Within days of Trump’s election, Ash-Lee Henderson “of the Movement for Black Lives (MBL) and Freedom Road aka “Liberation Road”, was featured on a webinar hosted by Liberation Road to strategize against his election victory.

What is Liberation Road? 

Liberation Road was one of the two groups that formed the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO),  a US Marxist-Leninist organization with a Maoist flavor.  In 2019, this group split in two.

After the split, the group most active in electoral politics and local organizing called itself Liberation Road. The full formal name is Freedom Road Socialist Organization/Organacion Socialista del Camino paper la Libertad. Despite the name change, Liberation Road is still sometimes referred to as “Freedom Road.” 

The goal of Liberation Road and its Marxist allies is to destroy the Republican Party and then work with groups like the Communist Party USA, Democrat Socialists of America and a “mass of independent political organizations (IPOs) as a part of a broader front to defeat the New Confederacy.” They want to create a powerful and politically dominant U.S. socialist party. The Highlander Center, Project South, the Southern Movement Assembly, just to name a few, have been working for years to help build and support these IPOs.

The Nashville Justice League, whose members were trained at Highlander, was recognized as an ally in Liberation Road’s July 2019 newsletter. The Nashville Justice League is an IPO (independent political organization) which has endorsed and gotten candidates elected to the Nashville Metro Council. Part 3 of this series will discuss Tennessee organizations actualizing the Liberation Road agenda.

Liberation Road states clearly that they are committed to combatting patriarchy, white supremacy and its privilege, capitalism and recreating the left into a “powerful disciplined revolutionary organization, big enough, deeply rooted enough among the people, and well-coordinated enough to challenge the white supremacist US ruling class for power.” They call this “left refoundation”.

Liberation Road has been energized by socialist election wins in Virginia, Durham, NC, Knoxville, Memphis and Nashville, and its members are organizing to defeat President Trump and continue going after more local and State seats.

The Highlander Research and Education Center

Right after Ash-Lee’s webinar, Black Lives Matter leaders rushed to gather in secret at the Highlander Center in New Market, Tennessee. They met to work out their future agenda in what the Marxist Liberation Road described as the “Trump disaster.”

Viewed in the context of Ash-Lee’s national and Tennessee connections, and her commitment to Marxist ideology and tactics, the convening of BLM leaders at the Tennessee site made sense.

One month after the Highlander Center secret meeting, Ash-Lee Henderson, was promoted to the Movement 4 Black Lives (M4BL) policy roundtable and became the Co-Director of the Highlander Center.

Groups involved in the 2016 M4BL policy roundtable which are connected to the Highlander Center and/or the state of Tennessee, included Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), Black Youth Project 100, Dream Defenders, Project South and Southerners on New Ground (SONG).  

The Highlander Center was founded in 1932 to bring socialism to the South. In recent years Highlander’s leadership made the Center the go-to-place for planning how to take down the “New Confederacy.”  The New Confederacy is what Liberation Road calls the GOP, which they describe as “the most reactionary factions of capital allied with racist/nativist, right-wing populists.”  They believe that “the Republican Party is the political expression of this alliance. We use the term ‘New Confederacy’ to emphasize the fact that this right-wing political force is rooted in an explicitly racist program and strategy.”

And the South is their declared prime target.

The Culture of the Highlander Center, Liberation Road, Black Lives Matter

Charlene Carruthers, who founded the Black Youth Project 100, was at the 2016 Highlander secret meeting. She describes her national organization of young Black activists who “work through a Black, queer feminist lens.” Carruthers and Ash-Lee had already crossed paths at the 2015 national M4BL convening in Cleveland out of which grew the M4BL policy roundtable in which Carruthers’ organization was involved.

The Cleveland convening was celebrated for focusing on the new rising young radical black leaders and discarding those now considered establishment like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. The “new force,” taking control are “black and brown youth” who are anti-capitalist, anti-police, and heavily represented in the LGBTQI community.

Indeed, many of the groups and their leaders working at the Highlander Center, the M4BL umbrella organization and Liberation Road, identify with the LGBTQI spectrum.

Part of the M4BL ”End the War on Black People” policy platform includes “End the War on Black Trans, Queer, Gender Non-Conforming and Intersex People.”

Liberation Road says that their war on patriarchy means “supporting the leadership of women and queer people in our organization and the movements we work in.”

If you really want to destroy a country like America and a civilization founded on Judeo-Christian principles, you go after its foundations, the family, belief in God and the biological differences between men and women, boys and girls.

Also present at the 2015 Cleveland convening were the three co-founders of BLM – Opal Tometi, Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors. Both Garza and Cullors identify themselves as “queer” and as such, have made it a point to affirm black and brown “queer” and transgender people by putting them front and center of their anti-America culture war.

Tometi, who describes herself as a “transnational feminist,” heads up another organization called BAJI – Black Alliance for Just Immigration.  This group was featured during the 2016 National Immigrant Integration Conference hosted by the TN Immigrant & Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC), in Nashville.

Garza is the chief strategic advisor of the BLM Global Network Foundation which gets to spend all of the millions of donated dollars. The foundation has been noted for its lack of transparency; between 2017 and 2019, it has spent about $4.6 million dollars on travel, consultants and personnel versus a measly $328,000 granted to outside organizations including some BLM chapters. Cullors is also a top advisor with the Foundation.

The point is that they have a lot of money so now people can be paid to organize communities, agitate and riot.

There is good reason to believe that Tometi and Cullors were at the 2016 secret Highlander meeting. BLM was founded by Marxist revolutionaries; Cullors openly admits that she and Garza are radical, anti-white trained Marxists. She would have had every reason to want to conspire with comrade Ash-Lee who has also proven her commitment to Marxist ideology and tactics.

And it was Ash-Lee’s organization Liberation Road that advanced the launch of BLM.

At the time of the Cleveland convening in 2015, Ash-Lee was a regional organizer for the Atlanta-based Project South Institute for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide, and a Highlander Center Board member. Project South, an anchor organization of the Southern Movement Assembly, is all about radicalizing students and teaching them how to organize. Ash-Lee remains on the governance council of the Southern Movement Assembly.

In an interview about the Southern Movement Assembly, Ash-Lee channels the left refoundation objective of Liberation Road. She tells her interviewer that action sought by the Highlander Center has to be “transformative” as opposed to actions they “concede to in reform.”

Ash-Lee also says that, “I take very seriously the notion that organizing the South saves the country.” She and her ilk are committed to breaking the Southern states – however long that takes. And as Liberation road says, “by any means necessary.”

Trevor Loudon who has spent more than 30 years researching the radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics, has issued a warning that we would be wise to heed – “Liberation Road works well-under the radar but is highly effective, disciplined and relentless. If the good people of the U.S. South do not want to suffer ‘socialist liberation’ in the next few election cycles they’d better wake up fast.”

Loudon recommends as a starting point to have state-level hearings on the Liberation Road influence on local and state elections. It will be up to concerned citizens to inform their state and local elected officials and urge them to follow Loudon’s advice.

More parts to the Highlander Center series are forthcoming and will have information about how the Liberation Road agenda is playing out in Tennessee radical organizations and elections.