Every August, members of the Black radical left spend the entire month raising awareness about the women and men of the Black Power Era who paid, and continue to pay, the ultimate sacrifice in the fight against racism, capitalism, fascism and imperialism.
This tradition, known as Black August, revives a call to action to free the Black political prisoners who are spending their twilight years in correctional facilities across the country.
Some of those prisoners, like Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, have been locked away in the belly of the beast for decades due to what some organizers of the Millennial and Gen Z generations recognize as his power to organize the masses against atrocities committed by the U.S. government.
“The system isolated Jamil Al-Amin and other political prisoners to break the lineage of the movement,” said Maria Fernandez, an organizer in the D.C. chapter of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM).
“These are elders suffering from medical neglect. They are not alone. The state has young people coming inside. We want to make those connections about how the state kills people and funnels them into the prison system.”
On Aug. 17, the 137th birth anniversary of Black nationalist and political prisoner Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Fernandez and other MXGM members will join Pan-African Community Action and the Black Alliance for Peace at the Black Workers and Wellness Center in Southeast for “Curbfest for Political Prisoners.”
This event counts among several “curbfests” taking place throughout the U.S. in recognition of Black political prisoners. Throughout much of the afternoon, people will converge on a portion of Martin Luther King, Jr. Avenue near Downtown Anacostia for free food, musical performances and films, and capoeira classes.
They will also have an opportunity to write letters to several Black political prisoners — including Al-Amin.
The Story of Jamil Al-Amin
Al-Amin, the 80-year-old human rights activist and Muslim cleric formerly known as H. Rap Brown, is currently serving a life sentence for the 2000 murder of a Fulton County, Georgia sheriff’s deputy. After a few years in a Georgia state prison, authorities transferred Al-Amin to a federal facility in 2007 and issued a gag order that prevented him from speaking with journalists and biographers.
After a stint in ADX Florence supermax prison in Florence, Colorado and a multiple myeloma diagnosis, Al-Amin became a resident of U.S. Penitentiary, Tucson in 2018. That’s where he confers with supporters who are fighting on his behalf for a retrial.
During the latter part of the 1960s, before his first prison stint and conversion to Islam, Al-Amin became a target of the FBI’s Cointelpro program, along with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, Kwame Ture, and several other organizers of that era. Though Fernadez initially learned about Al-Amin’s radicalization of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), she said that she came to better appreciate him while organizing with MXGM comrades in Atlanta, where Al-Amin led a religious movement in the West End throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
As she and others continue to raise awareness about the campaign for Al-Amin’s release, and organize to free other Black political prisoners, including former Black Panther Kamau Sadiki, Fernandez said she remains resolute in ensuring that young people know about the figures who provided a blueprint for self-determination.
“It’s important to note the impact that he’s had on particular movements, like… SNCC and his spiritual work on the West End [of Atlanta],” said Fernandez, who also served as a member of the committee that secured Dr. Mutulu Shakur’s 2022 release. “Before his last arrest, the state had decades of attacks [against Jamil Al Amin]. We have to make those connections to his work. We have so many lessons to learn.”
The Ever-Continuing Fight to Free Al-Amin
In 2000, Fulton County sheriff’s deputies Ricky Kinchen and Aldranon English visited Al-Amin’s home to execute an arrest warrant after Al-Amin didn’t appear in court over charges he received during a traffic stop a year prior. Those charges, which included speeding, auto theft, and impersonating a police officer, stemmed from Al-Amin’s alleged possession of a stolen car for which he had the bill of sale, and the police officer’s discovery of an honorary police badge that John Jackson, Al-Amin’s comrade and the first Black mayor of White Hall, Alabama, gave him.
After Kinchen and English determined that Al-Amin’s home was empty, they drove away. As they pulled off, a black Mercedes passed them, heading toward the house. Police reports say that, upon seeing the Mercedes, Kinchen turned the patrol car around and pulled up on the vehicle in question.
Once English exited the patrol car and approached the Mercedes, he asked the driver to show their hands. The driver then opened fire with a rifle. English returned fire while running between two cars. He was hit four times while Kinchen was shot with the rifle and a 9 mm handgun.
Kinchen succumbed to injuries a day later. English, who survived the shooting, later identified Al-Amin as the shooter.
The U.S. Marshals started their four-day manhunt of Al-Amin at the site of the shooting where they discovered a blood trail. When they found Al-Amin in White Hall, Alabama, he was unwounded and wearing body armor.
While forensics scientists determined that the 9 mm handgun found at the site of Al-Amin’s arrest was used to shoot English and Kinchen, they didn’t find Al-Amin’s fingerprints on the weapon. Testing of the blood determined that it neither belonged to Al-Amin nor the two officers.
However, authorities later found Al-Amin’s black Mercedes with bullet holes.
On March 9, 2002, two years after the shootings and less than a year after the 9/11 attacks, a jury convicted Al-Amin of 13 charges, including Kinchen’s murder and the aggravated assault of English. Al-Amin’s supporters have since fought for his release, albeit with less than desirable results.
In 2004, the Supreme Court of Georgia upheld Al-Amin’s conviction in a unanimous ruling. In 2019, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Al-Amin’s appeal for a retrial, even with requests that officials consider a confession made by Otis Jackson, a man who, two years before Al-Amin’s conviction, told authorities that he committed the Fulton County shootings.
In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from Al-Amin.
Supporters say that the Innocence Project, an organization dedicated to proving wrongful convictions, took on Al-Amin’s case earlier this year. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, the Innocence Project has reportedly secured thousands of documents, most of which had been redacted.
Vanessa Potkin, the director of special litigation at the Innocence Project, didn’t return The Informer’s request for comment.
These days, Luqman Al-Sadiq counts among those who not only maintain regular contact with Al-Amin through letters and phone calls, but raise awareness about Al-Amin and advocate for this release through the Imam Jamil Action Network.
In his role as deputy amir of the Imam Jamil Action Network, Al-Sadiq travels across the U.S. to organize people around the campaign for Al-Amin’s release. He has also taken on the responsibility of forming an international support network that includes Muslim communities in the U.S. and throughout Africa, including Sierra Leone, Gambia and Malawi.
For Al-Sadiq, these structures have taken on a life of their own, which he said speaks to Al-Amin’s influence and legacy.
“They don’t want him to speak or do anything, but it has done the opposite,” Al-Sadiq said. “When you talk to him, you can’t believe he’s in prison. He’s always upbeat. He talks about [being on] Allah’s time. That’s his state of mind. His character is humbling. I try to exemplify and live up to his standards [because] I don’t have time to sit on my laurels.”
Al-Sadiq, a descendant of Black Panthers, first wrote Al-Amin in 2004. He said that his relationship with Al-Amin grew through the years as he made phone calls and wrote letters to other people on Al-Amin’s behalf.
After nearly six years of corresponding via letters, Al-Sadiq and Al-Amin finally spoke on the phone in 2010. That’s where Al-Sadiq said he first saw his responsibilities growing.
“I sent letters to the United Nations asking them to get involved through the Human Rights Commission, Al-Sadiq said. “I wrote sports figures, rappers, and even Dick Gregory, Nelson Mandela.”
Other efforts that Al-Sadiq mentioned included “The Forgotten Imam” campaign, through which he and others have been able to educate others about Al-Amin and raise his profile around the world.
As the Israeli government continues to kill and displace Palestinians in the West Bank, Al-Sadiq said that Al-Amin has even greater relevance to the ongoing human rights struggle.
“Under Cointelpro, they considered him a Messiah and a threat to the nation,” Al-Sadiq said. “He is one of the last orators we have. Everything he said was the truth and it turned on a light,” he added, telling The Informer that Al-Amin continues to persevere through the government’s decades-long attempts to silence him.
“He never deviated from his principles. The things the government accused him of don’t make sense. He had a rebirth when they locked him down [the first time] then they really had a problem.”
The U.S. Government v. Imam Jamil Al-Amin
By 1967, Al-Amin, then known as H. Rap Brown, assumed the helm of SNCC, where he, in resistance to the early nonviolent tenor of the movement, built upon Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael)’s calls for Black Power and militant self-defense.
That summer, Al-Amin toured the nation, demanding that Black people organize militarily and conduct guerilla warfare in the major cities. He faced police opposition in Cambridge, Maryland when, as explained in Peter B. Levy’s 2003 book, a sheriff deputy shot him after he wrapped up a speaking engagement.
Long after Al-Amin received treatment for his injuries and left town, a fire broke out in Cambridge. Authorities later charged Al-Amin with inciting a riot and carrying a gun across state lines. Levy, in his book titled “Civil War on Race Street: The Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge, Maryland,” argues that the fire spread across 17 buildings, not as a result of a riot, but the Cambridge police and fire departments’ negligence of the Black community.
In 1970, just as Al-Amin’s trial was set to begin, he disappeared. After 18 months on the FBI’s most wanted list, authorities arrested Al-Amin in New York City for his alleged robbery of a bar. Between 1971 and 1976, Al-Amin served time in New York’s Attica Prison, where he converted to Islam and formally took on his current name.
For nearly a decade, another author by the name of Dr. Arun Kundnani has immersed himself in his studies about Al-Amin’s life, including the spiritual transformation that inspired the imam’s entrepreneurial endeavors and leadership of the Muslim community in Atlanta’s West End.
Kundnani, a writer interested in race, Islamophobia, surveillance, police violence and radicalism, said his work will culminate in a biography. That biography, titled “I Rise in Fire: H. Rap Brown, Jamil Al Amin, and the Long Revolution,” is scheduled for release sometime before 2026.
“In almost all the books about the Black Power movement, Jamil Al-Amin’s name had been erased. I thought that maybe I should try to do his story justice,” Kundnani said. “There’s an interesting story…that shows what it means to be involved in radical grassroots activism for decades. That shows what it means to face defeat and rethink your framework.”
Kundani said he first came across Al-Amin during his research of Islamophobia that he said emerged in the 1990s and laid the foundation for Al-Amin’s 2002 conviction in Georgia and subsequent transfer to the supermax federal prison in Florence.
Al-Amin, Kundnani learned, was an associate of Imam Luqman Abdullah, who the FBI killed in 2009 out of wrongful suspicion of being an al-Qaeda sympathizer.
That discovery, Kundnani recounted, took him down a rabbit hole over the next few years as he spent time learning about Al-Amin’s work in SNCC and spiritual transformation. Kundnani said his upcoming book will include information collected via interviews with nearly 50 people — including Al-Amin’s wife Karima Al-Amin, SNCC associates Cleveland Sellers and Mukasa Dada, and Black Muslims who worked closely with Al-Amin, including Bilal Sunni Ali.
Kundnani had also set out to speak to the man himself, telling The Informer that he wanted to accurately piece together the details of Al-Amin’s life story and document the various means through which he’s been able to serve the people.
That interview, however, wouldn’t happen until 2021, after years of letters to the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the threat of a lawsuit.
“The fact that it took so long to get an interview tells us that they’re pretty committed to cutting him off from the outside world and not allowing him to communicate,” Kundnani said. “We’re back to the situation where it’s not so easy to interview him again. They’ve succeeded in [making] his voice disappear from public consciousness.”
The U.S. government’s targeting of Al-Amin, Kundnani noted, remained incessantly consistent, throughout the latter part of the 20th century, even as law enforcement and intelligence agencies changed their priorities.
“Since the 1990s, Islam’s the new enemy,” Kundnani said. “We knew that there were FBI informants being placed in Al-Amin’s community. They understood what they were doing targeting who they believed to be an Islamic extremist and someone they referred to as a Black Panther, even though he had never been a member. They saw [their mission] through an Islamic and Black radical lens. That’s what made Al-Amin at the top of the list of targets.”
These days, as much of the Black radical community continues to lift up Al-Amin’s name, and that of other Black political prisoners, Kundnani expresses his desire for a movement that follows Al-Amin’s example in connecting with the non-credentialed masses.
“Jamil Al-Amin puts the importance on organizing with regular folks on the street corner,” Kundnani said. “Not just the people who’ve been to college and are supposed to be more educated or better off. He’s been interested in how to organize around the most disaffected. That’s maybe the hardest constituency to build with. But without them, you don’t have radical politics, just bourgeois politics.”