A New York native transplanted to New Orleans is behind two of the main groups organizing protests in New Orleans. The organizations have a seven day plan to protest.
Tuesday night the protesters shut down I-10. Wednesday night they first headed upriver. The “protesters” marched toward Drew Brees’ house, chanting “F—- Drew Brees,” before they called an audible and elected not to protest outside the New Orleans hero’s home. The protests began locally on Sunday and Wednesday night was the largest crowd.
The local media, from WWLTV to The Advocate to the Lens, have shared nothing on the people behind these protests. It shows the state of media, meaning their interests are not for the general public. Local journalists should report on local goings on. They don’t. And WVUE covered up their reporter Kimberly Curth and her cameraman being harassed on the Crescent City Connection. Curth was on the air live talking about how peaceful the protesters were. Seconds later a protester accused the reporter of saying they were “paid actors.” The live feed showed the protesters turn on the news crew. Some got in her face, cursed at her, and asked if the WVUE reporter was “with Trump.” WVUE cut their live feed and the hostility was not aired. So don’t expect your traditional news sources to provide you info on who is flirting with destroying the businesses in New Orleans worse than the mayor already has.
The groups behind the protest hold signs to market their involvement. Aside from Black Lives Matter, the other two main brands at protests are Take Em Down NOLA (TEDn) and the New Orleans Workers Group (NOWG).
For almost five years, Take Em Down NOLA has existed in some form. The three frontmen of the organization are Malcolm Suber, Angela Kinlaw, and Michael “Quess?” Moore. For anyone curious as to the common link between Black Lives Matter, Take’em Down NOLA, and New Orleans Workers Group—the answer is a woman named Gavrielle Gemma. Gemma is a registered agent in Louisiana for both TEDn and NOWG. And through research it appears Gavrielle Gemma is the puppeteer for Suber while also operating the commie-based New Orleans Worker Group and The People’s Assembly.
It’s time to further explore the resume of the person influencing protest culture in New Orleans. Gavrielle Gemma is an avowed communist and a labor, women’s rights, and African American rights activist. She remains in the shadows and the New Orleans media either does not know she exists or else turns a blind eye.
Gavrielle Gemma, sometimes known as Gavrielle Gemma Holmes, was born in 1949 and grew up in Queens, New York. In 1980, Gemma Holmes ran as the Vice President candidate under the Workers World Party along with communist Deirdre Griswold in the president election. Gemma ran for President of the United States in the 1984 election as a third-party candidate for the Workers World Party. Gemma campaigned as a stand-in candidate for her husband, Larry Holmes, and because the communist party’s ticket only secured representation on the Ohio and Rhode Island ballots for Gemma, those were the only two states that she received votes in. Gemma received 2,718 votes for President. Her husband was the Workers World Party presidential candidate in the other states and campaigned with the slogan “Jobs, Equality, Socialism – Not War.” He received 15,327 votes for president.
In 1982 Gemma made national news while leading a food crusade to feed the needy. The Baton Rouge Advocate quoted Gemma in a Newsday story about surplus food supplies. “Look – tons and tons of food. And it’s all going to rot in some cave or going to feed the military, not the poor and the hungry.” A Seattle paper quoted her saying the food situation “is an underground crisis.”
1990 was a busy year for Gavrielle Gemma. Newspapers recorded her as the spokesman for the Coalition to Stop U.S. Intervention in the Middle East. The group helped Muhammad Ali with travel arrangements for his trip to meet U.S. prisoners of war in Iraq. That same year she was also affiliated with the New York based Commission of Inquiry on the Invasion of Panama, an ad hoc fact-finding group, and she personally met with Manuel Antonio Noriega in Miami’s federal courthouse. And she also participated with the Monmouth County Residents for Immigrants’ Rights in New Jersey.
In 1992 Gemma organized the “Peace for Cuba” rally in Manhattan which drew 3,200 participants, but attracted an even larger counter protest crowd that was anti-Castro. She told the Associated Press they ejected four anti-Castro protesters. “These people can’t stop this meeting. We’ve got plenty of security. We’re just going to keep going.”
Gemma married Essam Omar Sadiq in New York in 1992. At some point she married Brian Walling as noted in a 2003 article. She worked as a veterinary technician then, but also told the reporter she worked as a “waitress, telephone operator, and union organizer.”
And according to the same 2003 New Jersey newspaper article, Gemma was “a leader of the Central New Jersey Coalition for Peace and Justice. The local anti-war movement.”
In 2009, she organized a protest in the Bronx involving the acquisition of a manufacturing company. “Some of us are prepared to block the taking of the machinery with our bodies tomorrow because the these anti worker companies and the banks that finance must realize, just as they did last December when the Republic Window workers in Chicago occupied their plant to win severance pay, that workers and communities are going to resist corporate plunder and rape.”
Some hypocrisy arises in her opposition to Donald Trump and his America First campaign. Trump has implemented trade regulations in an effort to improve American manufacturing and create more jobs in the U.S. Gemma said back in 2010 that American business owners are shipping jobs around the world and storing their profits in off-shore bank accounts. As a labor activist, one could reason that the workers groups would support Trump’s efforts to create more jobs in America.
In 2010, Gavrielle Gemma organized the Bail Out the People Movement to combat the popular conservative Tea Party movement. She was interviewed on The Alonya Show which even YouTube notes is entirely funded by the Russian government. In the interview Gemma said the Koch brothers “set up a whole like evil network of foundations and think tanks with fancy names like ‘Americans for Prosperity.’” Interesting coming from a woman with the resume she has.
In September 2010 Gemma participated in a flash mob on Wall Street with the Unemployed Workers Action Group.
In 2011 Gavrielle Gemma served on the Jobless Working Group of Occupy Wall Street. At that time Gemma was “an unemployed 61-year old with a monthly food budget of two-hundred dollars. She is among the 43-million Americans relying on federal food subsidy.”
She has a YouTube video from 2012 in which Gemma discusses labor issues.
This white New York communist-activist mysteriously found her way to New Orleans. The date of her transplantation to the Big Easy has not been pinpointed, and she did not respond to an email asking her for more info, but she bought a home in August 2015 in the Lower Ninth Ward then another property from the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority in June 2016.
She encouraged the January 20, 2017, riot in New Orleans on the night of Trump’s inauguration. That night Gemma’s protest involved vandalization and property damage in New Orleans.
In March 2017, NOLA.commie described Gemma as a “retired restaurant worker” in an article that detailed her unruly actions during an RTA meeting.
Gemma stood up and interrupted one person mid-speech at the podium. She was flanked by other workers who held banners from their seats.
“You knew that we were coming today to address the board,” Gemma said. “So you’re refusing to set aside time before restaurant workers have to go to work to address the concerns of the restaurant workers in this city, who hold up the whole city’s economy and are not being served by the RTA.”
Sharonda Williams, the board’s chairwoman, chided Gemma for “disrupting a public meeting” and said the board “will get to you in due course.”
Shortly thereafter, NOLA.commie quoted her on the monument removal scheme. “Taking down these statues is part of the overall struggle for social and economic justice now,” Gemma said. The article listed Take Em Down’s ultimate plans to change the names of schools, streets, hospitals, and monuments to remove throughout New Orleans.
In October 2017, Gemma registered both Take Em Down NOLA and New Orleans People’s Assembly in Louisiana. The agent for Take Em Down is Gemma with the officers listed as Malcolm Suber and Angela Kinlaw although she has since been removed. The agent for New Orleans People’s Assembly is Gemma and the officers are Gemma, Suber, and Kinlaw. Both organizations have the same address registered with the state on N. Claiborne Ave near Esplanade.
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Note that the four historic monuments were removed in April and May 2017, and Take Em Down was not an organization on the books until October 2017. The IRS should explore their financial activity up to that time.
According to a 2017 article, the goals of the People’s Assembly’s includes “Living wage jobs, Decent and affordable housing, Removal of white supremacist representations from the city, Ending all discrimination based on race gender or sexual orientation, Free drug and mental rehab centers, Reliable public transportation, 24-hour public childcare for working families, Ouster of District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro, Opposition to imperialist wars, Properly taxing the rich, Ending police terror, and Community-controlled public schools” among others.
More hypocrisy as Gemma, Suber, and their cohorts celebrated the Bolshevik Revolution, a nod to historical figures although they are dead set on destroying American figures.
At a 2018 protest on Bourbon Street over a sexual harassment claim, Gemma was quoted supporting the public shaming of the business, “I don’t know what other language they understand.”
Three days after Saints owner Tom Benson died in 2018, Gemma wrote an article headlined “Tom Benson, Thief Who Treated New Orleans as a Cash Cow.” She attacked the New Orleans businessman mostly for government money tied to his NFL franchise calling him “parasitic” and a “crook.”
In 2019 Gemma registered Workers Group New Orleans with Louisiana. She and Malcolm Suber are the registered officials.
An explanation as to the source of her activism may be in that her father worked as a mail handler for the New York Central Railroad for 26 years until he was laid off without benefits. Some of her crusading mentions pensions.
Gemma has been referred to as a “star” of the New Orleans activist community. She was quoted in 2003 saying, “The only political advice I received from my father was: ‘Never cross picket lines.” Yet in the same article it stated Gemma was first arrested in 1967 while protesting the war in Vietnam.
Some journalists in New Orleans obviously know of Gavrielle Gemma considering how many times they’ve quoted her since she acquired property in Orleans Parish. Her involvement with dozens of public protests are been quiet. She attended court events involving the monuments, all the while Malcolm Suber, Angela Kinlaw, and Quess Moore stood in the spotlight.
The Louisiana Secretary of State website says all three Gemma-Suber organizations are currently “Not In Good Standing for failure to file Annual Report.”
What most people consider a black group is actually being driven by a white woman. Gavrielle Gemma is a life long activist moving from cause to cause to stir up controversy. The idea that Take Em Down is some local, grassroots, black organization is a myth. Gemma uses these people while remaining in the background, a true systemic racial issue.
Malcolm Suber has been a lifelong activist himself. He worked as a political science instructor at Xavier University. From the late 1970’s to the 1990’s Suber led the Afro-American Liberation League. The group produced a “Hit List” of schools back in 1990 that they felt needed to be renamed. “To maintain these names is another badge of inferiority slapped on your children,” Suber said in June 1990. That was the beginning of whitewashing the South from New Orleans. Suber was part of the African American History Alliance of Louisiana. And as evidenced by his non profit affiliations, Suber is also a communist.
New Orleanians generally are not protesters. It takes out of state people like Gemma and Quess Moore also a native of New York combined with the post Katrina transplant crowd to get all hot and bothered.
This New York-New Jersey carpetbagger has embedded herself in New Orleans. She has decades of experience as a community organizer and coordinating public gatherings. She has brought together some locals and transplanted Antifa types and orchestrated much of the street activity in New Orleans the past five years. When New Orleanians see the crowds of Antifa seeking Drew Brees’ home or marching down Magazine Street, shutting down major thoroughfares, they should know Gavrielle Gemma is the puppet master pulling the strings.
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