Domestic terrorismBaton Rouge gunman was a member of black “sovereign citizen” group
Gavin Long, the 29-year old former Marine who on Saturday killed three Baton Rouge police officers, was a member of a black antigovernment sovereign citizen group whose members believe they are indigenous to the United States and beyond the reach of the federal government. Members of the Washitaw Nation believe that they are descendants of black people who occupied the North American continent tens of thousands of years before white Europeans arrived, and, therefore, they fall outside federal authority.
"Sovereign" Washitaw nation a Mardi Gras // Source: commons.wikimedia.org
Gavin Long, the 29-year old former Marine who on Saturday killed three Baton Rouge police officers, was a member of a black antigovernment sovereign citizen group whose members believe they are indigenous to the United States and beyond the reach of the federal government.
The Kansas City Star reports that Long, who also used the name Cosmo Setepenra, last year filed documents with Jackson County, Kansas, declaring himself an antigovernment “sovereign citizen” and a member of the United Washitaw de Dugdahmoundyah Mu’ur Nation.
The document included a “live claim birth” record in which he changed his name to Cosmo Ausar Setepenra.
The Washitaw had an on-and-off collaborative relationship with the Nation of Islam.
The Star notes that Long, in many YouTube videos, social media postings, and a book he self-published, gave expression to an all-consuming anger about legal authorities violating the natural law of man — a theme which is common to sovereign citizen groups.
In a video posted on a YouTube channel called “I Am Cosmo” last year, Long ranted against police conduct. “They’re trying to say that the war is being waged against the police when in fact the war is against the people, everybody,” Long said. “It’s against the people.”
The SPLC says that members of “Moorish” sovereign citizen group and other African Americans have for years been taking up the ideas of the antigovernment “sovereign citizen” movement — a movement whose adherents believe they are outside the reach of most law. The sovereign citizen’s conspiratorial belief system was originally determinedly anti-black, but the racist roots of the movement have become marginalized among as more black Americans have married the movement’s major tenets with selective interpretations of the teachings of pioneer black nationalist Noble Drew Ali, who founded the exclusively black Moorish Science Temple of America (MSTA) nearly 100 years ago.
The SPLC notes, though, that the Washitaw Nation, of which Long was once a member, is something different, as it employs pseudo-legal language and theories of “common law” — an ideology developed by American white supremacists in the 1970s and 1980s.
The Washitaw are not white supremacists, and in the bizarre language the group’s leader, a woman named Verdiacee Turner — who called herself Empress Verdiacee “Tiari” Washitaw-Turner Goston El-Bey — decedents of the “Ancient Ones,” the “black ones,” occupied the North American continent tens of thousands of years before white Europeans arrived. Therefore, they fall outside federal authority.
“No doubt at all,” J .J. MacNab, an author who for two decades has been tracking anti-government extremists. “He’s 100 percent sovereign citizen,” MacNab told the Star.
“This group [the Washitaw Nation] believes that they are indigenous to the continent and therefore above all federal, state, and local laws,” said MacNab, who also is a fellow at George Washington University’s Center for Cyber and Homeland Security. “These documents show Long’s attempt to separate his flesh and blood ‘indigenous’ self from his legal entity self.”
Federal authorities consider the sovereign citizen movement a domestic terrorist threat.
