The leader of a Black militia known as the Not Fucking Around Coalition was arrested on federal charges at his Ohio home on Thursday, WHAS11 reports.
John Fitzgerald Johnson, also known as Grandmaster Jay, is facing charges of "assaulting, resisting or impeding certain officers" after allegedly pointing his rifle at U.S. Secret Service and Louisville Metro Police Department officers during a protest on September 4.
The authorities claim that Jay pointed his AR rifle at officers stationed on a rooftop above a protest in Louisville's Jefferson Square Park. They claim that when they went to look down on a gathering of less than 10 NFAC members at the protest they were "blinded by a light which they shortly thereafter determined was a flashlight mounted to the rifle." The officers also allege that none of the men on the ground appeared afraid of them as probable cause in their complaint. They write that none of the men "appear[ed] to be alarmed or concerned about their safety" upon seeing the police on the rooftop.
Johnson was identified using surveillance footage and LMPD officers said they had notified Johnson of their presence on the rooftops ahead of the protests.
“Here in Kentucky we revere our First and Second Amendment freedoms, not foolishness which puts police and protesters at grave risk,” U.S. Attorney Russell Coleman said of the charges.
The relatively young NFAC has made headlines after appearances in Stone Mountain, GA and Louisville, KY to protest the unjust deaths of Black people. The former Army veteran Johnson said he sees his organization in the same vein as the Black Panthers, and that it's responding to a similar threat.
"We live in a world where racism is appearing to rear its ugly head again the way it did back in the Jim Crow days,” he said in an interview with Complex. “We didn’t create that. It recreated itself. So it proved to be fertile ground for the creation of the NFAC, the same way it was fertile ground in the ’60s to create the Black Panthers.”
Like the Panthers, Johnson is hoping the NFAC can self-police Black neighborhoods. It also contains a hint of Garveyism, in that Johnson hopes the organization will grow to a point where they can facilitate Black people who wish to leave the United States. Currently, Johnson describes the NFAC as an organization made up of "grown adults who are law-abiding citizens who are responsible gun owners who understand the Constitution.”
The 57-year-old activist and guns rights activist is facing down charges that carry a maximum of 20 years in prison.
