Are Beyoncé and Jay Z Anonymously Funding Black Lives Matter?

Image via Beyoncé's Instagram.

Activist, filmmaker, and prolific Twitter user Dream Hampton dropped some heavy tweets on the Internet over the weekend divulging that Jay Z and Beyoncé pitched in thousands of dollars to help bail out protesters in Ferguson and Baltimore—and then she promptly deleted them. Apparently, the Carters want to keep their involvement in the movement a secret. That didn’t stop people from screencapping the tweets. The Guardian reached out to Hampton, however, and confirmed that the two music moguls did indeed help bail out jailed demonstrators.

“When [Black Lives Matter] needed infrastructure money for the many chapters that we’re growing like beautiful dandelions, Carters wrote a huge check,” wrote Hampton in one Twitter missive.

This kind of financial assistance, says Hampton, is critical to the advancement of the movement, especially as nervous law enforcement officers crack down on protests.

“They’re waging war on black resistance in a multitude of ways, many of them financially. Protest is literally punished with tariffs,” Hampton wrote in her tweets. “When they fine and arrest people for protesting, more opportunities for exploitation by the state are possible with each encounter.”