Dr. Umar Johnson wants the world to know the school is real. After more than a decade of promises, the Philadelphia psychologist and activist has been walking supporters through a finished FDMG Academy, the school for Black boys he has been raising money to build since around 2013, and declaring that the long awaited doors are finally ready to open.
FDMG, short for the Frederick Douglass and Marcus Garvey academy, sits in Wilmington, Delaware. Umar, who calls himself the Prince of Pan-Africanism, has always framed the school as a direct answer to what he describes as the special education, ADHD, and overmedication pipelines aimed at Black boys. The original vision was even bigger. Around 2014 he set out to buy St. Paul’s College, a defunct HBCU in Virginia, for $5 million to house the academy. That deal fell apart by 2017, and he pivoted to the Delaware property that has carried the project ever since.
What came after became one of the longest running debates in the culture. Reports over the years pegged his fundraising anywhere from $1.6 million to more than $4 million, and a steady chorus of critics accused him of collecting donations without ever delivering a school. Opening dates came and went. He pointed to September 2024 as a first day he called an intellectual insurrection, then pushed it into 2025, then floated Malcolm X’s birthday. Even the Joe Budden podcast went on record wondering aloud whether the place would ever open at all. Through all of it, Umar has consistently denied the scam allegations, calling them unfounded and pointing instead to renovation delays, tax and permitting hurdles, and the plain difficulty of building an independent institution without corporate or government money.
This time the footage tells a different story than it used to. The recent walkthroughs show a building that looks considerably further along than the boarded windows and hard hats of the earlier tours that critics loved to clown. In his latest updates, Umar has said the renovations are complete and the academy is ready for state inspection, and he has spent 2026 meeting the transparency and donor accountability questions head on rather than waving them off. Whether that translates into an actual first day of class with actual enrolled students is the part both his supporters and his doubters are still waiting to see…