Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors lamented that the Communist Party in the U.S. has been “systemically destroyed and decimated” while speaking at a 2015 panel hosted by Harvard Law School.
Unearthed by The National Pulse, the clip comes from a panel on “Globalizing Ferguson: Racialized Policing and International Resistance” hosted by the prestigious law school’s Human Rights Program.
Cullors, who recently announced her resignation from the Black Lives Matter (BLM) Global Network Foundation, described how “the state has organized to dismantle movements” including the Communist Party and the civil rights movement. Cullors repeatedly references both “movements: – including the Communist Party – using first-person pronouns:
“I think the state has organized itself to dismantle movements in this country. There was a robust Communist Party. There was a robust human rights and civil rights movement, the Panther Party, and we have been systematically destroyed and decimated.
“So I think it’s important to understand what has happened in this country and the ways in which the state has consciously and purposefully destroyed our movements,” Cullors, a self-declared “trained Marxist,” adds.
The BLM co-founder also explicitly rejects the “civil rights establishment,” insisting she is focused on organizing with “all poor people”:
And so we are literally left with the civil rights establishment, which is not a movement, which is often co-opted by police and elected officials, and many of us are trying to rebuild a human rights movement that is centered around fighting anti-black racism and centered around organizing and building with poor people, all poor people.”
Cullors criticizes the failures of far-left nonprofit work, noting “we get stuck in funder-driven traps, and we get stuck in really liberal narratives, and we don’t actually fight the things that are going to ultimately free us.”
