Donations to Black Lives Matter UK Top £1m
By Tuesday afternoon, six days after launching a fundraising drive, Black Lives Matter UK (BLMUK) had raised more than £750,000. Money pledged to other groups, including organizations helping black people with their mental health, providing legal assistance for protesters and holding memorials for loved ones who have died from Covid-19, took the total figure to more than £1m.
A spokesman for BLMUK said: “BLMUK have been overwhelmed and greatly touched by the generosity of communities and individuals across the country. We have received messages from small villages and towns organising fundraisers, workplaces or community organizations and black parents desperately concerned about the safety of their children. The safety of the people protesting is our priority and we are working with other groups to ensure this.
“In the longer term, we will take our time in making carefully considered plans about how these donations can be best invested into the black communities that need them most.”
The group, which is not a registered charity, said the funds would go towards a number of aims including advocacy to effect changes in the law, developing and distributing educational resources, healing practices in black communities, police monitoring, strategies for the abolition of the police and supporting the United Family and Friends Campaign to help friends and loved ones of people killed by British police to access justice.
It said it was organizing “in the black radical tradition, using political education, direct action and political leadership toward black liberation”.
On the fundraising page, BLMUK says it understands “questions about our transparency” and will provide more information soon.
Other organizations that have raised significant sums, grouped together under a special “We Stand Together: Help Support the Fight Against Racism” page on GoFundMe, include Black Minds Matter UK, which had pledges of more than £290,000 towards its aim of linking black people with certified black mental health practitioners. The Black LGBTQIA+ therapy fund had raised almost £50,000, and the Black Protest Legal Support UK fund more than £45,000, against a target of just £300.
In an article for the Voice, Boris Johnson acknowledged the “incontrovertible, undeniable feeling of injustice, a feeling that people from black and minority ethnic groups do face discrimination: in education, in employment, in the application of the criminal law.”
He wrote: “And we who lead and who govern simply can’t ignore those feelings because in too many cases, I am afraid, they will be founded on a cold reality.”
But he condemned those who have flouted physical distancing rules to attend protests during a “time of national trial”.
On Tuesday there was criticism that he had not gone far enough in addressing the grievances of the BLMUK movement.
Simon Woolley, the director of Operation Black Vote and chair of the Downing Street race disparity unit’s advisory group, said: “I’m pleased that he’s using Britain’s black newspaper to speak to black Britain. But, whilst an acknowledgement of racism within our society is to be welcomed, the real deal is having a plan to effectively deal with it – and that was missing.”
BLMUK was created in 2016, and its cause has been given renewed attention following the US police killing of George Floyd.
Source: The Guardian
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