Brenda Paige Ward, Alabama civil-rights advocate, pushes for progress, but she reportedly is paid to also represent the interests of giant utility Southern Co.

Brenda Paige Ward (banbalch.com)

A prominent civil-rights activist has been "captured" by the nation's second largest utility company and is paid to represent the firm's social and political interests, according to a post at banbalch.com.

K.B. Forbes, publisher of the Ban Balch blog and CEO of its parent organization, the CDLU public charity and advocacy group, provides details under the headline "Bought and Paid For! Southern Company Criminal Enterprise Buys Civil Rights Advocates and African American Activists." Forbes writes:

In January, Refuge In Troubled Times Community Development Corporation held its fourth candlelight vigil in Birmingham to memorialize the murdered victims of violence.

AL.com reported:

Brenda Paige Ward, founder of Refuge In Troubled Times, said her goal is to bring the community together and set a path for change.

“We need to come together in unity and do something about all of the deaths, and the murders, and the homicides and all of the things that are going on around our city. This is our city and we have to do something for our children,” Ward said.

Ward created the nonprofit in 2011, after the fatal shooting of her eldest grandson, RaSheed Ali Ward, 19, on June 17, 2010. Keith Hilson, 24, was also killed in the shooting. No one has been arrested for their deaths.

But Ward is more than a heart-broken grandmother. She’s also an alleged stooge for the Southern Company Criminal Enterprise.

In 2020, self-anointed Apostle Brenda Paige Ward, rented a large van from Budget Rentals at the Birmingham Airport and showed up in the neighborhood of CDLU Chief Executive Officer K.B. Forbes.

Ward, along with a dozen or so African American actors, held a two-minute “shoot and scoot” fake protest adjacent to Forbes’ home, terrorizing neighbors and Forbes’ then-8-year-old daughter,  who cried thinking they were killing an innocent African American like George Floyd.

Ward and others were part of Southern Company’s campaign of terror and intimidation against Forbes and Burt Newsome, the attorney who took on Balch & Bingham, the sister-wife of Alabama Power, a wholly owned and most profitable subsidiary of Southern Company.

Ward, showed up, without apparently knowing who she was protesting or for what reason.

The buffoons couldn’t even spell Forbes’ last name correctly, calling him Forger, Forges, or Forgis. Even the Apostle Brenda Paige Ward couldn’t spell Forbes’ name.

Why would Ward get involved in such a fiasco? Evidence indicates she was paid to do it. Forbes writes:

The Southern Company Criminal Enterprise utilized Matrix, the obscure political consulting firm founded by the diminutive “Sloppy Joe” Perkins.

An investigation by Floodlight,  recently published in The Guardian, revealed that Matrix funneled resources to influence Civil Rights groups and leaders.

Entities controlled by Matrix paid $115,000 to Charles Steele Jr, the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and about $170,000 to the Rev Deves Toon, national field director for the National Action Network (NAN), according to verified internal Matrix documents and tax records.

The SCLC was a desegregation pioneer in the South and active in the first protests against environmental racism. NAN, founded by the Rev Al Sharpton, spotlights violence faced by people of color. In 2023, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the leader of the Environmental Protection Agency spoke at NAN events.

In an interview last year, Steele confirmed one payment from Matrix but categorized it as a contribution for civil-rights work. Neither he nor his organization responded to additional questions. Toon did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Southern Company did not try very hard to hide its involvement, Forbes reports:

Even Southern Company Chairman Tom Fanning acknowledged greasing the wheels. From Floodlight:

Tom Fanning… confirmed in a May interview with Floodlight that the company at the time was still working with Matrix and with civil-rights groups including the SCLC. The company did not respond to later requests for comment.

“There’s a real business reason why we do this,” he said, claiming a mutual benefit for the company and the civil-rights groups.

The Southern Company Criminal Enterprise has bought and paid for Civil Rights advocates and African American activists to attack other minority activists, such as Forbes.

Fanning, Perkins, Ward, and others demonstrated total ignorance about Forbes, who lived in Chile as a child, is the son of a Hispanic immigrant, and is fully bilingual.

Forbes and the CDLU were working with the U.S. Department of Justice in 2020 as informants about the misconduct in Alabama, and the criminal enterprise did not like that fact.

Now, today, Forbes and the CDLU are working to hold Fanning and the Southern Company Criminal Enterprise accountable for wasting millions of shareholder resources on campaigns of fear and intimidation that had no corporate purpose whatsoever and violated the civil rights of innocent victims, including children.