Jermaine Grant, leader of the East Harlem-based Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ, and the organization’s treasurer, Lincoln Warrington, were sentenced to prison on a tax fraud scheme on Tuesday, January 28, 2020. Grant received an 18-month sentence, and Warrington was sentenced to a year. However, Jermaine Grant passed away on April 1, 2020 at the age of 44, just weeks before beginning his prison sentence. It is suspected that his death was related to the Coronavirus.
Below, a bit of recent history on this group, known as Black Hebrew Israelites.
The video taken on January 18, 2019, on the day of the Pro-Life March in Washington D.C. between Covington Catholic High School student Nicholas Sandmann and the Black Hebrew Israelites, brought attention to the little-known group ~ The Black Hebrew Israelites, who were involved in the initial confrontation that day. (As a side note, a year later, in August of 2020, Nicholas Sandmann spoke at the Republican Convention and was hired by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to work as a grassroots director for the McConnell reelection campaign). From the language used in the video, it appeared that the five Black Hebrew Israelites in the video were part of a division called Israelite School of Universal Practical Knowledge (ISUPK), known to demonstrate at the corner of Seventh and H Streets in Washington D.C. This group, headquartered in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, occasionally makes an appearance in Harlem, staging themselves in front of CVS Pharmacy on the corner of Lenox Avenue and 125th Street, megaphone in hand, spewing their hateful rhetoric, and most recently on the opposite side of Lenox Avenue, between 124th-125th Streets.
On Tuesday, December 10, 2019, the Black Hebrew Israelite movement was once again in the news when David Anderson, a one-time follower of the Black Hebrew Israelites, brought hate and violence to Jersey City in a murderous spree.
