Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King tripled income despite his group’s revenue tumbling
Gabe Kaminsky
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Black Lives Matter movement activist Shaun King received a tripled income in 2021 from his social justice advocacy group despite the entity seeing its revenues plummet by almost 60%, records show.
King pulled an over $268,000 salary in 2021 from the Grassroots Law Project, while his media company called the North Star was paid $60,000 for email lists, following his roughly $104,000 pay in 2020, according to tax records and the Washington Free Beacon. The surge in cash to King, an ex-2020 presidential campaign surrogate for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), comes as the nonprofit group he chairs saw its revenues decrease in 2020 from over $6.6 million to $2.6 million in 2021, filings show.
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The decline in Grassroots Law Project’s cash flow is a snippet into how social justice causes have received increasingly less financial support than immediately after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, which saw corporations and celebrities handing millions of dollars to groups such as the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. Between 2021 and 2022, the BLM charity’s revenues tumbled by 88% as the group faces legal and ethical scrutiny over alleged financial mismanagement, tax filings show.
Grassroots Law Project alleged that “white supremacy, bigotry, greed, and corruption are at the center of police violence and mass incarceration.” The organization, which lists a San Francisco, California, address on tax filings, said that it “helped ensure” former Minneapolis, Minnesota, police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted for murdering Floyd in May 2020.
King has come under fire in recent years in connection to financial matters, including from Samaria Rice, the mother of a 12-year-old black boy named Tamir Rice, who was shot and killed in 2014 by a Cleveland, Ohio, police officer. In 2021, Samaria Rice accused King of profiting off her son’s death. An activist named Keisha N. Blain, who worked with King prior, has labeled him “a liar & a fraud,” while another activist named DeRay McKesson has alleged that King is “running a long con” through his groups.
However, King has denied that there is legitimacy to allegations about him engaging in mismanagement or fraud.
From 2020 to 2021, Grassroots Law Project’s assets went from over $4 million to over $1.8 million, according to tax filings. The group dished out over $2.1 million in salaries in 2021 — a 50% increase from the year prior.
Revelations concerning the project’s 2021 revenue come after King was outed last year for paying over $40,000 for a designer guard dog to stave off “white supremacists” with funds from his political action committee. Later, King threatened to dox and inflict “pain” on a pair of New York Post journalists for reporting on him.
“I know where you live. Where you used to live. Where your family lives. Where they work,” King posted on Instagram, referring to writers Kevin Sheehan and Isabel Vincent. “And a few thousand other people know now as well.”
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“You motherf***ers that won’t leave me and my wife and kids alone … I’m about to return this pain back to you,” King also posted.
Grassroots Law Project did not return a request for comment.