narcotics, arson for profit, bank robbery, illegal weapons purchases and "muscling" their way into security contracts with businesses in tough parts of New York City.
Around the same time, rumors that York was sexually abusing the women and children among his followers started a "mass exodus" from the AAC, one of his grown children, identified only as "Jacob," told the Intelligence Report in 2002. Also, the FBI began looking into the suspicious 1979 murder of a Brooklyn community leader who'd spoken out against York and the cult.
With the heat rising in New York, York and many of his remaining followers relocated to sparsely populated Putnam County, Ga. For a time, the locals considered them odd but harmless — York's minions would hand out flyers proclaiming their leader a savior from the Planet Rizq who would lead the "chosen ones" back to his home galaxy on May 5, 2000, to escape Planet Earth before its destruction. But the group also had earthly aspirations: Claiming to be an indigenous tribe called the Yamassee Native American Moors of the Creek Nation, it applied for a casino license, only to be rejected. Undaunted, York's followers then began calling themselves the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors and started to erect Egyptian pyramids and statuary at their compound, which they called Tama-Re.
A zoning battle broke out in 1997 when the sheriff tried to shut down an illegal club at Tama-Re. The Nuwaubians countersued and played the race card, handing out flyers to passersby. "The Whites in Putnam County Hate Blacks," screeched one. Using York's trademark capitalization, it spelled out the Nuwaubians' plan to strike back: "We Want Revenge! Because Our People Have Been Unjustly Hurt, We Will Make Sure That They And Theirs Are Hurt."
In 2001, a second "mass exodus" began. Aided by York's son Jacob, women and children left the Nuwaubian compound and told authorities about years of serial psychological and sexual abuse at the hands of their spiritual leader. In May 2002, authorities arrested York, charging him with 116 counts, mostly for child molestation and illegal weapons possession. York was convicted in 2004 and is incarcerated in Florence, Colo., at the U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility — Supermax. The Tama-Re compound was eventually sold at a government forfeiture auction and all the Egyptian accoutrements bulldozed.
Melanoma and the Third Eye
There is a case to be made that the NBFSN — the bloggers of Shittycop, Collective Underground, And God Made Light, Waldorf Caruthers, The 4th Angel, Black Male Felon, Ghetto Bragging Rights and countless others, along with whoever may stand behind them — are remnants of the Nuwaubians, or at least Nuwaubian-inspired. Many of the Nuwaubians slipped below the radar after York's fall from grace, leaving Georgia for points unknown.
The network is replete with images from the Nuwaubian Holy Tablets, which York claims is a "renewed" translation of the Torah, Scripture, the Koran, and the Book of the Dead that he undertook in order to give his followers "guidance from this to the next world and on." Much of the pseudo-scientific jargon used to explain NBSFN's beliefs precisely matches that of the Nuwaubians.
Though claiming to be secular, the NBFSN links to blogs promulgating Nuwaubian race theory. Collective Underground cites Fard Muhammad, reputed founder of the Nation of Islam, as the source of its information: "When Moses (who was black) found whites in the Caucasus Mountains they didn't bathe, had sex with animals, didn't know what fire was, were having sex with their parents and children and eating raw meat," it reads.
Not all of the bloggers' beliefs adhere to known Nuwaubian theology, however — and most of those elements are in any case shared with many other black nationalist religious doctrines. The NBFSN writers, for instance, boast about their ability to conduct "melanoma executions," in which they claim to inflict melanomas on white people with merely a look by focusing ultraviolet light through an invisible third eye.
Andy Caress of Cincinnati, who was 24 when he died of melanoma last Aug. 4, spent his last years building Mela-KNOW-More, a foundation devoted to educating people about melanoma prevention. Four days after his death, the NBFSN blog And God Made Light crowed, "THE ANDY CARESS MELANOMA EXECUTION: 'IT IS COMPLETE;' Cincinnati Yakub Muslims Praise Completion Of Skin Sinner's Execution, Condemn 'Mela-Know-More' Foundation, Admonish Whites: 'Learn Laws Of New Sun Of God Era & Apply For Mercy.'"
Other than dying of melanoma — and being white — it is not clear what "offense" Caress committed against black people.
Identifying the 'Foot Soldiers'
The late David Mills, a popular blogger whose online handle was "Undercover Black Man," identified the pattern of unique terms referenced by the NBFSN blogs and concluded they were a hoax perpetrated by someone trying to provoke whites into hating blacks. Mills, a former newspaper reporter and Emmy-winning writer for HBO's "The Wire," devoted substantial effort to exposing them, and several times exchanged angry words online with various members of the network, who were especially enraged when they learned that he was black.
After Mills died from an aneurism in 2010, a post on one network blog implied that Mills, though black, was essentially white and had earned his early demise. "David Mills' soul got blue eyes," it said.
The NBFSN also has been much discussed on white nationalist hate sites. Members of Stormfront, the Web's largest white racist forum, seem to agree with Mills' theory, while posters on the racist and anti-Semitic Vanguard News Network believe the blogs are created by Jews as a way to foment tension between blacks and whites.
These theories seem dubious at best. Far more likely, judging from the scant evidence available on their websites, the people who make up the NBFSN are drawn from the world of racist black nationalism.
In fact, it seems very likely that they include many of the hundreds of Nuwaubians who largely disappeared from view after their leader's imprisonment. They also may well include former followers of Yahweh ben Yahweh, a terrifying cult leader who was convicted of conspiracy to murder white people as an initiation rite at his Florida-based Nation of Yahweh, which reportedly once owned properties around the country valued at $100 million. Since his death in 2007, hundreds of his followers in the U.S. and Canada have dropped out of sight as well.
Whether they are active Nuwaubians, people drawn from other black supremacist cults like the Nation of Yahweh, or freelancers who have created an entirely new concept, the National Black Foot Soldiers Network has brought Dwight York's apocalyptic hatred of whites into the 21st century. York, whose release isn't scheduled until the 22nd century, would be proud.
