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Speaker 5: Campsite Media.
Speaker 3: Atlanta, Georgia, was one commercial crossroads of the Confederacy then
Speaker 3: decades after the Civil War. In the middle of the
Speaker 3: twentieth century, it became something dramatically different, the seat of
Speaker 3: the country's black political leadership that was at the height
Speaker 3: of the Civil rights movement. The city's business elite called
Speaker 3: Atlanta the City too Busy to Hate. There are other
Speaker 3: nicknames too, the Black Mecca, the city in a forest,
Speaker 3: the atl My name is Mosey's Secret and for me,
Speaker 3: Atlanta is my hometown.
Speaker 4: It's where I grew up.
Speaker 3: Within the city, there's a neighborhood called the West End
Speaker 3: that was once a rich white enclave with bungalows, Victorian homes,
Speaker 3: and a leafy tree canopy. In the fifties and sixties,
Speaker 3: after desegregation, white people took flight to the suburbs like
Speaker 3: in so many other American cities, and black people moved
Speaker 3: in institutional neglect, urban decay, and the crack epidemic followed.
Speaker 3: That was the West End in the eighties when I.
Speaker 4: Was growing up in Atlanta, pretty rough.
Speaker 3: But it was also around that time that black people,
Speaker 3: African American Muslims in particular, began to create a thriving
Speaker 3: religious community in the West End. It turned the neighborhood
Speaker 3: into something radically different from the rest of Atlanta, unique
Speaker 3: even in the country. It was self led and to
Speaker 3: a large extent, self policed, but it was not removed
Speaker 3: from the city in the country's problems. There was tension
Speaker 3: and there were clashes. Then on the nine of March sixteenth,
Speaker 3: two thousand, it all came to a deadly explosive head.
Speaker 3: That confrontation is what this story is about. It happened
Speaker 3: around West End Park, the namesake park in the neighborhood.
Speaker 3: Across a small street south of the park, there's a
Speaker 3: one story wooden building. It looks like a house, but
Speaker 3: people in the community have used it as their mosques
Speaker 3: since the late seventies. I like to use the Arabic
Speaker 3: word for mosque, masjed. On March sixteenth, two thousand, around
Speaker 3: eight pm the Adan, the Muslim call to prayer was
Speaker 3: broadcast throughout the West end those bungalows and Victorians African
Speaker 3: American Muslims lived in them. Now the neighborhood was like
Speaker 3: a little Muslim village, and at the call to prayer
Speaker 3: that night, like always, men wearing thebes and coofies walked
Speaker 3: from their homes to the masjed. They took off their
Speaker 3: shoes and got ready for prayer in the front room,
Speaker 3: shouldered to shoulder, toe to toe. That's a Muslims prey
Speaker 3: or makes a lot lined up facing the city of
Speaker 3: Mecca as they recite Versus from the Koran. A seventeen
Speaker 3: year old kid, just a few years younger than me
Speaker 3: at the time, joined the prayer. And after Salat that night,
Speaker 3: when most of the men walked home, abduced samat Jahad
Speaker 3: stuck around for a math lesson.
Speaker 6: Were going over fractions and I think also were dealing
Speaker 6: with a little trigger number tree or algebra, something like that,
Speaker 6: and I was having problems real bad.
Speaker 3: The streets in the neighborhood are small, it's quiet, especially
Speaker 3: at night. The match was normally a great place for
Speaker 3: up just samat to focus on algebra.
Speaker 6: You didn't hear nobody's saying anything. You didn't hear nobody
Speaker 6: speaking anything. It was just completely silence, and then all
Speaker 6: of a sudden gunfire. So naturally me, I don't know
Speaker 6: what's going on. I'm sitting down doing math and they
Speaker 6: I just know the teacher jumped on top of me,
Speaker 6: and you know, say get down because it sounded so close.
Speaker 4: I'd samot and the tutor lay still on the floor.
Speaker 6: All I knew was it was scary, you know, it
Speaker 6: was scary to hear. I didn't know what was going on.
Speaker 6: I was just saying, oh God, I thought somebody Honestly,
Speaker 6: when they already shooting, I thought somebody was doing the
Speaker 6: drive by on the Master, trying to shoot up on
Speaker 6: the Master while I was in so I thought he
Speaker 6: jumped on me. I was just a god, don't let
Speaker 6: me get shot in the head or get shot by
Speaker 6: my stray bullet. I thought somebody was doing the drive
Speaker 6: by that's why he jumped.
Speaker 7: On top of him.
Speaker 3: They weren't hit and it wasn't a drive by, but
Speaker 3: with shots still ripping through the air, someone dragged u
Speaker 3: Duce some mat into a closet and told them, no
Speaker 3: matter what, stay put.
Speaker 6: And then after that the gunshots continued and continued and
Speaker 6: continue to continue. It was like almost like an overkill,
Speaker 6: like it was a war zone out there. Who would
Speaker 6: shoot that many tonight? No one, I mean, no one
Speaker 6: would do that.
Speaker 3: When the gunfire finally stopped, Abduce crept out of the
Speaker 3: closet through a window. He saw the street was flooded
Speaker 3: with cops, and then a few moments later he heard
Speaker 3: his father calling for him. They lived right next to
Speaker 3: the mass jed, so he hurried home. So you spent
Speaker 3: the rest of the night looking out the window.
Speaker 6: Huh well yeah, basically, yeah, yeah, looking out the window.
Speaker 6: And then my dad put me to sleep. He said, hey,
Speaker 6: you got to go to school in the morning.
Speaker 3: The responding officers found the aftermath of a shootout. There
Speaker 3: were dozens of shellcasings strewn about and two black men
Speaker 3: lying on the ground. They were bleeding, one in the
Speaker 3: street and another in the grass next to the mass Jed.
Speaker 3: The men were uniform deputies from the Fulton County Sheriff's Office,
Speaker 3: the county that includes most of Atlanta. Someone had shot
Speaker 3: the cops. The sheriff's deputies were there to arrest a
Speaker 3: man named Jamil Abdullah Elamine on some relatively small charges.
Speaker 3: He lived right across the street from the mass jed.
Speaker 3: In fact, he was the imam it's leader and the
Speaker 3: de fact the leader of the whole neighborhood. When investigators
Speaker 3: arrived at the crime scene, a Maam Jamil, as he
Speaker 3: was known in the neighborhood was nowhere to be found.
Speaker 4: It wasn't a leap for the.
Speaker 3: Investigators to suspect he shot the deputies. And that's the
Speaker 3: story that's still in the public record about what happened
Speaker 3: that night in March sixteenth, two thousand. I was away
Speaker 3: at college when it happened. Then I began working as
Speaker 3: a journalist. I've been doing that for more than twenty
Speaker 3: years now, and by some strange twist of fate, this
Speaker 3: story about a Maam Jamil in the shootout, it found me.
Speaker 3: A Maam Jamil was convicted of the shooting after a tense,
Speaker 3: high profile trial. Some of the evidence against him was shaky,
Speaker 3: and a prosecutor was accused of misconduct. Ma'am Jamil insisted
Speaker 3: he was innocent, and his family and supporters they're still
Speaker 3: making that case. In the last year or so, I've
Speaker 3: learned that the story in the public record it's not complete.
Speaker 3: There's much more to a man Jamil, and more to
Speaker 3: what happened that night, more than law enforcement has cared
Speaker 3: to acknowledge, and more than Muslims in Atlanta had cared
Speaker 3: to acknowledge. Somehow, when I started asking questions, the timing
Speaker 3: was right for a new narrative to emerge. A Mam
Speaker 3: Jmil was not an ordinary man, or even in ordinary
Speaker 3: a man. He was legendary, the stuff of myth, the
Speaker 3: kind of person people tell stories about. Some of those
Speaker 3: stories people need them to find the courage to face
Speaker 3: their own lives. Some of those stories people fear, fear
Speaker 3: their danger in their violence. But all the stories, regardless
Speaker 3: of their basis, in fact, tend to grow. Over the
Speaker 3: course of his life, a man Jamil became more and
Speaker 3: more of a hero, even as he became more and
Speaker 3: more of a villain. And even the tallest of those
Speaker 3: tales had a way of becoming real as people lived
Speaker 3: with them, acted on them. Sorting through this tangle I've
Speaker 3: just described bringing this story to you, it required me
Speaker 3: to come to grips with how I let stories take
Speaker 3: shape in my own mind and just how I'm willing
Speaker 3: to pass them on. This is one I'm going to
Speaker 3: tell you and the way I'm going to tell it.
Speaker 4: That's what I want to pass on.
Speaker 3: From Campsite Media, Tenderfoot TV, and iHeart podcasts. This is Radical,
Speaker 3: I'm Mostly Secret. Episode one Fire and ma'am Emil Elmine's
Speaker 3: story begins in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he was born
Speaker 3: into a black family in nineteen forty three. He was
Speaker 3: the third and final child of a man off fighting
Speaker 3: in the Second World War and a woman who worked
Speaker 3: two jobs as a teacher at the local orphanage and
Speaker 3: as a maid. The parents named their youngest Hubert Gerald Brown.
Speaker 3: As a kid, he was drawn to the young bloods
Speaker 3: on the corner, the bad mother focus who made a
Speaker 3: profession of hanging out all day, playing the dozens, the
Speaker 3: ones who excelled at sports like he did. These were
Speaker 3: the guys who stood firmous against the establishment. Brown thought
Speaker 3: against Jim Crow they didn't give a shit about white values.
Speaker 3: The kid could talk trash with the best of them,
Speaker 3: and they took the calling him Rap a moniker. That
Speaker 3: stuck as he rose to public life. Most of the
Speaker 3: folks I spoke with who knew AmAm Demil before he
Speaker 3: became Muslim, they called him rap h Rap Brown.
Speaker 4: So that's what I'll do too.
Speaker 3: Rap bristled at Jim Crow's efforts to control his movements,
Speaker 3: to limit the idea of what he could be, and
Speaker 3: he bucked the system in the brashest way possible at
Speaker 3: every opportunity. In his first book, a memoir called Die
Speaker 3: Nigger Died not my favorite book title, Rap wrote that
Speaker 3: he once went to a boy scout circus. It was segregated,
Speaker 3: but nobody was going to warn Rap Brown that he
Speaker 3: couldn't go see what the white boys were up to.
Speaker 3: He walked over there and heard a white boy holler out, nigger,
Speaker 3: you have been sentenced to death, and the boy started
Speaker 3: shooting him with a B begun. The next year, Rap
Speaker 3: brought his own bbgun to the circus. Rap grew up
Speaker 3: to be a tall man, distinguished by his height six
Speaker 3: foot five. He was thin, lanky, with dangling arms and
Speaker 3: long fingers, but he moved smoothly through the world, almost
Speaker 3: gliding as he walked his own kind of swat. He
Speaker 3: was light skinned, a complexion that black folks used to
Speaker 3: call red, similar to Malcolm X. He grew a short
Speaker 3: afro and a mustache, wore a lot of dinnim, sometimes
Speaker 3: a leather jacket. In the sixties, Rapp followed his brother
Speaker 3: to Howard University in DC and got involved in organized activism.
Speaker 3: He read thinkers like W. E. B. Du Bois and
Speaker 3: Franz Feron and Frederick Douglass for the first time, and
Speaker 3: eventually became a part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
Speaker 3: that's the s NCC or SNICK. It was the most
Speaker 3: prominent student group of the movement. While Rapp was a
Speaker 3: part of SNICK, he grew close to a fellow fire
Speaker 3: brand named Willie Rix or Mucassa Dada as he's known
Speaker 3: these days. Mucassa eighty years old now hasn't lost much
Speaker 3: of his fire.
Speaker 7: Rap was always around and you would have encountered him personally.
Speaker 4: You met him and hung out with him.
Speaker 8: I met him with him smoked.
Speaker 7: We used to smoke out herb and whatever and party
Speaker 7: and whatever, and we fought together.
Speaker 8: And Rap was a fighter and a warrior, and he
Speaker 8: was in many, many battles.
Speaker 3: Inside of Snick, the organization was working in the Black Belt,
Speaker 3: a mostly rural swathe of counties across the South that
Speaker 3: got its name from the black fertile soil there and
Speaker 3: the Black people who live in the land since the
Speaker 3: end of their enslavement. But despite their demographics, these mostly poor,
Speaker 3: majority black counties were still controlled by white people. So
Speaker 3: Snickson and organizers Mucasa was one of them, and so
Speaker 3: was Rap.
Speaker 7: The first thing organized have to do is find a
Speaker 7: place to eat, find a place to sleep, and also
Speaker 7: find local leadership.
Speaker 8: If not there, you have to creating.
Speaker 3: Lowndes County, Alabama, where both a RAP and Mucasa worked,
Speaker 3: was the center of the struggle. Black folks there lived
Speaker 3: in wood shacks out on the flat grassy plains, sometimes
Speaker 3: near pine and oak forests.
Speaker 4: The outnumbered white.
Speaker 3: People four to one, but few, if any, of the
Speaker 3: more than five thousand eligible black voters in Lowndes County
Speaker 3: were registered to vote. Landowners evicted black people who tried
Speaker 3: to register, and night writers fired shots into the.
Speaker 4: Homes of local leaders. While Snick was organizing.
Speaker 3: In Lowndes County, a sheriff's deputy killed a volunteer working
Speaker 3: closely with the organization. In the nineteen sixties, at least
Speaker 3: twenty civil rights activists were killed, a conservative estimate that
Speaker 3: doesn't include the hundreds of people who were injured and threatened.
Speaker 3: SNICK is widely remembered for non violence. Of course, it
Speaker 3: did have the word non violent in its name, but
Speaker 3: as I've learned more about the organization, that's really only
Speaker 3: part of the story. Mukasa puts it pretty simply.
Speaker 7: We used none violent as a tactic, where doctor King
Speaker 7: used it as a will of life and what whatever.
Speaker 7: And we said if we'd do it in front of
Speaker 7: let a white man hit us in front of a camera,
Speaker 7: but if they hit us in the camera and there,
Speaker 7: we're gonna fuck him up. If they file us around
Speaker 7: the column, we're gonna fuck him up.
Speaker 3: Mucassa isn't speaking for everyone. Other SNICK organizers may have
Speaker 3: seen it differently, but Mucassa and rap they were prepared
Speaker 3: to defend themselves with violence if necessary, and this was
Speaker 3: in line with many of the locals they were working with,
Speaker 3: Black people living in the Black Belt in Lownes County
Speaker 3: kept shotguns next to their front doors or handguns next
Speaker 3: to their beds, and some snack activists carried guns with them.
Speaker 7: Yeah, we U should go out and fit in the backyards
Speaker 7: and practice shooting and all that cast up all the time.
Speaker 3: But did you ever have to fire your weapon in
Speaker 3: the confrontation?
Speaker 8: Absolutely about tamen.
Speaker 7: Yeah, we'd we'd ride down the street and white folks
Speaker 7: jump behind us and started shooting.
Speaker 8: We ain't out there and started shooting back.
Speaker 3: Rap had carried a gun for years, got us first
Speaker 3: one at fourteen after a run in with some white boys.
Speaker 3: He stole it from a sporting goods store. Rap wrote
Speaker 3: in his autobiography, give me a gun before you even
Speaker 3: give me somebody to work with. A gun won't fail you.
Speaker 3: People will who costs us of it. Once, when Rap
Speaker 3: was organizing in the Alabama, some of the black folks
Speaker 3: who had registered to vote were kicked off their land.
Speaker 3: So they set up a tense city and then white
Speaker 3: people attacked.
Speaker 7: And the white wo come by attens and shooting an attense.
Speaker 8: So Rap, you should have fire him back up.
Speaker 7: Some white man got shot over there, wrapped their Hell yeah,
Speaker 7: we shouted.
Speaker 3: Rap gained a reputation within Snick and across the Black
Speaker 3: Belt for fearlessness and for his speeches that encouraged and
Speaker 3: inspired people to stand up for themselves. A year after
Speaker 3: Snick started working in Lowndes County in Earnest, the local
Speaker 3: leaders organized their own political party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization.
Speaker 3: They made a black panther their symbol, inspiring activists in
Speaker 3: Californi who would later found the Black Panther Party. In
Speaker 3: nineteen sixty six, despite intimidation, sixteen hundred people in Lounges.
Speaker 4: County voted for the new party.
Speaker 3: They wanted to take down the sheriff given the violence
Speaker 3: against black people, and elect their own candidate, but no
Speaker 3: one on the party ticket won. It was this same
Speaker 3: year that Snick began peeling away more publicly from doctor
Speaker 3: Martin Luther King Junior in his rallying cry of freedom.
Speaker 3: Now Snick's new rallying cry was black power. The next year,
Speaker 3: in nineteen sixty seven, rap became Snick's chairman and was
Speaker 3: named an honorary officer of the Black Panther Party. Now
Speaker 3: Rapp wasn't just traveling around the Black Belt. He was
Speaker 3: chairman traveling around the nation at speeches and press conferences
Speaker 3: like this one, he shocked many Americans black and.
Speaker 9: White violence is a plot of America's culture, is as
Speaker 9: American as cherry pie. We will use that violin to
Speaker 9: rid ourselves of oppression if necessary.
Speaker 3: And his speeches, rap boldly explained the mindset he thought
Speaker 3: was necessary for real change in the country where racism
Speaker 3: was a part of the bedrock.
Speaker 9: We did not make the laws in this country. We
Speaker 9: are neither, Marley, not legally confined to those laws, those
Speaker 9: laws that keep them up keep us down.
Speaker 8: You got to begin to understand that.
Speaker 3: It was a revolution and the object was not for
Speaker 3: black people to simply replace white people at the top
Speaker 3: of the heap. Rapid As comrades wanted to toss out
Speaker 3: the systems the country ran on capitalism and all they
Speaker 3: saw a grand conflict between black people and the government
Speaker 3: controlled by white people, a government that used police and
Speaker 3: law enforcement like a domestic military force to maintain control.
Speaker 9: And wan end in the Swahili saying, it says losima
Speaker 9: to sinda be lost you eli shakak which means we
Speaker 9: shall concer without a doubt.
Speaker 8: Black power.
Speaker 3: Mukasa was Wrap's right hand man.
Speaker 7: I was assigned to travel rap wherever he would go.
Speaker 7: And that we started traveling, and as we traveled throughout
Speaker 7: different areas everywhere would go to cities would be on fire,
Speaker 7: catching on fire. Right after we leave, he would go
Speaker 7: out in the battlefields and go out there with them
Speaker 7: folks doing five arms and fighting and burning and whatever.
Speaker 7: And he would always ready to go do that. And
Speaker 7: whenever he talked, he go with him. And when the
Speaker 7: rebellions started wrapped beyond the front line.
Speaker 3: In nineteen sixty seven, there were at least seventy five
Speaker 3: uprisings or rebellions and cities across the country, from San
Speaker 3: Francisco to Cincinnati to New York.
Speaker 4: People took to the streets.
Speaker 7: Even Doctor King and his organization field rep Brown so
Speaker 7: much that even if he wasn't nowhere around, that was
Speaker 7: gonna be somebody in the crowd let's say black power
Speaker 7: and throw a brick or throw a brick at the police.
Speaker 7: And the police didn't discriminate, they didn't running there and
Speaker 7: stop beating them all.
Speaker 3: As part of cointelpro the FBI's program aimed at preventing
Speaker 3: the rise of a so called black messiah. The Bureau
Speaker 3: used dirty tricks to disrupt SNICK and other black power groups.
Speaker 4: Agents began surveilling.
Speaker 3: A Rap and apparently targeted him with trumped up or
Speaker 3: entirely fabricated criminal charges. The conflict seemed to reach a
Speaker 3: climax when a car bomb exploded, killing two SNACK activists.
Speaker 3: There were conflicting theories about what happened, but it looked
Speaker 3: like the bomb was.
Speaker 4: Meant to assassinate Rap. He went into hide it.
Speaker 7: Police departments, the United States government and their agents they
Speaker 7: hated reput all the way to death.
Speaker 3: In nineteen seventy one, after more than a year underground,
Speaker 3: Rap was arrested in New York City. I won't get
Speaker 3: into the particulars of that arrest now, just know that
Speaker 3: he got popped on an arm robbery charge. He and
Speaker 3: some friends were sticking up a lounge to help further
Speaker 3: their activities in the movement, a caper that ended in
Speaker 3: a shootout with cops.
Speaker 4: Rap twenty eight.
Speaker 3: Years old, went to jail Rikers Island and eventually landed
Speaker 3: at Attica Prison. Tough places to say the least, but
Speaker 3: it's hard to imagine Rap living much longer if he
Speaker 3: hadn't stepped back from the front lines. Death was certainly
Speaker 3: something he prepared for and maybe even welcomed. In that autobiography,
Speaker 3: it was published two years before rap was locked up,
Speaker 3: he wrote, America, if it takes my death to organize
Speaker 3: my people to revolt against you, and to organize your
Speaker 3: jails to revolt against you, and to organize your troops
Speaker 3: to revolt against you, and to organize your children to
Speaker 3: revolt against you, and to organize your God to revolt
Speaker 3: against you, and to organize your poor to revolt against you,
Speaker 3: and to organize your country to revolt against you, and
Speaker 3: to organize mankind to rejoice in your destruction and ruin,
Speaker 3: then here is my life. But within weeks, maybe months,
Speaker 3: of his arrest, that seemed to change. He converted to Islam.
Speaker 3: A transformation was underway. Some would even say the creation
Speaker 3: of a new man, Jamil, Beautiful Abdullah, servant of God,
Speaker 3: Alamin the Trustworthy. My own conversion to Islam happened in
Speaker 3: the fifth grade. We'd been Baptist and Pentecostal, and then
Speaker 3: my father found new faith and he wanted all of us,
Speaker 3: my mom and two younger siblings to follow suit. My
Speaker 3: parents put me out of public school and sent me
Speaker 3: to a Muslim private school. I got so being out
Speaker 3: of shape by the change that during my second week
Speaker 3: at the new school, I got super sick and had
Speaker 3: to stay home. When I felt better, my parents finally
Speaker 3: let me go back to public school and joined my
Speaker 3: old friends. In time, I accepted Islam for a good while.
Speaker 4: Anyway, I made.
Speaker 3: My salots and facet for Ramadan, but I always occupied
Speaker 3: this weird in between spot, not fitting in all the
Speaker 3: way with the Muslim kids and feeling different from my
Speaker 3: non Muslim friends. An insider, outsider in both way worlds,
Speaker 3: an observer. When I went to college, I studied comparative religion,
Speaker 3: trying on other beliefs. I realize pretty young that what
Speaker 3: we believe, the way we structure our worlds, and the
Speaker 3: stories we tell ourselves, all of that can be totally
Speaker 3: changed with the flip.
Speaker 4: Of a switch.
Speaker 3: Part of why I pursued writing when I graduated college,
Speaker 3: and why I'm so drawn to complex stories like this,
Speaker 3: is because I sense the power stories.
Speaker 4: Have over our lives.
Speaker 3: What are myths but stories we believe in? With cosmic
Speaker 3: stakes and Ma'am Jimille's conversion, his flip of that switch
Speaker 3: was obviously pivotal in his life. But what kind of
Speaker 3: man did it make him? Rap, the man who was
Speaker 3: throwing fire bombs in the streets, who people believe escaped
Speaker 3: an assassination attempt by the federal government. I can imagine
Speaker 3: him shooting sheriff's deputies coming into his neighborhood to arrest him.
Speaker 3: But a Mam Jamil, all these years later, that was
Speaker 3: much less clear. Converting to Islam. It was something I
Speaker 3: shared with a Ma'am Jamil, something my family shared with him,
Speaker 3: and something that connected us to lots of other African Americans.
Speaker 10: We believe anywhere from twenty to thirty percent of the
Speaker 10: African slaves were either Muslim or exposed Islam in West Africa.
Speaker 3: This is a man Pleman Elamine, maybe the most prominent
Speaker 3: elder in Atlanta's African American Muslim community and the peer
Speaker 3: of a Mam Jamil. A man Pleman believes that through
Speaker 3: our ancestors, Black people have a deep and innate connection
Speaker 3: to Islam, like it's somewhere in our DNA. And when
Speaker 3: Rap became Muslim in jail, he was joining something ever tradition.
Speaker 3: Because the history of African American Islam is linked to
Speaker 3: incarceration and to the Nation of Islam, the black nationalist
Speaker 3: organization found in the nineteen thirties. The Nation did a
Speaker 3: lot of ministry in prisons. Its message that the white
Speaker 3: man was a devil resonated with black people living under
Speaker 3: the yoke of oppression. Malcolm extrajoined the Nation when he
Speaker 3: was in prison, and after he got out, eventually became
Speaker 3: its spokesperson. But like many others, he left the organization
Speaker 3: for Sunni Islam, which is more closely based on the Qur'an.
Speaker 3: The vast majority of the world's Muslims are Sunni, and
Speaker 3: as new sects of Sunni Islam developed in the United States,
Speaker 3: they also recruited in prisons.
Speaker 10: When people in prison, they have to have to think,
Speaker 10: you know, really, that's Malcolm. He came to Islam by
Speaker 10: being in prison and just studying and reading and trying
Speaker 10: to come with some solutions. So that's been a tradition
Speaker 10: in our community and where gangs are really dominant in prisons,
Speaker 10: and many folks see the salvation as being a Muslim,
Speaker 10: so they get the protection of the brotherhood or even
Speaker 10: the sisterhood. And it's also a great productive way of spinning.
Speaker 4: Your time organizing your time, organizing your days.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a Sunni movement called dar
Speaker 3: Ul Islam that reached Rap. Darul was based at Amasthid
Speaker 3: in the Beverid Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, not.
Speaker 4: Far from where I live now.
Speaker 3: Actually, Daroul used to send men to minister to inmates
Speaker 3: of the notorious Rikers Island jail where Rap was being held,
Speaker 3: and those men met Rap at a moment when he
Speaker 3: was trying to make sense of what was happening in
Speaker 3: him and around him. Rapp said the fact that Malcolm
Speaker 3: X converted to Islam made him take it more seriously.
Speaker 3: The men from dar Oul organized Friday Juma services at
Speaker 3: Rikers and Rap attended. In nineteen seventy one, he took
Speaker 3: the Shahada, the oath to become Muslim. When he got
Speaker 3: out of prison. In nineteen seventy six, a man Jamil
Speaker 3: made the pilgrimage to Mecca and completed the Hodge. He
Speaker 3: moved to Atlanta, and not long after he arrived he
Speaker 3: founded the Western Community Master, and Man Cleman was a
Speaker 3: leader at another Master across town.
Speaker 10: I had the role of keeping a relationship with AmAm
Speaker 10: Jamil always found him very very Islamic, but always very
Speaker 10: polite and uh wonderful hospitality, and it's really very decent person.
Speaker 3: How much of what he was doing in the West
Speaker 3: End did you see as a continuation of who he
Speaker 3: had been before or was it a departure.
Speaker 10: Yeah, No, he made a complete change.
Speaker 8: He made a complete change.
Speaker 3: But I see it as the prophet at my question
Speaker 3: reminded the man cleman of a hadith a teaching from
Speaker 3: the prophet.
Speaker 4: Behind came a follower asked a prophet a question. We
Speaker 4: all have genes.
Speaker 10: The gen that is really is the identity that earth
Speaker 10: the devil is this fiery nature, the passionate nature that
Speaker 10: is willing to reject God. And the prophet said, yes,
Speaker 10: we all have gens, even myself. But I've made my
Speaker 10: gin a Muslim. So there's Mohammed the prophet saying that
Speaker 10: he's made his gin a Muslim. So I see Jamil
Speaker 10: in the same way that he had this fiery nature
Speaker 10: of h rap brown, and he didn't just give it
Speaker 10: up and let it go.
Speaker 4: He just made it a Muslim.
Speaker 10: So he got the advantages of having that passionate, fiery pod,
Speaker 10: but it was always under a control then, and he
Speaker 10: was made a total conversion.
Speaker 3: If a man Jamil had made a total conversion, if
Speaker 3: his gin his devil, his fire was always under control.
Speaker 3: It was hard to see him shooting two sheriff's deputies.
Speaker 3: But if he ever let the fire of rap Brown loose,
Speaker 3: I thought I might find the embers burning in the
Speaker 3: West the community a manager Meal founded and led Rahap's
Speaker 3: vision that at least seems to have made its mark
Speaker 3: on the new Muslim village. So much of what the
Speaker 3: community aspired to be and often became a place of
Speaker 3: their own where black people could govern themselves, where they
Speaker 3: could thrive and feel safe to raise their children. That
Speaker 3: echoed the black nationalist's ideal. But that kind of utopia
Speaker 3: didn't just materialize. There were too many obstacles. It took work, faith, passion.
Speaker 3: Had a manmaged Meal ever leaned on his old demons too.
Speaker 3: I spent some time around the weston mass Yet when
Speaker 3: I was a kid, maybe popping in with my father
Speaker 3: to make prayer a few times, but mostly I would
Speaker 3: have seen a manager Meal at the e the islam
Speaker 3: holidays when Muslims from all over the city would gather
Speaker 3: to pray, and Mama Jamil always stood out there among
Speaker 3: thousands because he carried this sword like a scimitar, and
Speaker 3: he towered over everyone.
Speaker 4: He's six foot five. Imagining that as a kid, and.
Speaker 3: I did go to this week long military style boot
Speaker 3: camp wanted a Maam Jamil used to organize in the
Speaker 3: North Georgia Mountains. I must have been twelve or thirteen,
Speaker 3: and I could not have been more out of my element.
Speaker 3: I don't know how to put this politely, but a
Speaker 3: lot of the other boys were drawn to life in
Speaker 3: the streets, and that was the last thing I was
Speaker 3: interested in. Later I would learn that some of them
Speaker 3: were already in the streets shooting, robbing. There was something
Speaker 3: different about the Muslim boys from the West End. Most
Speaker 3: often I would see them on sports teams. Abdusamad Jahad,
Speaker 3: the kid who was in the matchet on the night
Speaker 3: of the shootout, we were on the track team together.
Speaker 3: He reminded me about his mother, sister Jamila, who always
Speaker 3: came to our meets. He told me that she would
Speaker 3: be a great person to talk with about what it
Speaker 3: was like living in the West End while a Ma'am
Speaker 3: Jamil was leading the community.
Speaker 4: Hi, how are you doing?
Speaker 8: Yes?
Speaker 3: Now, your face looks familiar. Wow, now I remember you.
Speaker 8: Sister.
Speaker 3: Jamila grew up in Atlanta and went to Clark Atlanta University.
Speaker 3: It's one of the historically black colleges that bordered the
Speaker 3: West End. When she was still in college, Jamila took
Speaker 3: the shahada from my mam Jamil.
Speaker 2: We went into the mess yet and he asked me,
Speaker 2: why anyone forcing me.
Speaker 8: To become Muslim.
Speaker 2: I said no, you know, so he told me, you know,
Speaker 2: to testify that there's no guard but a law, you know.
Speaker 2: And I became Muslim. I felt free. I felt so happy,
Speaker 2: and he became more like a uncle father figure for
Speaker 2: me because I was eighteen and I was you know.
Speaker 2: He had a corner store at that time, so I
Speaker 2: would go into the store and talk to him, and
Speaker 2: I felt like, Okay, this is my new family, you know.
Speaker 3: And Mam Jamil ran that corner store Jamila mentioned, just
Speaker 3: across the street from the mass Jed and across another
Speaker 3: street from Weston Park.
Speaker 4: During the day, a.
Speaker 3: Mam Jamil might play basketball with kids from the neighborhood.
Speaker 3: Everyone says he could really ball. He talked to people
Speaker 3: who came into the store or chill outside, maybe sitting
Speaker 3: at a picnic table, greeting neighbors as they walked by, offering.
Speaker 4: Them counsel.
Speaker 3: And the Mam Jamil led the daily prayers in the
Speaker 3: mass Jed and delivered sermons during their Friday Juma services.
Speaker 3: A member of the mass Jed shared some recordings of
Speaker 3: his sermons with us.
Speaker 11: How do we increase our remembrance of a law? It
Speaker 11: is through the establishment of lot, through the prayer and
Speaker 11: the maintaining of the prayer and the punctuality in coming
Speaker 11: to prayer.
Speaker 3: The message he was giving to the faithful, attend prayer
Speaker 3: as much as you can take care of your families
Speaker 3: and care for others in the Masjed.
Speaker 12: You have to begin to practice your prayer now in
Speaker 12: congregation because this is afforded to you. But when the
Speaker 12: repression comes, it might be a situation where you might
Speaker 12: as in many different countries, you have to move around
Speaker 12: and move your places of congregational prayer.
Speaker 11: But right now you don't have to do that, But
Speaker 11: that might be the case.
Speaker 3: AmAm Demil tried to create something like a village in
Speaker 3: the West End. The Masjed hosted festivals and barbecues. Jamila
Speaker 3: started a summer camp for elementary school kids and hired
Speaker 3: teenagers as counselors. It was all centered around the masjed
Speaker 3: and around the daily prayers five times each day. Jimill
Speaker 3: remembers that part of the community most fondly.
Speaker 8: It was a beautiful thing.
Speaker 2: Means to see the brothers going to prayer, you know,
Speaker 2: but a dyn call and you see the brothers walking
Speaker 2: to the messget brothers coming out of the house. You know.
Speaker 2: It was a beautiful thing.
Speaker 3: A man and Jamil also assign a group of men
Speaker 3: to do armed security patrols of the neighborhood to establish
Speaker 3: a perimeter to keep out the drug dealing and the prostitution.
Speaker 3: The eighties and nineties, this was the height of the
Speaker 3: crack epandemic in the community. The Mastered they were right
Speaker 3: in the thick of it. There are some of the
Speaker 3: busiest drug corners on the West Side. Addicted people used
Speaker 3: to roam the streets like zombies.
Speaker 4: A few people told me, but.
Speaker 3: West End Park, a public park, remember, became known as
Speaker 3: Holy Land. You better now tread on that land if
Speaker 3: you have no business being there. There were consequences. The
Speaker 3: rules for members of the community were strict too. The
Speaker 3: women wore long dresses and hijab. Men wore thogues and coofies.
Speaker 3: Women were supposed to get permission from their husband before
Speaker 3: leaving the house, but for Jamilla, at least, that's not
Speaker 3: how it worked in practice. She was close enough to
Speaker 3: a Mama Jamil to have some sway.
Speaker 2: His sisters used to come to me and ask email Jamil,
Speaker 2: can we do such and such? I said, okay, you know,
Speaker 2: so like I said that uncle father figured. And he
Speaker 2: was almost often all the time he said yes, yes,
Speaker 2: go ahead.
Speaker 3: You know, Ma'am Jamil was in control, and he could
Speaker 3: monitor what was happening near the mast, did in his
Speaker 3: corner store, and on the streets and in the houses
Speaker 3: that surrounded the park. I asked a man cleaning about
Speaker 3: the amount of authority in Mama Jamil seemed to have
Speaker 3: over the West End.
Speaker 8: Madam Jamil took it literally that in that community.
Speaker 10: Now, not saying internationally all over the world or whatever,
Speaker 10: but in his community he was the representative of the
Speaker 10: prophet Mahobbit Press peace Field Honey, and so he expected
Speaker 10: the same kind of respect from his community as.
Speaker 8: They would give to the prophet.
Speaker 10: And then it became an issue when somebody was ignoring
Speaker 10: that leadership or going against that leadership.
Speaker 3: Over time, a man Jamil gained a reputation in Atlanta
Speaker 3: for quote cleaning up.
Speaker 4: The West End.
Speaker 3: From the outside, at least it appeared that he had
Speaker 3: secured his peace without violence.
Speaker 2: It was family, orented. You know, everyone was close knit.
Speaker 12: It was.
Speaker 2: Really close. I'm sorry, Oh yeah, it was family. Everyone
Speaker 2: loved each other, everyone cared. The sisterhood were very strong,
Speaker 2: and no matter what happened, we was there for one another.
Speaker 2: You know, we was there.
Speaker 11: For women him.
Speaker 8: I'm sorry, yeah, you moved.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now I'm hearing what Sister Jamila is saying about the
Speaker 3: beauty and peace of the community, and I'm hearing what
Speaker 3: a man Pleman is saying about rap making his fiery nature,
Speaker 3: his gin, his devil a Muslim. It seems like some
Speaker 3: ways that a Mam Jamil would have thrown away if
Speaker 3: he shot those sheriff's deputies, his own little paradise that
Speaker 3: he controlled.
Speaker 4: Why would he do that? It just doesn't make sense.
Speaker 4: I must be missing something.
Speaker 3: Either a man Jamil's transformation from h rap Brown wasn't
Speaker 3: as complete as some would have us believe, or the
Speaker 3: West End was never really that peaceful or something had
Speaker 3: thrown him off kilter, or was it just that he
Speaker 3: wasn't involved in the shooting as he's been saying for
Speaker 3: decades now, there's got to be more to it.
Speaker 4: Maybe I just.
Speaker 3: Needed to talk to more people who lived in the
Speaker 3: West End. So I went to a guy named Balao
Speaker 3: Suni Ali. He knew both a Maam Jimil and h
Speaker 3: Rap Brown. In the sixties, Blow was a member of
Speaker 3: the Black Panther Party in New York City and that's
Speaker 3: where he first met Rap.
Speaker 13: He was talking to talk that I wanted to hear about,
Speaker 13: you know, us controlling our neighborhood, you know, community self determination.
Speaker 13: I mean that's what black power is. Black people control
Speaker 13: the economics in the politics of an area where we live.
Speaker 3: For Balal and Rap, part of creating that community meant
Speaker 3: securing it themselves. They trained their comrades on how to
Speaker 3: handle guns and they did target practice.
Speaker 13: It was empowering to grow up as a class where
Speaker 13: he a person and now you've taken the power within
Speaker 13: your hands to defend yourself. So you know that this
Speaker 13: level of persecution is not going to continue. You know
Speaker 13: it's not going to be my children are not going
Speaker 13: to grow.
Speaker 8: Up like this.
Speaker 3: In the eighties, Blao moved to the West End and
Speaker 3: he joined the mass Jed. Blaugh told me there were
Speaker 3: at least two things Rapp didn't like and the man
Speaker 3: Jamil didn't like. Drugs and cops. Both came into black
Speaker 3: communities from the outside and tore them apart. And many
Speaker 3: of the people who moved into the West End to
Speaker 3: join the mass Jed from black working class neighborhoods in Detroit,
Speaker 3: New York and Philadelphia. They had experienced that. On the
Speaker 3: nine of March sixteenth, two thousand, Blao was in the
Speaker 3: neighborhood at his house. He heard the gunfire near the
Speaker 3: mass Jed and when he learned two deputies were shot.
Speaker 3: The way he sees it, the blame shouldn't fall in
Speaker 3: the shooter or anyone in the community. It should fall
Speaker 3: in the.
Speaker 13: Deputies sign that they was coming in and they was wrong,
Speaker 13: because most of the time they come in and they're wrong.
Speaker 13: If they get stopped for doing wrong, they deserve what
Speaker 13: happened to them.
Speaker 3: The idea that a man Jamil might shoot at police
Speaker 3: it seemed in line with what blal knew of the man.
Speaker 3: But in this case, he didn't think that a man
Speaker 3: Jamil was the one who did it because he said he.
Speaker 4: Didn't do it.
Speaker 13: I knew that what they were saying he was capable of,
Speaker 13: But when I heard him say he didn't do that,
Speaker 13: I believed he didn't do it, Just like when he
Speaker 13: said anything else any other time, I believe he ain't
Speaker 13: never lied to me.
Speaker 3: So the way Blal saw it, a man Jamil was
Speaker 3: capable of shooting the deputies, but he didn't do it.
Speaker 3: What a contradiction. That left me with a lot more questions.
Speaker 4: But I did realize the two biggest questions I.
Speaker 3: Had been thinking about what actually happened the night of
Speaker 3: the shootout and who was a man Jimil?
Speaker 8: Really?
Speaker 3: Those questions were totally entangled. As peb allows other contention
Speaker 3: that AmAm Jamil was wrongfully convicted. Lots of people believe
Speaker 3: that thousands, tens of thousands. Maybe when I was younger,
Speaker 3: I did a big investigation that helped free an innocent
Speaker 3: man from prison, and the reporting mostly consisted of listening
Speaker 3: to the folks who never stopped believing and tracking down
Speaker 3: their leads. A Ma'am Jimial's case would be much bigger
Speaker 3: with tentacles reaching into shadowy parts of the federal government.
Speaker 3: You can spend a lifetime tracking down those kinds of leads.
Speaker 3: But not long after I began working on this project,
Speaker 3: I read a document that made the reporting seem a
Speaker 3: little more realistic. It was a letter that I don't
Speaker 3: think was ever meant to go public. The letter came
Speaker 3: to me from my producer, Johnny Kaufman, who first started
Speaker 3: looking into a Mam Jamial's case. I'd met Johnny through
Speaker 3: a friend of a friend, a connection after a random
Speaker 3: dinner party. He was looking for a reporter and host
Speaker 3: to work with on a podcast he was imagining. The
Speaker 3: four page letter was among the reams of court documents
Speaker 3: connected to a Maam Jamial's case. Its author Andrew Young,
Speaker 3: civil rights leader and confidant to Martin Luther King Junior.
Speaker 3: Young was with King when King was assassinated. He would
Speaker 3: become an ambassador to the United Nations and the mayor
Speaker 3: of Atlanta. Young sent his letter to the Fulton County
Speaker 3: District Attorney in Atlanta, the office that prosecuted AmAm Jamil.
Speaker 3: It stated May twenty sixth, twenty twenty. That's almost two
Speaker 3: decades after his conviction. On his own letterhead, Young wrote, quote,
Speaker 3: I believe that the only reason he was convicted was
Speaker 3: because of the egregious misconduct of both law enforcement and
Speaker 3: the individual prosecutor who handled mister Allamine's trial. Young was
Speaker 3: asserting without equivocation that a Maam Jamil was innocent, that
Speaker 3: he was wrongfully convicted. Mister Alamine, Andrew Young wrote, has
Speaker 3: outstanding character. You have the power to now write an
Speaker 3: a storic wrong. This should be done not only for
Speaker 3: the sake of mister Alamine, but indeed for the sake
Speaker 3: of our entire nation and all mankind who yearn for justice.
Speaker 3: Strong words right. I felt weary when I first started
Speaker 3: working on this project. The community of African American Muslims
Speaker 3: in Atlanta is small. Some folks from the West End
Speaker 3: the are family friends. Why should they go poking around
Speaker 3: old pains that the man has already locked up. Gratuitous
Speaker 3: true crime stories are not really my thing, but Young's
Speaker 3: letter gave me a reason to keep digging. There were
Speaker 3: plenty more people to talk to, and I was ready
Speaker 3: to start investigating the details of the shootout to determine
Speaker 3: if a man Jimial was responsible for what happened that night.
Speaker 8: And I remember that that face, that cold faith. I
Speaker 8: couldn't forget that.
Speaker 4: That's on the next episode of Radical.
Speaker 3: Radical is a production of Camside Media, Tenderfoot TV, and
Speaker 3: iHeart Podcasts. Radical was reported and written by Johnny Kaufman
Speaker 3: and me Mossy Secret. Johnny Kaufman is our senior producer.
Speaker 3: Sheba Joseph is our associate producer. Editing by Eric Benson,
Speaker 3: Johnny Kaufman, Emily Martinez and Matt Cher. Fact checking by
Speaker 3: Sophie Hurwitz, Kaylin Lynch and Layla Dos. Original music by
Speaker 3: Kyle Murdoch and by Ray Murray, organized noise, sound design
Speaker 3: and mixing by Kevin Seaman. Recording by Ewan Leed trem Ewen.
Speaker 4: And Sheiba Joseph.
Speaker 3: Campside Media's operations team is Doug Slaywan, Ashley Warren, Elijah Papes,
Speaker 3: Destiny Dingle, and Sabina Mera. The executive producers at Campside
Speaker 3: Media are Josh Dean Vanessa, Gregoriatis, Adam Hoff and Matt Cher.
Speaker 3: For Tenderfoot TV, executive producers are Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay.
Speaker 3: The executive producers at iHeart Podcasts are Matt Frederick and
Speaker 3: Alex Williams, with additional support from Trevor Young,