In May 2017, an officer snapped a photo of Corey Cobb’s parked Chevrolet S10 pickup in Dallas. A hearing the following month determined he violated a morning parking ban on South Houston Street.
Cobb took out a permanent marker and put his rebuke in writing.
“I do not consent to contract,” he wrote in big letters on a document detailing the outcome, his words crisscrossing the printed text.
His scrawl cast the citation as a violation of, among other things, an “organic constitution” and an arcane peace treaty the U.S. and Morocco signed in the late 18th century. He signed under the addendum with his preferred name: Coremour Luel Bey.
The document was among more than a dozen filed by Cobb, then 23, in court the same year as he faced charges for failing to identify himself to a police officer with intent to provide false information.
His posts on social media and the court filings, in which Cobb identifies himself as a “Moorish American National” and suggests he is not bound by U.S. laws, are informing an investigation by Dallas police into a shooting that killed a police officer and injured two others.
Police say Cobb, who later changed his name to Cobb-Bey, shot and killed Officer Darron Burks in an Oak Cliff parking lot on Aug. 29. He then opened fire on two responding officers, injuring both and blinding one, before leading law enforcement on a chase that ended in Lewisville with him shot dead by police.
Dallas police Chief Eddie García acknowledged there was evidence Cobb-Bey was a “Moorish sovereign citizen” during his first public remarks after the shootings.
“We’re scouring through his social media to see if we can find anything that is similar to some sort of manifesto,” García said at an Aug. 30 news conference. The chief later added: “As that information comes forward, I can guarantee we will be transparent with it if we do find something.”
Since then, Dallas police have not released any additional information about Cobb-Bey’s apparent beliefs or theories about what led to the shootings.
Dallas police declined to answer a list of questions seeking additional information, citing the investigation. The case has not yet been presented to a grand jury, which will review officers’ actions that night, police Lt. Tramese Jones said in a statement.
The Dallas Morning News reviewed hundreds of Cobb-Bey’s social media posts, YouTube videos and court filings.
Experts say the voluminous materials show he espoused a unique combination of tenets, beliefs from fringe Moorish Science groups and elements of “sovereign citizen” ideology.
The FBI classifies sovereign citizens as antigovernment extremists. Federal investigators did not know of Cobb-Bey before the shooting, FBI Dallas office spokesperson Melinda Urbina said in a statement.
Moorish Science teachings during the religion’s founding in the early 20th century are incongruent with sovereign citizen ideology, experts say.
Many Moorish Science groups, including at least two in the Dallas area, have disavowed Cobb-Bey and other groups adhering to sovereign citizen ideology. One of the Dallas groups renouncing Cobb-Bey’s alleged actions once hosted him in its study meetings in late 2017 and early 2018, the group’s leader told The News.
What is the Moorish Science Temple of America?
Cobb-Bey, 30, took to social media about three hours before the shooting.
“WHO GOT THE NEAREST MOORISH SCIENCE TEMPLE of America IN DALLAS TEXAS??” he wrote on Facebook and Instagram. “Wanna know plz thanks!”
The post resembled years of Cobb-Bey’s musings on social media about Moorish Science and the Moorish Science Temple of America, a religious movement founded in Chicago in the early 1900s that intertwined Black nationalism and a religious philosophy rooted in Islam.
Symbols of the religion include the number seven, fezzes, turbans and the Moroccan flag — all of which can be seen in Cobb-Bey’s social media posts and videos reviewed by The News.
Timothy Drew, the movement’s founder who took the title Prophet Noble Drew Ali, taught adherents they were descendants of Islamic Moors from Morocco and Egypt. He believed African Americans could gain recognition as American citizens in the Jim Crow era by calling themselves Moorish Americans rather than Black or “Negro.”
Adherents sometimes add “El” or “Bey” to their surname to acknowledge their ancestry. Cobb-Bey legally changed his name to add “Bey” in 2017, court records show.
Drew Ali encouraged members to reclaim this identity and, in doing so, shed what he saw as false labels — Black and “Negro” — that had been used to perpetuate slavery, said Spencer Dew, a professor of religion at Ohio State University who has studied the Moorish Science and its movements.
Dew said the movement splintered into three major groups after Drew Ali died in 1929. While no religion has a monolithic structure, the fragmentation in Moorish Science was divisive to the degree that multiple separate groups, including in the present, have fought in court over using the Moorish Science Temple name.
Groups have read Drew Ali’s teachings in various ways. With the rise of the internet, Moorish Science “gurus” on social media broadly share their interpretations, with some leaning into sovereign citizen ideology, said Rachel Goldwasser, a senior research analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center who studies sovereign citizen movements.
The rise of sovereign ideology among Moors conflicts with Drew Ali’s foundational teachings.
“Sovereign interpretations abandon much of the Prophet’s focus, but they do, indeed, fit with that history for those who follow them,” Dew said.
Moors who claim to be sovereign from U.S. laws often cite, among other things, a 1786 peace treaty between the U.S. and Morocco — the same centuries-old document Cobb-Bey seemingly cited on paperwork for his 2017 parking citation in Dallas.
Dew, who reviewed Cobb-Bey’s social media posts and court filings, said Cobb-Bey’s writings “echo” the teachings of other Moors and sovereigns online, though he said some aspects appear to be uniquely his own.
Some of Cobb-Bey’s writings discuss the “end times.” In a video posted to Instagram, the caption identifies police as “devils” and “creations.” The video shows him walking up to officers in an unmarked SUV and asking if there’s “any problem.”
Cobb-Bey describes a world where “dehumanized entities pose a real threat, but he has hope” the apocalypse is coming, Dew said.
“He’s building up a system where the folks that he identifies as ‘other’ are utterly inhuman,” Dew said of the social media posts. “That’s never good.”
Of Cobb-Bey’s last Facebook post asking about Moorish Science temples in Dallas, Dew said he doubted Cobb-Bey would “find much community or fellow travelers.”
Moorish “sovereign citizens” clash with law enforcement
The actions of sovereign citizens can vary in scope.
“At their most harmless, [sovereign citizens] frustrate police officers with phony identification cards and insist that they are not corporations,” wrote Charles E. Loeser, an attorney and author of a 2015 study of sovereign citizens in the law review for the University of North Carolina School of Law. “At their most harmful, they lure police officers into traps and murder them for the alleged injustices law enforcement has perpetrated against sovereigns.”
Sovereign citizen ideology has white supremacist roots dating back to the 1970s, but the Moorish offshoots appear to have picked up in the 1990s, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The ideology has sometimes fueled clashes with law enforcement. A frequently cited example took place in July 2021, when Massachusetts law enforcement arrested nearly a dozen armed members of a Rhode Island-based group called “Rise of the Moors” after an hourslong standoff on Interstate 95 in the city of Wakefield.
The leader of the group livestreamed the standoff, at one point saying, among other things, that officers were violating the U.S.-Morocco peace treaty, according to The Boston Globe.
Moors who clash with law enforcement make up a small fraction of all Moors, with those embracing sovereign citizen ideas making up an even smaller portion, Goldwasser and Dew said.
What is more common in Moorish Science is what Goldwasser characterized as “gurus” on social media. The gurus lure people who’ve landed into legal trouble, whether financial or criminal, with the false promise they are not subject to the law.
“There are thousands of these people,” Goldwasser said of the gurus, adding the practice can be profitable. “So it is hard to quantify because there’s always new ones popping up online to make their case.”
Most people hear about Moorish Science after a violent event involving a follower who believed they were sovereign, Dew and Goldwasser said. Other Moorish Science groups often attempt to distance themselves from the people who carried out such events, Dew said, sometimes contacting local law enforcement or media.
Days after the shooting, a North Carolina-based group emailed letters to Dallas-area reporters expressing condolences for Burks’ family and asking the outlets to remove “Bey” from Cobb-Bey’s name.
“His actions stand apart from the principles and values we uphold,” the two-page letter reads. The author did not respond to requests for an interview.
In late April, two sheriff’s deputies were injured in a shootout at a park in Lakeland, a city in central Florida. The county sheriff identified the 26-year-old gunman, who was shot dead by the deputies, as a “Moorish sovereign citizen” named Kmac El Bey.
In a lengthy video published May 18 on his YouTube channel, Cobb-Bey talks with a fellow Moor about the Moorish identification card deputies recovered from El Bey.
In the video reviewed by The News, Cobb-Bey said he was in the same online community of Moors with El Bey from 2015 to 2018, after which the two had a fractious relationship. Cobb-Bey goes on to describe El Bey as a corrupting force, saying he was a “wizard” who once “sent demons” to his Dallas home.
At one point, Cobb-Bey said the term “Moorish sovereign citizen” was an oxymoron.
In the video, Cobb-Bey speculates without evidence that El Bey shot the deputies knowing the incident would draw media attention and “scare the Moors away from their birthrights” and those properly following the religion’s teachings, such as himself.
Three months later, Officer Burks was killed.
Dallas Moor says members are supposed to be “an example of how to be”
There are at least two Moorish Science groups in Dallas, one of which Cobb-Bey attended meetings with years ago.
Marcus Molden Bey, who leads a group of about 20 members, said he met Cobb-Bey in late 2017. The two lost touch in early 2018 when Molden Bey says Cobb-Bey stopped attending meetings.
News of the shooting was a shock, he added.
“I never would have thought he possessed the energy or ability to do what he did,” Molden Bey, 51, said in an interview. “Never.”
Molden Bey said it is not unusual for new members to come and go. He said he remembers Cobb-Bey leaving because he was unhappy with the “structure and layout” of the teachings.
“We weren’t using remedies out of tax evasion or child support or trying to beat some type of criminal case — none of those things exist in the teachings within the Moorish Science Temple of America,” Molden Bey said.
Molden Bey said groups on social media encouraging Moors to be sovereign had twisted the teachings. His personal run-in with the law informed his opinion.
In 2007, Molden Bey pleaded guilty to theft of more than $45,000 via check fraud, court records show, in exchange for a promise to pay restitution, a fine and 10 years of deferred community supervision.
In January 2013, a DeSoto police officer stopped Molden Bey because the van he was driving had defective brake lights, the officer wrote in an arrest affidavit. He gave the officer his Moorish Science Temple ID because he did not have a driver’s license, which was suspended, according to court records.
Molden Bey faced one count of failure to identify as a felon with intent to give false information. In May 2013, Dallas County prosecutors and Molden Bey entered a conditional agreement to dismiss the case, court records show.
Molden Bey, who said Moorish Science can “make you feel like a diplomat,” described the arrest as a “wake-up call” that frustrated fellow Moors.
“I was told immediately by Moorish Americans, ‘Why wouldn’t you have your license?’ They were agitated with me,” he said, recalling the discussions. “That even furthermore showed me that we’re not here to be a problem for law enforcement. We’re here to be an example of how to be.”
Molden Bey said he was not aware Cobb-Bey was facing criminal charges when he attended his group’s meetings in late 2017 and early 2018. He now wishes he could have put Cobb-Bey on the “right path.”
Cobb-Bey pushed for a jury trial, court records show. In January 2018, he was convicted of failing to identify himself to a police officer with intent to provide false info — a charge similar to the one Molden Bey faced.
Cobb-Bey served six days in jail.
