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Tamir Rice's mother Samaria calls Shaun King an impostor: 'White man acting Black'

Samaria Rice has been very vocal about her disapproval of the so-called national leaders of the civil rights movement in the past
PUBLISHED JUN 24, 2021
Samaria Rice has called out Shaun King (Photos by Andrew Burton/Getty Images and Karen Ducey/Getty Images)
Samaria Rice has called out Shaun King (Photos by Andrew Burton/Getty Images and Karen Ducey/Getty Images)

Samaria Rice, the mother of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old Black boy who was killed in Cleveland, Ohio, by Timothy Loehmann, a 26-year-old White police officer in 2014, has slammed civil rights activist Shaun King in a scathing social media post. In an Instagram post addressing King, Rice asked, “Why do you think its so important to tell folks we had a conversation?” 

“Well we talked and everything that was said was very toxic and uncomfortable for me to hear that you raised additional money and then say you did not want to bother me,” Rice wrote. “Personally I don't understand how you sleep at night. I never gave you permission to raise nothing. along with the united states, you robbed me for the death of my son.”

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“You gave me a cop and donut conversation,” she wrote, directly addressing King. “All lies Shaun, please stop thinking we on the same page. As a white man acting black you are a imposter that can not to be trusted. My son was 12 years old and, and DOJ needs to reopen his case period. Tamir Human rights was violated, why would you so ever make it about you? you are a selfish self centered person and God will deal with you White man.”

In a May interview with The Cut, Rice took issue with the so-called national leaders in the civil rights movement, from Reverend Al Sharpton to King, saying they were self-serving in the ways they dealt with her and with other families of people killed by police officers. Rather than helping family members develop a public voice, she said that many of the prominent organizers have become the only voices.

“They should not be standing on the front line like this was they child,” she said. “You supposed to be uplifting the family, the community, teaching us how to love on each other, not bickering and fighting about who gon’ get the next case or who gon’ be on TV next. It’s a mess.”

Shaun King introduces Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders during a rally in the capital of his home state of Vermont on May 25, 2019 in Montpelier, Vermont. This was the first Vermont rally of Sanders' 2020 campaign. (Photo by Scott Eisen/Getty Images)

Speaking directly about King, Rice had then said, “I ain’t never talked to Shaun King a day in my life. Shaun King raised all that money [for Tamir] and sent me a $60,000 check.” The money was put into Tamir’s estate. The author of the profile said that it made Rice sick to think that a stranger had used her son’s name without her consent.

“I ain’t know Shaun King from a hole in the wall.” King had said at the time, “I have never, once in my life, raised funds for a single family without being asked to do so.”

Rice’s latest vitriol seemed to have been caused by a post on King’s website published on June 22. Titled ‘I spoke with Samaria Rice this past week,’ the post said, “Over the past 6 months, I had reached out to Samaria Rice directly many times through email, through direct messages, through civil rights leader Opal Tometi, and through the families of Oscar Grant and Philando Castile in an attempt to hear from her directly and answer any questions she might have.”

King, in the long post, said that he does not seek the limelight and that he also does not begrudge anyone who does any of those things. He said that he had learned that Rice “didn’t even know most of what I had done for her. That’s my fault and I’ll never let that happen again. Sadly, people have lied to Samaria about me and about the fundraising I have done for her family. I’ll never fully know their intentions, but I am going to take time here to detail it all for you.”

(L-R) Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin; Samaira Rice, the mother of Tamir Rice; and Lesley McSpadden, the mother of Michael Brown Jr; join the "Justice For All" march and rally in the nation's capital December 13, 2014 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

King outlined how he had raised a total of about $125,000 through several fundraisers and didn’t receive a penny for his efforts. He also had nothing to do with disbursement of the money, he stated. King also outlined how he and Rice had met early last week after one of the staffers on his team at the Grassroots Law Project worked alongside the Tamir Rice Foundation.

King is a biracial man but identifies as Black. Back in 2015, conservative political commentators and journalists had claimed that he had misled people about his racial identity - that both his parents were White as per his birth certificate. At the time, King told The Washington Post that his father was a Black man whose identity he does not know. The White man whose name appears on King’s birth certificate, he says, is not his father.

“The reports about my race, about my past, and about the pain I’ve endured are all lies,” King said in a statement. “My mother is a senior citizen. I refuse to speak in detail about the nature of my mother’s past, or her sexual partners, and I am gravely embarrassed to even be saying this now, but I have been told for most of my life that the white man on my birth certificate is not my biological father and that my actual biological father is a light-skinned Black man. This has been my lived reality for nearly 30 of my 35 years on earth.”

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