concerns were well-founded. Rahim lived through COINTELPRO, the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program, which utilized agents and informants to spy on and sabotage movements from 1956 though the operation’s exposure in 1971.8 The FBI’s paid informant program has grown dramatically since the days of COINTELPRO, with the number of informants rising from 1,500 in 1975 to 15,000 in 2011. While COINTELPRO focused on the civil rights and Black power movements, today the FBI uses undercover agents and paid informants in a range of movements, with the majority apparently focused on Muslim communities. From 2001 to 2011, almost half of all terrorism prosecutions involved the use of a paid informant.9 In many of these cases, lawyers and advocates have found that the so-called “terrorists” were confused young men, often with mental disabilities, limited intelligence, emotional problems, or desperate life situations who were manipulated by the informant into agreeing to actions they had previously shown no interest in.10
By this time, Darby was already having conversations with the police. In December 2005 he told a reporter that he had “the New Orleans Police Department’s hierarchy on speed dial” and had regular meetings with police.11 Local organizers condemned his provocative behavior, but his leadership position in Common Ground shielded him from accountability.
In the tense post-Katrina era, Darby seemed to be encouraging conflict between different activists and organizations doing reconstruction work. When organizers from the local chapter of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence announced that they were opening a women’s health clinic, Darby announced his own clinic, and with his higher profile was able to secure funding that might otherwise have gone to the local, women of color–led effort.
Darby’s friend crow (in an action he later said Darby pushed him to take) wrote a brutal letter attacking People’s Hurricane Relief Fund, a coalition of Black-led organizations active in the city, further causing conflict among local organizers. Lily Keber, one of the many new arrivals to New Orleans who dated Darby in 2006, told me that even when Darby was in a bar, “there would always be fights near him. He would never be in the fight, but it was always between two people he had just been talking to.”
New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was a touchstone in social justice history in this country. Tens of thousands of volunteers came to help rebuild the city. In one month, during spring break 2006, about two thousand five hundred volunteers passed through Common Ground, most of them staying in a gutted schoolhouse in the Upper Ninth Ward and washing in outdoor showers. When volunteers saw the devastation in mostly Black areas, while white areas were receiving aid and recovering quickly, and when they saw Black-led organized resistance to this unequal recovery, it was a transformative, inspiring experience. Like the protests in Ferguson nearly ten years later, it was a moment of awakening that spread virally across the United States.
But there were also problems in that gutted schoolhouse: an epidemic of sexual assault, committed by young white males against female and transgender volunteers. And Darby had helped foster a macho culture that dismissed the complaints. “He kicked in the door of a trailer where there were volunteers with guns on them. He did a lot of Wild West shit—Mister Macho Action Hero,” says Lisa Fithian, an early leader of Common Ground who was driven out by Darby. For Fithian, there was obvious misogyny involved in the blind support for Darby. “A lot of women had been hurt by this man, and a lot of men had defended him over the years, and it’s not okay,” she says.12 Other people in the organization’s leadership followed Darby’s example. In the macho atmosphere he fostered, talk of patriarchy or sexual assault was seen as a distraction.
At one point, allegations appeared online that Darby had sexually assaulted volunteers. His then-friend Common Ground cofounder scott crow worked to take the online postings down. “I used my connections with Indymedia all around the world to take it down, on server after server after server, because Brandon asked me to,” he said later. “I still stand by that, because you know, no physical person ever came forward, and no advocate for a physical person ever came forward and said, ‘He physically assaulted me.’”13
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