Dream Of Being Chased And Hiding, Articles J

I had five MOSs, Jay said. For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. He faces three to 27 years in prison if convicted of the charges. John Fitzgerald Johnson in 2020 was employed in Alameda County and had annual salary of $352,845 according to public records. In certain cases in which white militia groups have confronted law enforcement directly such as the armed stand-off at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016 the feds have pounced on them. But Jay has loyal followers, maybe in spite of these eccentricities, and maybe because of them. Generous readers sustain our work. Nonetheless, the federal governments case against Grandmaster Jay follows a longstanding pattern of clampdowns on Black Americans who arm themselves. Johnson is nicknamed Grandmaster Jay. After basic training, the Army assigns every soldier a military occupational specialty, or MOS: 11B is an infantryman, 94S is a Patriot system repairer, 12K is a plumber. Some wore body armor, others had gas masks. Photos from the funeral show Jay wearing an Anglican-style clerical collar and holding Judy Scotts left arm. John Fitzgerald Johnson (Oldham County Detention Center). Laws, he told me, are just paper, and it is only reasonable that Black people arm and train themselves to act as an immediate bulwark against the continued human-rights abuses perpetrated against them. Wed spent an hour talking some sense, and a lot of nonsense; now the restaurant staff presented me with the bill and a doggie bag, and exiled us to the parking lot. number 02-2376 appellant John Fitzgerald Johnson appellee State of Florida note fbbe No. [16], Johnson stated that NFAC provided armed security for the sister of Rayshard Brooks at her request. Some people come to change the world, he said, and some come to end it all. The latter, he implied, are unwelcome in the NFAC and have to be screened out. Left: Grandmaster Jay (center) marches with members of NFAC in Louisville, Kentucky, on July 25, 2020, to protest the killing of Breonna Taylor. A woman who identified herself as "Debbie James, Esq." ONE Super Series Your tax-deductible donation to The Trace will directly support nonprofit journalism on gun violence and its effects on our communities. Despite multiple inquiries, local and federal police agencies did not provide any evidence that the group is tied to the property where he was arrested. The second event of NFACs Drop The Charges Weekend, a neighborhood picnic billed as Feed The People, was off to a slow start. When Grandmaster Jay walked into Millions Crab, a seafood joint in suburban Cincinnati, the waitstaff looked alarmed. In Germany, Jay was treated with the utmost respect, and he said he enjoyed a reprieve from the American racial hierarchy. If youre biracial, your father must be Black. The other criteria relate to recruits ability to arm themselves without attracting the attention of law enforcement. We aren't protesters, we aren't demonstrators. Hes a dangerous man, they say, who commands an army of agitators. 10th Aug 2015, 1:00am. Discriminatory policies emerged in the form of licensing schemes, bans on cheap weapons, and targeted policing as a means to disarm and terrorize Black communities. Right: A protester carries his rifle at the State Capitol in Lansing, Michigan, on April 30, 2020. . Jays military career, like most things about him, is strange. He is a former soldier, a failed political candidate, a hip-hop DJ, a rambling egotist, and a prolific self-promoter. Jay has terrible ideas, and in ordinary circumstances most people would identify them as crazy and reject them. In a Dec. 11 interview posted on YouTube, Johnson said he is fighting both cases. Patrick Cotter, a former federal prosecutor in Chicago who has practiced criminal law for 40 years, said this is where the governments case gets shaky. (Kemet, Jay explained, is the original name of Egypt, which means land of the Blacks.) A patch on Grandmaster Jays body armor bore the new nations initials, UBKN. Filipino MMA fighters Led by NFAC, he said in an interview, Black America should create its own nation a nation within a nation that could sue the United States government for reparations. In one of Jays videos, he tells his followers that he intends to meet each and every last one of you face-to-face, to conduct an interrogation to screen out fakes, wannabes, snakes, and spiders. Jay says he will swear people in after they have put your life on the line by standing armed in an NFAC formation, in a situation where other armed groups might start trouble. It also has organized armed marches in two towns in Georgia, Washington, D.C. and Lafayette, Louisiana, the documents say. Jay said, If I assemble 1 million legal guns, I have the fifth-largest ground army on the planet. He said that the NFAC was born out of the atmosphere created by Donald Trump, not out of a spiritual revelation. The moment of fealty, in a day marked by a sense of confusion and disappointment, provided an unfiltered window into how NFAC operates. John Fitzgerald Johnson, who also is known as Grandmaster Jay, is the enigmatic founder of the Not Fucking Around Coalition. Johnson, who is a leader of a Black militia, led the group through a march in the September 2020 Breonna Taylor protests in Louisville twice. You made a threat. (By contrast, aerial photos suggest that the white militiamen present that day could have fit in a small school bus.) Think of it in terms of alternate paths. He said that by stepping off this timeline into another timeline, you create a new reality. NFAC members kneel in the street during a march near Churchill Downs on Sept. 5, 2020, in Louisville, Kentucky. (Right-wingers, gun enthusiasts, and ex-military types on social media ridicule Jay for his and his followers poor weapons discipline.). Our team, our mission, our partners, and more. The Enquirer reached out to Johnson through two email addresses associated with him. Tommie Shelby, a professor of African American studies and philosophy at Harvard, noted that these ideas have precursors in Black political thought. These people are screaming our name while theyre resisting," he said, although no such screams have been independently documented. In one video, as alleged in a criminal complaint against him, he tells his followers to burn government officials homes and murder their children. They are a lightning rod that attracts opposing groups, and thats a recipe for conflict., We have a zero-incident record, Jay boasted, mostly accurately. If we cant get to you, were gonna go after your family members. In addition to the Bundy Ranch and Malheur stand-offs, the most recent example is the Jan. 6 insurrection, which has led to the arrest of dozens of members of illegal militias. Grandmaster Jay disavowed Wallace, saying he had left NFAC months before. According to a motion filed Dec. 18 in federal court by his public defender, Johnson has been producing two shows on Instagram, Factz over Feelingz and Morning Mental. His "livelihood depends in part on these productions," the motion says. His story, and the purpose of Not Fucking Around, became a little more clear, and a little less. No one was injured. Jay said he does not admire or imitate any Black activists from previous generationshe protested when I suggested a comparison to the Black Panthers, whose aesthetic the NFAC has obviously ripped offbut was quick to defend the Jamaican political thinker and activist Marcus Garvey, who called for Black self-sufficiency and attempted to found a homeland for Black people. We need our own military. You wont get that from me. He said he wasnt from the Midwest. He wore his trademark body armor and sunglasses in the summer heat and spoke grandly of self-defense, Black empowerment and the creation of a Black nation. That includes defending it. Johnson is the leader of the self-proclaimed militia, the No F****** Around Coalition, or NFAC, and accused of pointing a semi-automatic rifle at officers and a federal agent on top of a roof during protests in September 2020. This demonstration was sparked after United States Representative Clay Higgins made threats against protesters who showed up armed regarding the shooting of Trayford Pellerin at the hands of police. His investigations into auto sears, toy guns, and ghost guns for The Trace have led to congressional action. The officers allege that they were blinded by a flashlight attached to Grandmaster Jays rifle as he pointed it at them. The crime he is now charged with is a real onepointing guns at cops is illegal and wrongbut poor muzzle discipline and poor judgment are universal at armed protests, and I suspect that other armed protesters have performed equally negligent acts and gotten little more than a dirty look and a chewing out from the cops. He was indicted last year on federal . He previously lived in Virginia, USA and Maryland, USA. He won't be able to post instructional videos for some time, because of the social-media ban that was a condition of his bail. Johnson, 59, was found guilty of brandishing a firearm at state. In the late '70s and early '80s, John worked in Congress as a legislative aide to help strengthen Superfund and staff the Congressional Solar Energy Caucus. It was the latest rally of the Not Fucking Around Coalition, an armed group that says its dedicated to protecting Black lives from police brutality. The charges were eventually dropped. He lost to Donald Trump and concluded, like most independent candidates, that America had rigged politics against him. In August 2003, according to the affidavit, Jay entered Fort Bragg and threatened to kill his wife (who was also a soldier) and her platoon sergeant at a recognition ceremony. Jays disarming has occasioned a shift in his emphasis, if not tone. Eduard Folayang In a series of interviews, Grandmaster Jay refused to deviate to subjects he said were off limits. MYRON H. THOMPSON, UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE. "[10] He also stated that the formation was a response to a threat by the KKK to start shooting black people at 8 pm on the Fourth of July, 2020. But the transformation does not appear coincidental. Were watching. This strategic stand-down was not entirely voluntary, of course. He has also seemed to flirt with Holocaust denial. A judge has barred Grandmaster Jay from possessing a gun while he awaits trial. The officers didnt respond the way police officers are trained: by raising their weapons and informing the assailant to lower his gun, or shooting him, Cotter said. We don't threaten. (Many still believe this.) But Grandmaster Jay has no control over the case that has forced him to give up his gun and his online megaphone. Years before Johnson led the NFAC and called on his social media followers to stand up for the Black community, he served in the military and some knew him as a hip hop DJ and producer. [21] Louisville police in riot gear helped to facilitate the maintenance of space between the groups. We realize that our people need some type of protection because those folks that are being paid to protect us, in our perception, are not doing the job.. Ultimately, Jay calls for descendants of the Portuguese and Atlantic slave trade to separate themselves from others and create a Black ethnostate. He served in the Virginia National Guard before enlisting in the Army, where he served from 1990 until 1997, when he was honorably discharged. There were videos on YouTube in which Johnson responded to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, documents say. He led a crowd of tens of thousands across the Arthur Ravenel Bridge to protest the mass shooting. (A sample lyric from one of his hip-hop songs: They call you racist if you proud of your folks / But they be muting you now if you forget about the Holocaust!), Jays videos repeat several themes popular among anti-Semitic segments of the Black Hebrew Israelites, a religious movement known for noisy proselytizing and elaborate conspiracy theories. At some point he got married, though he refused to say more about his domestic life. When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. There is no parole in the federal system.. John Fitzgerald Johnson, also known as Grand Master Jay and John Jay Fitzgerald Johnson, claims leadership of the group and has stated that it is composed of "ex military shooters." Johnson served in the Virginia National Guard and the Army from 1989 to 2006, leaving at the rank of private. Plenty of Trump supporters believed that their man had a mystical ability to outwit his opponents and bend previously unbendable laws of politics. If he does go down, Grandmaster Jay said, he would be the latest in a long line of Black leaders struck down by a system that was biased against him from the start. He seldom smiles and talks in rapid, polished sentences, rounded off with quotes from philosophers, the Bible, and hip-hop. [31][32] He was later federally indicted the following year on February 24, 2021, and has since been found guilty. [11][12] In April 2021 Johnson expanded on this notion, telling The Atlantic that the intention of the NFAC was to establish the "United Black Kemetic Nation", a strictly black ethno-state. Though he seldom grants in-depth interviews, he gave access to USA TODAY and The Trace over a weekend marking the one-year anniversary of NFACs big moment in Louisville.In person, the former soldier, DJ and fringe presidential candidate is combative yet charismatic. ar18 80% lower; new england patriots coaching staff 2021; duna to kerbin transfer window Brave CF When John Fitzgerald Johnson was born on 9 March 1901, in Giles, Tennessee, United States, his father, Thomas Joseph Johnson, was 50 and his mother, Armenia Elizabeth Sandusky, was 27. A year later, NFAC, as the group is known, was back in Louisville. Learn how your comment data is processed. These laws are seldom enforced, however. When he met Americans overseas, they tended to interact with one another more as compatriots in exile than as the race enemies they might have been at home. The website says he "wasa veteran of the Hip Hop game since Day 1" and that he "made a name for himself in the Hip Hop Worldas a rapper, deejay, and producer. When I mentioned W. E. B. "[2], NFAC mandates that members have a concealed-carry permit or the ability to obtain one. His platform consisted of mostly liberal platitudes, with an emphasis on diversity, police reform, support for veterans, and action on climate changealmost indistinguishable, he said, from Bernie Sanderss. He talked about acquiring land from various African leaders and eventually being part of the United Nations. John Johnson (Latter Day Saints) (1778-1843), early Latter Day Saint and owner of the John Johnson Farm, a historical site in Mormonism. One way to understand the NFAC is to imagine what a paramilitary wing of the Black Hebrew Israelites would be like. He is a resident of Ohio, USA. At one point in our conversation, I thought I might have detected such a limit. Sign up for The Root's Newsletter. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. F. Scott Fitzgerald, in full Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, (born September 24, 1896, St. Paul, Minnesota, U.S.died December 21, 1940, Hollywood, California), American short-story writer and novelist famous for his depictions of the Jazz Age (the 1920s), his most brilliant novel being The Great Gatsby (1925). One man with NFAC ties has turned violent. In our conversation, though, he made no direct reference to the mass murder of Jews and others, or to the lessons of totalitarian fascism. That seemed an especially tough pill for this leader to swallow. but records show he served in the Virginia National Guard and the Army from 1989 . [13], In 2019, Johnson told the Atlanta Black Star that the organization was formed to prevent another Greensboro Massacre. Ultimate Fighting Championship Officials say he pointed an AR-15-style rifle at officers who were on the rooftop of a building, watching over a park where protesters had gathered. The tradition of armed resistance persisted even as the civil-rights movement succeeded by rejecting this fearful symmetry: Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin, and John Lewis showed that Black people without guns were much more formidable. John Fitzgerald Johnson found in 1830 United States Federal Census John Fitzgerald Johnson found in U.S. General Land Office Records, 1776-2015 John Fitzgerald Johnson found in U.S. General Land Office Records, 1776-2015 Potential photos and documents Daren Curtis Johnson Daren Curtis Johnson Daren Curtis Johnson Daren Curtis Johnson Floyd was killed as the nation was grappling with the frequency with which Black men die at the hands of police officers. US Army 1,309,239 followers 5d JRTC and Fort Polk . Most soldiers have just one MOS over the course of their career; once the Army trains a soldier, why go through the expense of training him again? China In Louisville, just two hours from where Jay and I sat, the NFAC first revealed the extent of its capabilities. [27] Johnson along with other speakers gave speeches at the Parc San Souci, urging members to continue protesting. Died: 3 August, 2015, in Newmarket, Suffolk, aged 63. He attained the rank of sergeant, went absent without leave just over a year later, then escaped court martial by getting out of the Army a third time, again under other-than-honorable conditions, and again reduced to private. In 2003, he was federally arrested and convicted of entering a military property, a misdemeanor, according to records. This story has been updated to include additional details about Grandmaster Jays public statements. He managed to get his name on 47 state ballots. One of NFACs female members had reported a sexual advance from a man in the group, and Grandmaster Jay was having none of it. and said she isa member of NFAC, declined to comment on Johnsons behalf. His life. Pre First World War and general: Annotated copies of published Army Lists recording officers' services from 1754-1900, WO 65 - WO 66. A look at Black militia group police say is connected to suspected shooter of Daytona officer", "Daytona officer shooting suspect Othal Wallace captured: What we know", "Man wanted for shooting Daytona Beach officer in the head captured near Atlanta", "Member of New Black Panther Splinter Group Suspected of Shooting Cop in Head", Israelite School of Universal Practical Knowledge, Historically black colleges and universities, Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), National Black Chamber of Commerce (NBCC), Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL), Black players in professional American football, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Not_Fucking_Around_Coalition&oldid=1142363417, African and Black nationalism in the United States, Paramilitary organizations based in the United States, Political organizations established in 2017, Postcivil rights era in African-American history, All Wikipedia articles written in American English, Articles lacking reliable references from June 2021, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, John Fitzgerald Johnson (Grand Master Jay), Established to protect, self-police, and educate Black communities on firearms and their constitutional rights, This page was last edited on 2 March 2023, at 00:24. [2] He was an independent candidate for U.S. president in 2016[8] and has stated: "We are a Black militia. Ive seen for myself, he said. John Jay Fitzgerald Johnson aka: Grand master jay, John Johnson, John Fitzgerald. I counted 28 rows of seven before I stopped counting. Grandmaster Jay chooses his words more carefully since he was indicted. Right: Grandmaster Jay (left) and members of NFAC prepare for the event. George Floyd Jakarta He showed up during uprisings following various outrages, such as the murder of nine parishioners at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, by a white supremacist. It was a methodology used to silence a very powerful voice in the world.. Twenty-twenty is a great example. They expected to be led by a commander who preaches radical separatism, and who will swagger with an AR-15 in public and boast that his snipers can bisect a white militiamans head from 1,000 yards away. Georgia The filtered water must have lowered his inhibitions, because over the next two hours Jay became more garrulous. Looking back at the stories we told, and which stuck with us, during an eventful year. After his final discharge, Jay disappeared for several years. After the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, overtly racist legislation was replaced with other means to deter Black communities from arming themselves. John Fitzgerald Johnson, known to many as the influential producer and rapper "Grand Master Jay," was arrested at his home and charged by federal agents Thursday, according to the Department. That September night, federal prosecutors claim, Grandmaster Jay aimed his rifle at a group of officers conducting surveillance on a rooftop. American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) rose to prominence as a chronicler of the jazz age. This is the worry of those who monitor domestic extremist threats: If you recruit an army, equip it to fight, and range it as infantry across from other armed groups, one shot could ignite a skirmish and perhaps turn downtown Louisville into Baghdad for an afternoon. John Fitzgerald Johnson was a 2016 independent candidate for president. North Carolina [33][34] In November 2022, he was sentenced to 7 years and 2 months in prison along with 3 years of supervision after completion of the term. Beyond his incendiary speeches, Grandmaster Jay has drawn fire for pejorative comments, includingantisemitism. He is a Army Vet SGT w/ jump wings. But Jay told me that when he floated Wyoming to his followers, their response was: Hell nonobody wants to go to Wyoming. (Shelby notes that the desire to establish a Black homeland on American territory likewise has a long history, showing up in Harry Haywoods book Negro Liberation in the 1940s and the Republic of New Afrika movement in the 60s and 70s.). Plus: How to contact us. You put me back in the cave, he said in an interview with USA TODAY and The Trace. Following the Louisville protests, Johnson was said to have pointed his AR-15 rifle toward a roof where a Secret Service agent, an FBI agent, and three local officers had been stationed. We don't come to sing, we don't come to chant. In an interview, he denied being antisemitic. The FBI provided photos of the moments that's now got Johnson fighting felonies. (I wonder how many of them regard Jays fraudulent past the way Trump supporters regard the former presidentsi.e., if such a clown could get this far, he must have divine favor.)