So what happened to all that money he raised?
For more than five years, Johnson has traveled the country raising money to open the Frederick Douglass Marcus Garvey Leadership Academy for Black Boys, or FDMG, receiving donations from thousands of his supporters. In 2014 he informed the public that he was looking to buy the now-defunct St. Paul’s College in Virginia and turn it into a boarding school. When confronted about the specifics, he has refused to answer, as he did in this video:
Two weeks after that video was uploaded in January 2015, Johnson told a crowd that because people didn’t want to take their “lazy ass to the post office and get a stamp,” he had opened an account with PayPal. However, in the same video, Johnson informed his followers that PayPal had frozen more than $100,000 in donations because he didn’t have the 501(c)(3) status required for tax-exempt, nonprofit organizations. He then stated that he had applied for the tax-exempt status.
On March 3, 2015, Johnson created a GoFundMe page with the express purpose “to acquire and rehabilitate either the Historically Black St. Paul’s College in Lawrenceville Virginia or the Chamberlain-Hunt Academy in Port Gibson Mississippi.”
To date, GoFundMe says that he has raised $375,989 in the 28 months since he began his campaign. This does not include the cash he has raised through in-person solicitations at speaking engagements or the money that has been mailed to him by supporters outside of his online campaign. On Monday’s NewsOne Now show, Johnson told Martin that he has raised $700,000.
To date, no one has seen financial documentation showing how much money he has collected, or how he has used any of the funds. No one has seen a business plan, an application for accreditation or anything tangible that indicates he is making strides toward this so-far mythical school.
According to IRS rules, all nonprofit organizations are required to “make available for public inspection certain annual returns and applications for exemption, and must provide copies of such returns and applications to individuals who request them.” Plus, the IRS mandates that “no part of a section 501(c)(3) organization’s net earnings may inure to the benefit of any private shareholder or individual.”
This solves everything, right? Since Johnson said that he applied for tax-exempt status in 2015, anyone who asks for financial records for the FDMG school gets them, right? Anything else wouldn’t just be unscrupulous; it is illegal for a nonprofit to hide its finances, and there is video of Johnson saying that he applied two-and-a-half years ago for 501(c)(3) status.
But when The Root searched the IRS database for the Frederick Douglass Marcus Garvey school, we could find no record of Johnson’s application, under either his name, the name of the school (there is a “Frederick Douglas Mastery Charter School” listed in Pennsylvania, but that’s not it) or any variation of the name. We even searched for the address he lists for donations—nothing.
As it stands, there are thousands of people who have donated between half a million and three-quarters of a million dollars for black empowerment and uplift, but no one knows what happened to their money.
But is he a doctor?
However, The Root searched every level of Johnson’s education but could find no proof that he holds a doctorate in psychology. But what started off as simple educational research has turned into a mystery.
The school Johnson claims he attended for his doctorate—the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine—also participates in the National Student Clearinghouse. It could not verify a degree under any variation of the name Umar Abdullah-Johnson or under Johnson’s birth name, Jermaine Shoemake.
Every doctoral candidate must submit a dissertation, and PCOM makes its students’ dissertations available online. When we looked through the university’s archives, we found a link to Umar Johnson’s dissertation, “The Relationship Between Self-Concept and Academic Achievement in African American Middle School Students: A Correlational Study,” which indicates that Johnson indeed submitted a thesis in PCOM’s doctor of psychology program. But unlike the other dissertations, Johnson’s was not available for download.
We then looked at the graduation-ceremony program for 2010—the year Johnson’s dissertation was submitted. He was not listed on the commencement program, even though he appears in the 2009 program as a doctoral candidate. In fact, we could not find any evidence that Johnson graduated from PCOM.
Mysteriously, a .pdf file of the program from every commencement exercise at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine is available online, except for the year Johnson supposedly graduated. In addition, 99 percent of students who received a doctorate from PCOM have their dissertation available online, but Johnson’s is not.
PCOM also posts videos of its graduation ceremonies online—the school has cataloged them on YouTube in a playlist—except someone has submitted a copyright-infringement claim only for the graduation ceremony that took place in the year Umar Johnson supposedly graduated.
The fact that Johnson’s dissertation, commencement program, graduation ceremony and every other piece of documentation that would prove he graduated from PCOM with a doctorate have apparently disappeared from the internet is either the biggest coincidence in the history of histories or he just may not have a doctoral degree.
When The Root reached out to Johnson by email and Twitter for comment on this issue and others, we received no response by the time of publication.