Two Alabama Black Lives Matter activists accused of setting a shopping cart on fire as part of a protest against the fatal police shooting of a young Black man have been charged with conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, in what one supporter calls a “railroading.”
The federal charge unveiled as part of a superseding indictment against Mercutio Southall, 41, and Lillian Colburn, 26, alleges that the pair committed terrorism through an arson at a Walmart Supercenter in Homewood, a Birmingham suburb, on Aug. 22.
“They’ve been trying to label Black Lives Matter a terrorist movement,” RaShaun Whetstone, a friend of Southall and Colburn, told Raw Story. “This is a railroading.”
The indictments come as President Donald Trump attempts to paint left-wing activism as “domestic terrorism,” through a national security memorandum that accuses activists of undermining “support for law enforcement” in order “to justify and encourage acts of violent revolution.”
This month, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memo instructing the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which include local law enforcement partners, to prioritize investigations of antifascist groups.
Echoing Trump’s national security memo, Bondi claimed: “These domestic terrorists use violence or the threat of violence to advance political and social agendas, including opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, or anti-Christianity.”
‘Not even Mercutio’s MO’
Luke Baumgartner, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told Raw Story the Alabama case is, as far as he knows, the first time the federal government has applied the material support to terrorists charge to Black Lives Matter protesters.
Southall and Colburn pleaded not guilty.
Whetstone told Raw Story he believes Southall and Colburn to be falsely accused. He said the alleged crime was completely out of character for Southall, who as an early leader of Black Lives Matter became one of the most high-profile racial justice activists in the Birmingham area.
Whetstone added that Colburn doesn’t match the person seen in store surveillance video.
Homewood has seen protests since June, when an 18-year-old Black man, Jabari Peoples, was fatally shot by an unidentified police officer at a city park. Police said the shooting followed a struggle, after which Peoples attempted to retrieve a handgun from his car, according to WVTM 13. Peoples’ family and a young woman who was with him say he was unarmed.
Community members have held several protests resulting in multiple arrests, WVTM 13 reported. The news station quoted a leader of the Birmingham chapter of Black Lives Matter as saying they planned to disrupt businesses until their demands, including the release of police body camera video, were met.
Homewood police said in a press release shortly after Southall’s arrest on state charges that detectives obtained evidence he attended a protest at the park on the day of the alleged arson.
The police allege Southall traveled from the protest to Walmart, and accuse him of filling “a shopping cart full of rags, blankets, charcoal bags, small engine fuel, and paint thinner,” then pre-positioning “the shopping cart in a clothing aisle,” before returning to the protest.
Southall was charged in state court with arson and first-degree criminal mischief.
The police said at the time they were working with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms “on pursuing federal arson charges.”
Colburn was arrested on identical charges.
AL.com reported that detectives testified that Colburn accompanied Southall from the protest to Walmart and the two loaded the cart together, then left in a car that investigators determined was registered to Colburn.
Later, investigators said, a woman wearing a blond wig, identified as Colburn, returned to the store and ignited the cart.
Whetstone told Raw Story he doesn’t buy prosecutors’ claims.
“It’s not even Mercutio’s MO,” he said. “Never has he done anything like that. Being who he is, he’s going to set a shopping cart on fire? What the hell kind of sense does that make?”
Federal prosecutors obtained an indictment for arson in late October. A month later, a grand jury returned a superseding indictment adding the charge of material support to terrorists.
Southall and Colburn could not be reached for comment.
An announcement by the FBI’s Birmingham office last week did not mention the defendants’ ties to Black Lives Matter, but characterized them as “violent actors.”
“Let it be clear: While peaceful protesting is a protected right, arson and destruction of property are violent crimes that will not be tolerated in our community,” Special Agent in Charge Dave Fitzgibbons said.
Baumgartner told Raw Story: “It’s not surprising they would levy this charge given that their focus has shifted [to the left]. They’re focusing on these left-wing or anarchist groups. Coming at them with all the tools in their toolkits is definitely in line with their stated strategy.”
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for Northern Alabama did not respond to a question about whether AG Bondi played any role in the decision to charge the defendants with terrorism. A spokesperson said the office did not comment on ongoing litigation.
‘Federal crime of terrorism’
Federal statute makes it a crime to act in support of “an offense identified as a federal crime of terrorism.”
Federal prosecutors have applied the material support to terrorists charge to white supremacist groups and activists, recently including Dallas Erin Humber, the leader of Terrorgram Collective, who is linked to a mass shooting targeting LGBTQ+ people in Slovakia and a deadly school shooting in Brazil, in addition to plots to assassinate politicians and attack the power grid.
The United States, Canada and New Zealand have all designated Terrorgram as a terrorist entity.
In another case, in 2022, four white supremacists pleaded guilty to material support to terrorists, for plotting to carry out coordinated attacks on the power grid in an attempt to instigate race war.
The charge is also being used to pursue violent nihilist groups.
Writing with Barry Jonas, Baumgartner noted in the journal Just Security that in October, for the first time, federal prosecutors indicted a leader of 764, a nihilist network, for conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists.
The government alleges that 764 leader Baron Martin manipulated child victims to self-harm.
Baumgartner and Jonas wrote: “By charging Martin with conspiring to provide material support for terrorists, the shift represents a long-overdue recognition that such conduct is not just depraved — it is terrorism.”
Last week, Canada became the first country to list 764 as a terrorist entity.
A closely related and better-known statute making it a crime to knowingly support “a foreign terrorist organization” has been used frequently since the Sept. 11 attacks to prosecute American citizens who attempted to join jihadist groups such as al-Qaida and ISIS.
Baumgartner said federal prosecutors now appear to be utilizing the material support charge with increasing frequency against defendants across the ideological spectrum.
Last month, prosecutors in Texas obtained an indictment against eight defendants for providing material support for terrorists, regarding an attack on an ICE facility.
The government has named one defendant as firing a weapon at law enforcement, while alleging others ignited fireworks, destroyed a surveillance camera, and vandalized vehicles and a shed.
‘Cause of justice’
Birmingham is a Southern city known as a cradle of the Civil Rights movement, where the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. launched a massive desegregation campaign in 1963, in which child marchers were met with police dogs and firehoses.
In his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King excoriated “the white moderate” and called himself an “extremist for the cause of justice.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. (Wikimedia Commons)
Of the two activists now facing federal charges, Southall has a long history of activism — which has seen him singled out by Trump for verbal abuse.
In November 2015, the activist was forcibly ejected from a Trump rally in Birmingham.
After Southall disrupted the event by chanting, “Black lives matter,” the Washington Post reported that video showed him falling amid a throng of white men who appeared to kick and punch him.
A Post reporter observed a man put his hands on Southall’s neck and a female onlooker shout, “Don’t choke him!”
“They said, ‘Go home, n-----, and somebody punched me,” Southall told Al.com.
Speaking to Fox News, Trump reportedly said: “Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.
“I have a lot of fans, and they were not happy about it. And this was a very obnoxious guy who was a troublemaker who was looking to make trouble.”
‘Untethered from reality’
Despite Trump’s hostility, conservative efforts to get Black Lives Matter designated as a terrorist group did not gain traction in his first term.
In 2017, the FBI drew criticism for an internal assessment that appeared to classify BLM activists as “Black Identity Extremists” who posed a threat of lethal violence.
Three years later, a law enforcement training group characterized BLM protesters as “terrorists.”
It also drew rebuke, one advocate for police reform calling the characterization “untethered from reality” and worrying that it could lead “to people dying unnecessarily.”
In the South, the Ku Klux Klan long waged a campaign of terror which succeeded in intimidating Black people from exercising their right to vote and ousting multiracial governments. Whetstone noted that the U.S. government has never designated the Klan as a terrorist organization.
“Black Lives Matter ruffles a few feathers, and they want to call us terrorists,” he said. “This is just one small step in how they normalize punishing anyone who is associated with any liberation movement. They’re trying to criminalize it.”
