One of the organizers of a protest that disrupted a Minnesota church service on Sunday reportedly grossed more than $1 million during her six years heading a nonprofit aimed at anti-poverty issues.
Nekima Levy Armstrong, who Fox News described as a “far left agitator,” helped to organize the storming of Cities Church in St. Paul, the cable news outlet reported; Armstrong justified the protest because a pastor at the church was an acting director in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office in that city.
Armstrong’s website identifies the 49-year-old organizer as “an award-winning civil rights lawyer, scholar-activist, and past-president of the Minneapolis NAACP.”
However, Armstrong is currently the founder and CEO of a cannabis company called Dope Roots, according to Fox, and was executive director of the Wayfinder Foundation from 2019 through 2024. According to the nonprofit’s tax filings cited by the cable network, Armstrong was paid handsomely.
According to Fox:
The 2024 tax filing shows that despite the foundation being dedicated to giving grants to anti-poverty community initiatives, it awarded just $158,811 that year, while Armstrong brought in a salary of $215,726. She also took an additional $40,548 in health benefits, benefit plan contributions and deferred compensation, according to the 2024 filing.
In 2023, the year that the nonprofit awarded $133,698 in grants, Armstrong brought in a salary of $170,726, plus $44,300 in other “compensation from the organization and related organizations,” according to that year’s filing. The year before reflects the same pattern, with Armstrong bringing in $175,000 in compensation, plus an estimated $33,126 in other compensation, while the organization gave just $161,325 in grants, per the 2022 filing.
In total, Armstrong netted $936, 395 in salary plus an additional $201,313 in health benefits and other compensation during her six-year tenure as executive director, according to the Fox report.
Meanwhile, her anti-poverty foundation disbursed approximately $700, 052 in grants.
Total revenue for the foundation in the same time span was some $5.2 million, with donations coming from the Black Lives Matter Global Network and the Walton Family Foundation, the family behind Walmart’s founding.
Fox News Digital reviewed some of the archived pages of the nonprofit’s website, which is no longer up. The organization’s mission included investing in “Black woman and Latina activists, organizers, and change agents” to “challenge the status quo” and “disrupt business-as-usual within systems that perpetuate oppression.”
Following Sunday’s storming of the church, Armstrong posted “a clip of our demonstration at Cities Church in St. Paul” and thanked “all the activists who showed up.”
The U.S. Department of Justice has launched a criminal investigation into the protest in the church, as it may have violated the civil rights of churchgoers and their freedom to worship under the First Amendment.
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times true crime best seller House of Secrets and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
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