Black people formed one of the largest militias in the US. Now its leader is in prosecutors' crosshairs.
Will Carless and Alain Stephens, USA TODAY
Fri, October 8, 2021, 9:55 AM
In late July 2020, as Louisville, Kentucky, fumed in the wake of Breonna Taylor’s killing in a botched police raid, a militia group descended on the city.
A phalanx of hundreds of Black men and women, all clad in black, marched through downtown. Some wore body armor, others had gas masks. They wore pistols on their belts and carried shotguns and AR-15-style rifles.
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https://www.thetrace.org/It was the latest rally of the Not Fucking Around Coalition, an armed group that says it’s dedicated to protecting Black lives from police brutality. And it got the attention of experts who track extremist movements.
“It was the biggest public display by an armed militia I have ever seen,” said J.J. MacNab, a fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism who has studied the militia movement for 25 years. “Nobody was expecting that.”
A year later, NFAC, as the group is known, was back in Louisville. Its leader, Grandmaster Jay, whose real name is John Fitzgerald Johnson, retained the cocky, steel-eyed confidence that has made him a messiah to tens of thousands of Black Americans. 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.
This time there was no march before a cheering crowd. The guns were nowhere to be seen. Grandmaster Jay’s troops had shrunk to a small crew of loyalists.
NFAC members kneel during a march near Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky., on Sept. 5, 2020. NFAC provided protection as people marched to the Kentucky Derby to call for justice in the death of Breonna Taylor, who was shot by Louisville police officers during a no-knock raid at her apartment on March 13, 2020.Everyone there knew why: Months after a second rally in Louisville, Grandmaster Jay had been charged with “assaulting, resisting or impeding” officers while brandishing a firearm.
That September night, federal prosecutors say, Grandmaster Jay aimed his rifle at a group of officers conducting surveillance from a rooftop. He faces three to 27 years in prison if convicted of the charges.
Since he was arrested, the coronavirus pandemic has raged and the police reform movement has cooled. A judge has barred Grandmaster Jay from possessing a gun while he awaits trial. He can’t access social media, cutting him off from perhaps a more powerful weapon.
Andrew Peckat
No longer can he use his twice-daily Instagram shows to rouse hundreds of troops with impassioned calls to arms. Instead, he relies on phone calls and emails.
Grandmaster Jay won’t talk much about what happened that night, though he said he had a flashlight mounted to his rifle, which he usually carries pointed upward. He maintains he’s just the latest Black leader to pick up a gun, only to be quickly targeted by a federal government with a history of suppressing African American groups that dare to challenge the status quo.
“You put me back in the cave,” he said in an interview with USA TODAY and The Trace. “It was a methodology used to silence a very powerful voice in the world.”
Though his organization has marched peacefully and respectfully, he said, mostly white groups have intimidated protesters and barged into government buildings carrying weapons, with little interference from police.
Complete story (long), and numerous pics at
https://news.yahoo.com/black-people-formed-one-largest-090107734.html 
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