The first of the funerals had just finished. As people piled flowers at the shooting site – a gas station parking lot – Umar Shabazz Bey looked on, feeling suspicious. He dwells in a world of suspicion.



Not suspicion for the mourners, or for horror at the killing the week before of three Baton Rouge police officers. He was clear on that. He refused to even speak the shooter’s name. But the official account made no sense, he said.

He pointed to a neighboring car wash. “There were reports of somebody shooting from the roof at Benny’s,” he said.

He pointed in the opposite direction. “Down there, they were looking for a shooter in camouflage shorts. The guy they got was wearing all black.”

The 53-year-old dropped his hands, and tilted his head back. Case closed, he felt.

What bothered Umar most, though, was that authorities say the gunman, Gavin Long, belonged to the same ideological sect he did. He is a leader among the Washitaw, a branch of the so-called sovereign citizens movement in the United States.

The movement is complex and recursive. It has structure but no central authority, and it is at sometimes violent odds with police. But it is expanding: experts say more than 300,000 sovereign citizens now walk and work and eat and sleep among US residents. The FBI calls sovereign citizens “a domestic terrorist movement”, and according to a 2014 survey of law enforcement agencies, they pose a larger threat to America than jihadi militants.

Confronted with paperwork Long filed in court claiming Washitaw membership, Umar shook his head.

“He got those papers from an offshoot of the Washitaw,” he said. “Not the real Washitaw.”

Baton Rouge police officers carry the casket of fellow officer Matthew Gerald. Photograph: Jeff Dubinksy/Reuters

•••

Starting at the beginning is difficult, with the Washitaw. The history of the US – slavery and the civil war, for instance – is only a recent development in their view, and almost irrelevant.

To get back beyond disputable history, to the last agreed-upon fact, means starting nearly all the way back – to the Paleozoic era, more than 250m years ago, when all the earth’s land made up a supercontinent geologists call Pangaea.

About 15,000 years ago, when the continents had long drifted apart, a group of people walked across a land bridge from Siberia into the Americas. It’s about here that the Washitaw object.

“We were already here,” Fredrix Joe Washington said recently. He lives in California now, and his official title among the Washitaw is “emperial royal throne dauphine”.

The Washitaw claim that when Pangaea broke up they already existed as a civilization, that they arrived on the North American continent by drifting on it across the sea many millions of years ago.

The Washitaw, a name taken from the native Ouachita tribe, were a mound-building people, they say, and left evidence of their handiwork throughout the Mississippi river basin, from Minnesota to Louisiana. The word “mound” is found right in their full name, they say: Washitaw De Dugdahmoundyah.

Scientists, lawyers, the FBI and historians say otherwise.

“It’s a fiction,” said Mark Potok, a researcher for the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Washitaw are unique among sovereign citizens in that they do have a hierarchy, Potok said, but they nonetheless fall in line with sovereign aspirations: to separate themselves from the United States, and unburden themselves of its laws.

What is most strange, Potok said, is how the Washitaw and other black nationalists have embraced a movement that had very different beginnings.

•••

Umar Shabazz Bey, on the mounds at Louisiana State University. Photograph: Matthew Teague

There’s no way to explain the Washitaw and other sovereign citizens without leaping through time and space and skin pigment.

In the 1960s, a group of white nationalists called the Posse Comitatus sprang up in Oregon, claiming the US was run by a Jewish cabal. They pioneered the sovereign citizens model by refusing to pay taxes, use drivers licenses, sign their names or enter other basic social contracts. They waged “paper terrorism”, burying opponents and courts in a blizzard of fraudulent suits. And they took more direct action. As recently as 2012, several Posse Comitatus members were charged with ambushing and shooting four police officers, killing two, in St John the Baptist Parish between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

Other groups followed, such as the Montana Freemen and the Republic of Texas. In general they believed that white people, as conquerors of the continent, had received a divine right to citizenship. African Americans had only received their citizenship by an act of the government, and were considered “14th Amendment citizens”.

In recent years, though, the sovereign citizens movement has shifted from the exclusive control of white separatists to a large contingent of black Americans. New black separatist members declare themselves Moorish, and assert sovereignty under antiquated, complex interactions between the young United States and people who lived along the Barbary Coast.

None of them, though, could match the spectacular claims of the Washitaw De Dugdahmoundyah. Those claims gradually drew violence.

•••

Umar Shabazz Bey is the highest-ranking member in Baton Rouge, where he oversees a small museum and a private school.

It’s difficult to say whether his home is in the museum or the museum is in his home; it takes up about half the small ranch house on 26th Street in north Baton Rouge. Inside are artifacts from black inventors, maps and books, artwork and reams of documentation, and something labelled a “donation pyramid”. Much of the Washitaw iconography is Egyptian, which members attribute to the tribe’s Pangaean origins – although geology shows the continents split many millions of years before the earliest days of Egyptian civilization.

Umar is tall, and might seem imposing except for his kind smile and slightly goofy demeanor. (“Where is that book?” he murmured to himself, digging through stacks of paper. “Come on, Umar! Look sharp! Don’t embarrass yourself!”)

His father was an air force man and an electronics whiz. Umar claims to have several postgraduate degrees, although he said he destroyed all his diplomas in a fire. “They got me nothing but interviews,” he said.

Twenty years ago, he put himself at the service of a woman calling herself Empress Verdiacee Tiari Washitaw Turner Goston El Bey. She was a poor woman from rural Louisiana, but she claimed to be heir to a vast empire. The Lousiana Purchase of 1803 was fraudulent, she claimed, and so she was heir to a 33-million acre tract.

Previously, when she was just Verdiacee Turner, she had served as mayor of Richwood, Louisiana, which was no mean accomplishment for a black woman in the 1970s and 80s. Newspaper clippings from the time show her wearing a construction hard hat and carrying a hammer for self-defense. She had been attacked by the Klan.

But she had been destined for more since her birth one night on a bayou. On that night in 1927 a levee broke and the river burst from its banks just as she burst from her mother’s womb. “I was born in my placenta,” she wrote later. “I kicked out of it on my own, and then [the placenta] rolled up on my head like a crown.”

She was so formidable that Umar committed right away to being her diplomatic aide. He travelled with her, transcribed her prophesies, researched far-flung archaeological sites and studied political intricacies for her.

She was not an easy woman to serve – she was an empress, after all. In the mid-1990s she and Umar traveled to Geneva, to lobby for recognition at a meeting of indigenous peoples. During their stay, they twice entered meetings held by Native American tribes. At one point, Verdiacee took a seat at the head of a great table.

A young woman whispered to her: “Ma’am, you are sitting in the chief’s seat.”

Verdiacee refused to move. “I am the empress over all of you,” she announced. The tribes canceled their meeting, and left her sitting at an empty table.

•••

For people who don’t recognize the government or its instruments, sovereign citizens put an enormous value on any document that seems to favor their view, no matter how tenuous it may be.

A favorite gambit of the Washitaw, for instance, is to force some low-level bureaucrat to commit the name “Washitaw” to paper, then hold the document aloft as an official government recognition.

Umar, for instance, was once pulled over by a Louisiana police officer for speeding. His car bore a homemade but convincing Washitaw license plate, and the officer apparently either assumed it belonged to a Native American tribe or knew it was a sham and didn’t feel like dealing with the hassle sovereign citizens notoriously bring to routine traffic stops.

Regardless, Umar received a ticket with his license plate noted as “Washitaw”. He now keeps it under plastic, preserved as the state’s recognition of the legitimacy of the Washitaw.

In other paperwork, various Louisiana agencies have written to Verdiacee at the name and address she provided: “Empress Verdiacee Tiari Washitaw …” In the letters themselves the authorities denied her requests again and again, but what mattered to her followers was that they had used the term “Empress”.

The pinnacle of this tactic came in 1997, when the Washitaw applied to receive a grant from United Nations funds for indigenous peoples. Members travelled to Switzerland, applied, and were filed by the UN as grant application No 215.

By the time the Washitaw contingent made it back to Louisiana, their account had mutated into a tale of how the UN had recognized them as “indigenous people #215”.

The UN did no such thing, but it didn’t matter. The whiff of legitimacy was enough to bring other sovereign groups out of the wilderness and to the empress’ door. She had a shot at international recognition, and they wanted a piece of it.

Skinheads. Militias. Neo-Nazis. Paleo-Nazis. White supremacists. White nationalists. People who would have slit her throat previously came bearing gifts for the woman they now called “empress”.

“They came in private airplanes,” Umar said. “They landed at the airport and came in a caravan of SUVs, and when they came in the room they laid out cases of gold and platinum coins.”

When they came, Umar said, his job was to stand in terrifying silence behind the seated Verdiacee. “I had never seen a platinum coin,” he said. “They were so tiny, but worth so much.”

The visitors joined the Washitaw and under its umbrella they sold paperwork and certificates and memberships to their own followers in various militant white enclaves. Washitaw passports sold for $200. Something called a motorized conveyance registration cost $250. Birth certificates. License plates. On and on. Within a year, Verdiacee was jetting off to Hawaii, opening her own bank, driving a Rolls-Royce.

•••

An image from YouTube shows Gavin Long. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Gavin Long claimed to have answers. He pitched himself online as a guru of manliness. An “alphapreneur”, willing to help weak men discover their inner wolves for a fee. In reality, he yearned to belong.

He grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, and after high school he joined the US Marines. After his discharge in 2010 he roamed east Africa, and claimed to consult with shamans and sorcerers. There is a whole spectrum of black nationalist organizations, from scholarly to virulent. Long dabbled in Christianity, in the Nation of Islam, in the Black Panther movement. Finally he settled on becoming a Washitaw.

The empress had died in 2014, the FBI had rounded up many of her followers, and the remaining adherents had scattered around the country. But something about the Washitaw gave Long a sense of belonging.

In May 2015, he filed court papers in Jackson County, Missouri, declaring himself a member of the United Washitaw de Dugdahmoundyah Mu’ur. He took on the trappings of its Pangaean culture. In the papers, he unofficially changed his name to “Cosmo Setepenra”. It appears to be a nod to Pharaoh Ramses II, whose royal names included “Setep-en-Ra”. He also started wearing an ankh pendant.

Long posted online rambling videos about race and power, which grew darker after the first week of July when police in Baton Rouge shot and killed 37-year-old Alton Sterling and police in suburban St Paul, Minnesota, shot and killed 32-year-old Philando Castile.

After Micah Johnson shot and killed five police officers in Dallas on 7 July, Long posted a video claiming to be in Dallas. In the video, he criticized protesters in Baton Rouge for being too peaceful. Veda Washington, Sterling’s aunt, had told protesters: “I’m mad. I’m so mad. I’m angry. But I’m not so angry that I will cuss out the police.”

According to Long, women had no place at protests.

Umar attended those early peaceful protests, carrying a Washitaw flag. He decried the officers who shot Sterling as power-drunken racists. Days later, when he turned on his television and saw live reports of Long’s rampage, he recoiled. And then, worse, his phone rang. A Washitaw woman from north Louisiana called with the news that Long had joined their group.

“They are just trying to put this on us because we are about to win a land settlement,” Umar said this past weekend. “Do you think they’re just going to let a group of black people take their land? No.”

The casket of Baton Rouge sheriff’s deputy Brad Garafola is carried by a police honor guard on Saturday. Photograph: Jonathan Bachman/Reuters

•••

The world of the Washitaw is awash with conspiracy. Nothing is certain. There are mirrors facing mirrors. But Umar is, beyond doubt, a believer.

“Look at them,” he said, walking across the campus at Louisiana State University. The campus was built on an ancient native site, and two mounds rise among the classrooms and dorms and laboratories.

“We can walk on them,” he said. “We can … ”

Interrupting himself he took off, sprinting up the wet grass incline. At true top he raised his fists toward the sky. “Wooo!” he called. “Do you feel it? Do you feel the energy? Look at my arms!”

His skin had broken into goosebumps. He gazed across at the second mound, and then up to the sky.

“Do you feel it? This is where I belong.”