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Speaker 4: Gamsite Media.
Speaker 3: After he was arrested in Lowndes County, a ma'am Jamil
Speaker 3: Elamine was taken to a jail in Montgomery, Alabama. He
Speaker 3: had been free for twenty five years, but now he
Speaker 3: was back behind bars and back in the court system.
Speaker 3: His first appearance would be the next morning at a
Speaker 3: courthouse named for a man whose career in politics started
Speaker 3: with the KKK and ended on the US Supreme Court.
Speaker 3: It was Alabama. Armed marshals drove a Mamjamial there. Shackled
Speaker 3: and handcuffed. He emerged from a van into public view,
Speaker 3: wearing loose fitting gray sweats pants, pockets hanging inside out disheveled.
Speaker 3: He said just a few words to a gaggle of reporters.
Speaker 2: The governmental conspiracy. Man, this is a governmental conspiracy.
Speaker 5: Weren't involved in news.
Speaker 3: This is a governmental conspiracy, he said, and he denied
Speaker 3: being involved in the shooting. US Marshal James Ergus was
Speaker 3: also still in Alabama. He had stuck round after helping
Speaker 3: to capture a Mamjamil, and he was among those waiting
Speaker 3: inside the courtroom when a Mam Jamil was brought in.
Speaker 3: James was standing at the entrance when he felt something.
Speaker 6: It was just a horrible energy and I didn't know why,
Speaker 6: and then I and then I realized that he was
Speaker 6: right behind me.
Speaker 4: It was just a.
Speaker 6: Very unusual I just felt bad. I mean, I don't know.
Speaker 6: I don't know how sixplained it is. I went from
Speaker 6: feeling great and fine to just feeling bad for a second.
Speaker 6: You know, they went away, But it was it exactly
Speaker 6: correlated with his.
Speaker 3: Closeness to me, James said, he since the force of evil,
Speaker 3: I won't argue with the fact that he felt something.
Speaker 3: I imagine that we can pick up on phenomena that
Speaker 3: we might call energy. Everyone has walked into a room
Speaker 3: and said something feels off, But those perceptions are subjective.
Speaker 3: I bet I would have picked up on something different
Speaker 3: if I'd been in the courtroom that day and Ma'am
Speaker 3: Jamil had been in a cell all night, forced into
Speaker 3: a moment of stillness after four days on the run,
Speaker 3: his mind must have been racing, and he emerged from
Speaker 3: whatever darkness that was into the glare of the press,
Speaker 3: and then suddenly he was at the mercy of the court.
Speaker 3: Who's to say that in that moment something wasn't radiating
Speaker 3: off of him, something that we don't really have words.
Speaker 2: For, but evil.
Speaker 3: I don't really use the word, and so I'm not
Speaker 3: sure I would have felt it. We perceive what we
Speaker 3: focus on. James everyone, we're all moving through slightly different realities.
Speaker 3: Crazy to think about that in the context of a
Speaker 3: court case.
Speaker 2: In Alabama.
Speaker 3: There was some legal bureaucracy that needed to play itself
Speaker 3: out issues not directly related to the shooting in the
Speaker 3: West End. Ammamdmil was indicted in Fulton County relatively quickly,
Speaker 3: in a little over a month, and so it was
Speaker 3: time for him to be brought back to Georgia. The
Speaker 3: news media TV especially had been following the legal procedures closely,
Speaker 3: and a mam Jamil's trip back was something of a climax.
Speaker 6: There was a bajillion news cruise that wanted to follow
Speaker 6: the motorcade back, but if the motorcade was a trick,
Speaker 6: he was never in the motorcade.
Speaker 3: Instead, a mam Jamil was taken in a helicopter. James
Speaker 3: said he was quiet on the trip, no supervillain vibes.
Speaker 6: We put him in an suv without a motorcade, drove
Speaker 6: him to a landing site, and they flew him directly
Speaker 6: to the prison and unloaded him in Atlanta.
Speaker 3: Before that first appearance in court, when a mam Jamil
Speaker 3: called out a conspiracy, he wanted people to see a
Speaker 3: government capable of trickery and deceit, for people to shift
Speaker 3: their focus. I'm not sure many were convinced. I'm not
Speaker 3: sure I'm convinced, but there's no doubt that a mam
Speaker 3: Jmi in his days as a revolutionary was the target
Speaker 3: of a government conspiracy at the highest levels. The press
Speaker 3: were none the wiser, and it would take decades for
Speaker 3: the public to come to grips with what happened to him.
Speaker 3: The force of evil, James said he felt in the courtroom.
Speaker 3: Maybe it was just the anger of the old h
Speaker 3: Rap Brown from Campside Media, Tenderfoot TV, and iHeart podcasts.
Speaker 3: This is Radical, I'm Mostly Secret, Episode three, Messiah. If
Speaker 3: Rap Brown was larger than life, there's one moment that
Speaker 3: supersized him, that landed his name in the newspaper headlines
Speaker 3: and on the evening news. It was a speed she
Speaker 3: gave in nineteen sixty seven at a rally and a
Speaker 3: town in Maryland called Cambridge. The irony is that few
Speaker 3: people seemed to know for sure what actually happened at
Speaker 3: this rally, like what really happened on the ground, But
Speaker 3: stories about Rap took flight afterwards, stories that forced people
Speaker 3: to pick sides and to reinforce narratives that weren't necessarily true.
Speaker 3: The late sixties was a time when white people were
Speaker 3: scared and black people were angry, and people saw in
Speaker 3: Rap who.
Speaker 2: They needed to see.
Speaker 3: He emerged as this phantasm with a shaky foundation in reality,
Speaker 3: not that there was even a consensus on reality. Cambridge, Maryland,
Speaker 3: is an industrial city of about ten thousand on Maryland's
Speaker 3: eastern shore. Peter Levy, a historian, wrote a book about it.
Speaker 7: So in the early sixties. From roughly nineteen sixty two
Speaker 7: through nineteen sixty four, Cambridge had been really one of
Speaker 7: the hotbeds of civil rights activism in the country. Though
Speaker 7: not as well known as a place like Birmingham or Selma,
Speaker 7: it garnered a great deal of attention.
Speaker 3: In Cambridge, there was an all white fire company that
Speaker 3: basically ran the city. It was technically private, but the
Speaker 3: fire company was funded with public money and the members
Speaker 3: usually decided who held political office in city government. Civil
Speaker 3: rights activists in Cambridge had some wins, though They pushed
Speaker 3: the city to pass a disegregation ordinance, but it was
Speaker 3: a victory that stoked the backlash. White residents who wanted
Speaker 3: to maintain the status quo began to raise their voices.
Speaker 3: The fire company operated the community pool, and instead of desegregating,
Speaker 3: they just shut it down.
Speaker 7: It would rather have no community pool than how blacks
Speaker 7: swim with them in a desegregated fashion. So it is,
Speaker 7: you know, it is the power broker, and it had
Speaker 7: been at juggernauts with the black community for years.
Speaker 3: George Wallace, the staunch segregationist and governor of Alabama, was
Speaker 3: running for president, and he held a rally at the
Speaker 3: building operated by the fire company.
Speaker 7: The percentage of whites who showed up for that was
Speaker 7: really really high. And in fact, the political leadership in
Speaker 7: Cambridge changes after that, and now more conservative elements took.
Speaker 3: Over the right word shift in Cambridge among the white community.
Speaker 3: Is it fair to call that like a more open
Speaker 3: embrace of white supremacist ideology.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean, it's the whole difficulty with the term backlash.
Speaker 7: It's more of a maybe I wish I called as
Speaker 7: a retrenchment. I see it as partly it's almost a
Speaker 7: premonition of the times we're in today, of a populist
Speaker 7: white populist upsearch that takes place.
Speaker 3: And in nineteen sixty seven, the National States Rights Party
Speaker 3: held a white power.
Speaker 2: Rally in Cambridge.
Speaker 3: The organization had ties to the KKK and the American
Speaker 3: Nazi Party. After the event, the Cambridge police chief Bryce Kinneman,
Speaker 3: he walked off with the party's leader appearing to protect him.
Speaker 2: About a week later, rap would come to town.
Speaker 3: He was chairman of SNAK at the time, the Student
Speaker 3: on Violent Coordinating Committee and some activists in Cambridge invited
Speaker 3: him to come speak.
Speaker 7: He's really relatively unknown until he goes to Cambridge in
Speaker 7: nineteen sixty seven. Brown, like a lot of black activists,
Speaker 7: thinks that there is a lot of change taking place,
Speaker 7: and if he can foster that change, he's going to
Speaker 7: do it. I mean, he understood, having been in the South,
Speaker 7: that sometimes the change would take place first and foremost
Speaker 7: at the community level, and he's trying to help community
Speaker 7: activists out.
Speaker 3: Before Rap got to Cambridge, the police chief Kinneman, he
Speaker 3: ordered his officers into the streets. State troopers were mobilized too,
Speaker 3: and the National Guard was on standby. Rap arrived at
Speaker 3: around eight forty five at night. A crowd of at
Speaker 3: least three hundred and fifty people had gathered in the
Speaker 3: city's Black neighborhood. He climbed on top of a car.
Speaker 3: Rap stood tall above the crowd. He had a small afro,
Speaker 3: black sunglasses, looked like he was wearing jeans and a
Speaker 3: denim jacket. When he spoke, he jabbed his right corner
Speaker 3: finger in front of him. No microphone, no megaphone.
Speaker 4: Animals, Monkeys are animal.
Speaker 3: We got this recording from the Maryland State Archives. It's incomplete,
Speaker 3: and it seems to only include the most inflammatory parts
Speaker 3: of Rap's speech. He's using a lot of language that
Speaker 3: I wouldn't use, and then I don't like, but I'm
Speaker 3: going to use some of it here just to make
Speaker 3: sure you can understand what he's saying.
Speaker 2: We're going to carry you.
Speaker 7: And the only thing I have to respects first.
Speaker 5: The.
Speaker 2: Man is moving to kill you. He said.
Speaker 3: The only thing that the honky respects this force. In
Speaker 3: nineteen sixty seven, the epithets and the naked calls for
Speaker 3: violence grabbed most of the attention, but in the less
Speaker 3: traffic parts of the speech that we don't have audio of,
Speaker 3: there's a pretty clear eyed assessment of the hypocrisy of
Speaker 3: the white establishment. You call us lazy, but you built
Speaker 3: a country with slave labor. You kill over in Vietnam
Speaker 3: for your cause. Send black people to kill for your cause,
Speaker 3: but we shouldn't kill for our cause. You talk about
Speaker 3: black people looting, but you looted this land from its
Speaker 3: native inhabitants. Rapp's response to the double standard was pragmatic.
Speaker 3: What gives them power over us is their willingness to
Speaker 3: use violence, so we should use it to What he
Speaker 3: seemed to overlook were the ways that brute force wasn't
Speaker 3: sustainable for white people. For one thing, they had a
Speaker 3: major revolt on their hands. Violence as an idea was spreading.
Speaker 8: Because that's what he about to do to you, believe me,
Speaker 8: unlike he would do to you.
Speaker 6: But do it to him first.
Speaker 3: Rap said, don't try to love the honky to death.
Speaker 2: Shoot him to death before he shoots you.
Speaker 3: He also spoke about what was happening in Cambridge. Nearby
Speaker 3: there was a dilapidated school, a symbol of unequal education
Speaker 3: in the city.
Speaker 2: Rap said it should have been burned all.
Speaker 3: The way down a long time ago. Burn that school
Speaker 3: down and take over the white school. If America don't
Speaker 3: come around, he said, we should burn it down. Rap
Speaker 3: spoke for about an hour, and afterward the crowd mostly dispersed.
Speaker 3: There's no riot, no fire. Law enforcement and the police
Speaker 3: chief Keneman, they got a recording of the speech, probably
Speaker 3: the same one we have.
Speaker 7: I think you have to see. Keineman is a kind
Speaker 7: of a boiling cattle and kind of a pressure cooker,
Speaker 7: and the pressure has been building.
Speaker 2: Up for years.
Speaker 7: He's getting really really angry. And other authorities at the
Speaker 7: state attorney General, the head of the state police, they're
Speaker 7: actually trying to calm Bryce Kineman down. You know, he
Speaker 7: wants to just go in and clean the place up.
Speaker 3: At this point, it's late at night, and the story
Speaker 3: goes that Rap and a few other activists are walking
Speaker 3: a woman home a deputy sheriff fired what he alleged
Speaker 3: were two warning shots, one on the ground and one
Speaker 3: in the air. It's a shotgun, though book shot and
Speaker 3: a pellet hit Rap in the head.
Speaker 7: Brown scared for his life, maybe rightfully so.
Speaker 2: Rap wasn't there for long though There's.
Speaker 7: Some people actually said that he was actually secreted out
Speaker 7: in a casket and he leaves town now. I'm not
Speaker 7: sure if the police officers knew that, but he's gone.
Speaker 2: Many of the people who heard Raps speak, they.
Speaker 3: Went back to their homes on the Black side of town.
Speaker 3: Cambridge was relatively quiet, but a fire was about to catch,
Speaker 3: a fire that draw the attention of the most powerful
Speaker 3: men in the country, and even though Rap was on
Speaker 3: his way out of Cambridge, those men would decide to
Speaker 3: come after him. In nineteen sixty seven, the same year
Speaker 3: that Rapp spoke in Cambridge, Maryland, there were more than
Speaker 3: one hundred and fifty uprisings of black people and cities
Speaker 3: around the country.
Speaker 2: And one hundred places Detroit is a fired.
Speaker 7: One hundred square blocks are now under sea.
Speaker 5: Looting and shooting by both police and rooftop snipers, and
Speaker 5: three Negroes were killed.
Speaker 4: And still the.
Speaker 6: Sirens whine and the victims come in.
Speaker 7: The fire has been raging for more than thirty.
Speaker 2: Minutes for then.
Speaker 1: This is where the riot in the city hospital WCBSTV
Speaker 1: news in Newark.
Speaker 3: Forty three people killed in Detroit, twenty six killed in Newark,
Speaker 3: thousands arrested. The period came to be known as the
Speaker 3: Long Hot Summer. Black people were angry and white people
Speaker 3: were scared. Everyone was watching, not least of all the
Speaker 3: President of the United States, Lyndon Johnson. He was concerned,
Speaker 3: maybe even angry. A few years earlier he had signed
Speaker 3: the Voting Rights Act, but that hadn't really eased the tension.
Speaker 3: America was still in distress.
Speaker 4: We will not tolerate lawlessness. We will not endure violence.
Speaker 3: This is Johnson speaking at a press conference about the uprisings.
Speaker 4: It will not be tolerated. This nation will do whatever
Speaker 4: it is necessary to do to suppress and to punish
Speaker 4: those who engage in it.
Speaker 3: He meant black people, especially black leaders of the uprisings.
Speaker 3: The rebellions because President Johnson's government, the FBI in particular,
Speaker 3: would set law and order aside when it came to
Speaker 3: and I'm using Johnson's words here, suppressing and punishing those involved.
Speaker 3: The FBI would employ covert, extra judicial, many would say,
Speaker 3: illegal actions to target Rap and other black leaders whatever
Speaker 3: was necessary. Rap would feel the effects of this for years.
Speaker 3: The night that Rap delivered his speech in Cambridge, Johnson
Speaker 3: and lots of other powerful white men in Washington, they
Speaker 3: would have been watching TV reports about uprisings around the country.
Speaker 3: In Cambridge, after Rap had left town, maybe in a casket,
Speaker 3: a fire was about to catch the historian Peter Levy,
Speaker 3: he spent years looking into how things went down. Cambridge
Speaker 3: was quiet that night until a bunch of white men
Speaker 3: night writers drove through the black.
Speaker 7: Neighborhood, and there are disputes about what they were doing,
Speaker 7: but many in the black community thought that they were
Speaker 7: being fired upon. Generally speaking, the police would not stop
Speaker 7: these night riders. Later on in the evening, they did
Speaker 7: stop him and claim they found no weapons, but many
Speaker 7: of the black community didn't believe that. Some police reported
Speaker 7: that they were actually shooting off fireworks, and at one
Speaker 7: point some black individuals began to arm themselves, and two
Speaker 7: black men were later arrested for firing back, and one
Speaker 7: of those shots hit an officer. Didn't seriously do any harm,
Speaker 7: but when the police chief, Rice Kunnerman, heard that his
Speaker 7: officer officer wrote and had been hit, he just goes
Speaker 7: you know, he goes crazy.
Speaker 3: Meanwhile, a small fire had started in that old elementary
Speaker 3: school that it spoken about, the symbol of unequal education
Speaker 3: that he said should burn to the ground. It took
Speaker 3: forty five minutes for that all white fire company to
Speaker 3: even be alerted, and when the company got there, the
Speaker 3: firefighters kept their distance just beyond the border of the
Speaker 3: black section of town for at least an hour, if
Speaker 3: not longer.
Speaker 2: The head of the fire companies said his men.
Speaker 3: Didn't feel safe enough to go into the neighborhood, even
Speaker 3: though other white people had gone in that night.
Speaker 7: The black city councilmen and leading business leaders asked for
Speaker 7: the right to put the fire out. You know, said
Speaker 7: give us. The equipment wasn't given to him, and the
Speaker 7: response essentially of the police chief was you know you
Speaker 7: and he used the N word started this fire. You know,
Speaker 7: you guys can put it out. But then they weren't
Speaker 7: wouldn't help him put it out.
Speaker 3: Finally, the state attorney General got involved, and he convinced
Speaker 3: the fire company to extinguish the fire.
Speaker 7: And by then two whole square blocks of the black community,
Speaker 7: including a number of businesses and a church of homes,
Speaker 7: had been burned to the ground.
Speaker 3: The night of the fire, President Johnson called an emergency
Speaker 3: meeting at the White House about the uprisings. There was
Speaker 3: a small gathering of powerful men. The Secretary of Defense
Speaker 3: was there, the Attorney General, a Supreme Court justice, and
Speaker 3: maybe most importantly, j Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI.
Speaker 3: Hoover had been leading the bureau for decades, and he
Speaker 3: was the one who launched the notorious counterintelligence program known
Speaker 3: as Cointel pro. It was aimed at surveilling and disrupting
Speaker 3: American political organizations, mostly on the left. According to Hoover,
Speaker 3: in this meeting at the White House, President Johnson was
Speaker 3: of the opinion that the uprisings of the Long Hot
Speaker 3: Summer they were coordinated by black activists. The next day,
Speaker 3: Hoover from the FBI called Johnson. Even with all the
Speaker 3: intelligence at his disposal, Hoover wasn't able to point to
Speaker 3: any coordinated conspiracy, but he named a Trap Brown that
Speaker 3: someone the President might blame and called him, quote, one
Speaker 3: of the worst in the country. A warrant was put
Speaker 3: out for Rap's arrest. The government would do whatever it
Speaker 3: took to stop him. FBI agents visited Rap's lawyer.
Speaker 2: Afterward. The lawyer called Rap.
Speaker 3: And they made plans for Rap to fly from Washington,
Speaker 3: DC to New York City, where he would turn himself in.
Speaker 3: But Rap's lawyer alleged the FBI was listening in on
Speaker 3: that call because when Rap went to the airport, he
Speaker 3: was arrested and charged with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.
Speaker 4: My fellow Americans, we have endured a week such as
Speaker 4: no nation should live through a time of violence and tragedy.
Speaker 3: Three days after Cambridge, President Johnson delivered a televised address.
Speaker 3: It was like he was speaking directly to Rap.
Speaker 4: The apostles of violence were their ugly drum beat of hatred.
Speaker 4: Must know that they're now heading for a ruin and disaster,
Speaker 4: and every man who really wants progress, our justice, our
Speaker 4: equality must stand against them and against their miserable virus
Speaker 4: of hate.
Speaker 3: Targeting Rap. It was an easy way to shift a
Speaker 3: tension from the crappy condition to police violence that often
Speaker 3: spark black people to take to the streets in the
Speaker 3: first place. Then a month after Cambridge, the FBI Director
Speaker 3: j Edgar Hoover kicked off a new operation under the
Speaker 3: Cointel pro umbrella. It would target what he called black
Speaker 3: nationalist hate groups.
Speaker 7: And so it begins to launch efforts to and this
Speaker 7: is Hoover's words, to neutralize black radicals. Another definition of
Speaker 7: black radicals is quite expansive because in that includes Martin
Speaker 7: Luther King, who had been disliked by Hoover, disliked as
Speaker 7: a wrong term, hated by Hoover for years.
Speaker 3: Expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize.
Speaker 2: Those were the goals Hoover and.
Speaker 3: The FBI wanted to prevent the rise of what they
Speaker 3: called a messiah. The FBI paid informants who infiltrated civil
Speaker 3: rights and black power organizations. Regular reports came in to
Speaker 3: FBI headquarters from agents surveilling leaders like Rap reading the
Speaker 3: documents that have been declassified. It looks like the FBI
Speaker 3: was trying to secretly create conflict between Rap and other.
Speaker 2: Black power leaders.
Speaker 3: And then there's this wild one which actually got approval
Speaker 3: from FBI headquarters to make a comic book vilifying Rap.
Speaker 3: From what I can tell for Rap, at least, none
Speaker 3: of these dirty tricks amounted to much. What was truly
Speaker 3: damaging was a scheme among federal and local law enforcement
Speaker 3: to Rapp caught up in the legal system. This unfolded
Speaker 3: over years. It began in Cambridge, where Rap was charged
Speaker 3: with arson the same day. I should point out that
Speaker 3: Hoover mentioned Rap to the President. The county prosecutor in
Speaker 3: Maryland later told a reporter that he charged Rap to
Speaker 3: quote get him on the FBI Most Wanted list.
Speaker 2: The charges weren't based on any evidence.
Speaker 3: A few days after Rap was indicted on those charges,
Speaker 3: he flew to Louisiana to visit his family in Baton Rouge,
Speaker 3: and he took a gun with him, an M one carbine.
Speaker 2: You could do that kind of.
Speaker 3: Thing back then, take a gun on a plane, check
Speaker 3: it in with the crew. The whole time he was
Speaker 3: in Louisiana, a Rap was followed by local police, and
Speaker 3: when he got back to New York, he was arrested
Speaker 3: by the FBI for carrying a gun across state lines.
Speaker 3: A while under indictment, and the judge in the gun
Speaker 3: case appeared to hardly even pretend to play by the rules.
Speaker 3: He was a former FBI agent, and at some point
Speaker 3: he was overheard saying that he was going to quote
Speaker 3: get that nigger, referring to Rap. On top of that,
Speaker 3: the legal bureaucracy took its toll filings and hearings. Rapp
Speaker 3: actually spent some time in jail for violating his bond.
Speaker 3: It was a lot, and he stepped down as chairman
Speaker 3: of SNICK. To survive as a leader in a black
Speaker 3: activist at the time, it was something like a small miracle.
Speaker 3: Malcolm X was assassinated in nineteen sixty five and the
Speaker 3: FBI was involved, Martin Luther King Junior in nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 3: the Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 3: and what many consider a plot orchestrated by the FBI.
Speaker 3: And then in nineteen seventy, the night before Rap was
Speaker 3: set to face trial in Maryland for those fake arson
Speaker 3: charges and explosion.
Speaker 7: The bomb was so bad that it totally eviscerated the car.
Speaker 7: If there were people who were trying to kill Brown
Speaker 7: and maybe even tracking Brown, they might have had good
Speaker 7: reas reason to believe that Brown was in the car,
Speaker 7: and most people argue that Brown was the target.
Speaker 3: But Rap wasn't in the car. Two other Snake activists
Speaker 3: were killed, Ralph Featherstone and William J. Payne, were in
Speaker 3: Maryland to try to protect Rap. In the aftermath, law
Speaker 3: enforcement argued that Featherstone, in pain had plans to bomb
Speaker 3: the courthouse and those plans went awry. But the Black
Speaker 3: press and Black activists they saw a failed assassination attempt
Speaker 3: with good reason to fear for his life, Rap went underground.
Speaker 3: Hoover put him on the FBI ten Most Wanted list. Ultimately,
Speaker 3: Rap wasn't convicted of any of those charges. I don't
Speaker 3: think it's a stretch to say there was a bona
Speaker 3: fide conspiracy against him, as much as these kinds of
Speaker 3: things can truly be coordinated. And so three decades later,
Speaker 3: in two thousand, as a Maam Jimil Alamin's trial approached,
Speaker 3: his defense this team wanted to make the jurors see
Speaker 3: that conspiracy, but see that it never really stopped, that
Speaker 3: it continued through the night of the shootout, and the
Speaker 3: defense wasn't just coming up with this out of nowhere.
Speaker 3: Evidence would emerge that showed law enforcement was surveilling a
Speaker 3: Ma'am Jamil in the years and even the weeks leading
Speaker 3: up to March sixteenth, two thousand, when gunfire erupted in
Speaker 3: the West End. By April of two thousand, about a
Speaker 3: month after the shootout in the West End, a Ma'am
Speaker 3: Jamil Elamin was in jail in Atlanta at an overcrowded
Speaker 3: facility known for being short staffed and violent. He pleaded
Speaker 3: not guilty when he went to court in Fulton County
Speaker 3: and was ordered to be detained until trial.
Speaker 2: It was decades after the.
Speaker 3: Long hot Summer and that meeting of powerful men at
Speaker 3: the White House. The surveillance of cointail pro was considered
Speaker 3: an artific of the sixties and seventies. But what if
Speaker 3: it never really stopped. What if there's surveillance and legal
Speaker 3: harassment followed Rapp when he left prison, moved to Atlanta,
Speaker 3: and became a man Jamil. That's what a Mam Jamil alleged.
Speaker 3: During conversations with his defense team. He said that in
Speaker 3: the weeks, months, and even years before he was arrested
Speaker 3: in Alabama, he still felt that he was being watched.
Speaker 3: He even figured there were informants in the mass jed
Speaker 3: in the West End.
Speaker 5: I think all means just because of his history with
Speaker 5: the FBI, was suspicious about that was he had reason
Speaker 5: to believe that might be true, but no hard evidence.
Speaker 3: Jack Martin was a Man Jamil's lead defense attorney. Martin
Speaker 3: and the other lawyers on the team, they didn't consider
Speaker 3: a Man Jamil paranoid. They shared his suspicions, and if
Speaker 3: the FBI was surveiling a Man Jamil, or if there
Speaker 3: was an informant in the mass jed, they wanted to know.
Speaker 3: That kind of information could be useful. It could even
Speaker 3: prove a Maam Jamil was innocent. What if an informant
Speaker 3: was at the scene of the shootout or if they
Speaker 3: were somehow involved.
Speaker 5: We felt that maybe some informant or somebody working for
Speaker 5: the FBI in the community, we'd know something and that
Speaker 5: they knew something that we didn't know.
Speaker 3: And so as they prepared for a Mam Jamil's trial,
Speaker 3: the defense team tried to squeeze as much information as
Speaker 3: possible from the prosecution.
Speaker 2: In federal law enforcement, the.
Speaker 3: Fulton County DA had given notice he'd seek the death penalty.
Speaker 3: He wanted the state of Georgia to kill a Mam
Speaker 3: jamial for the murder of Deputy Ricky Kinchin and the
Speaker 3: shooting of Deputy Algernon English. The court determined that Maam
Speaker 3: Jamil couldn't afford to pay an attorney for an adequate defense.
Speaker 3: His salary was listed as seven hundred dollars a month
Speaker 3: and the savings were valued at twelve hundred dollars. But
Speaker 3: that didn't mean he would end up with a lawyer
Speaker 3: from the Public Defender's Office in Georgia. For death penalty cases,
Speaker 3: the state will pay extra for the defense of the accused.
Speaker 3: The judge would still have to approve the lawyers. But
Speaker 3: a man Jimiale's family and closest supporters, they got to
Speaker 3: work assembling a high powered legal team. There was Jack Martin,
Speaker 3: a white guy who had lots of experience with death
Speaker 3: penalty cases, and Tony Akxom, who's black.
Speaker 2: He had a.
Speaker 3: Reputation for representing civil rights leaders and politicians.
Speaker 2: Here's Axom.
Speaker 9: I could see myself not having been a lawyer, but
Speaker 9: having been a stokely Carmichael on a trap round. It
Speaker 9: is a thin line that separates who he was to
Speaker 9: where I am.
Speaker 3: Axelm and Martin were the two attorneys on the team
Speaker 3: who I was able to interview. There was also Bruce Harvey,
Speaker 3: a white ponytail liberal, and there was Michael Warren, an
Speaker 3: African American Muslim from New York who helped get the
Speaker 3: Central Park five exonerated.
Speaker 9: If Jack would not a lawyer, he'd be a mathematician.
Speaker 9: If Bruce was not a lawyer, Bruce would be a hippie. Okay,
Speaker 9: So all of us brought something different.
Speaker 2: And if Michael Warren were not a lawyer.
Speaker 8: Oh, Michael would be in the pits. I mean Michael
Speaker 8: would be He'd be fighting the Russians. That's That's that's
Speaker 8: who Michael would be. Absolutely all of us brought a different.
Speaker 4: Mix to it.
Speaker 3: With these different personalities, the hippie, the warrior, the mathematician
Speaker 3: that's Martin, and the civil rights worker that's Axom. There
Speaker 3: was sometimes conflict on the team, but Axholm said it
Speaker 3: never created a serious problem because ultimately a man, Jamil
Speaker 3: had final say.
Speaker 9: If there's conflict, we say, Jamil, it's your call. So tension,
Speaker 9: uh is not enough tension that it breaks or it
Speaker 9: causes a ripple effect that we can't do what we
Speaker 9: need to do.
Speaker 3: With this outsized persona following him around a Mam Demio
Speaker 3: managed to convey an image of courtesy and respectability in
Speaker 3: the run up to the trial. In my quest to
Speaker 3: pin him down, I'm finding him really slippery. Not only
Speaker 3: do other people distort him into the embodiment of whatever
Speaker 3: ends there seeking, he has his own way of shifting form.
Speaker 3: I'm still trying to figure out if that's something unique
Speaker 3: to him or what we all do. But yeah, slippery
Speaker 3: and Mam Dmil's case did not go to trial quickly.
Speaker 3: He sat in jail after he was arrested, weeks past,
Speaker 3: then months. Tony Axam, Jack Martin, they met with him
Speaker 3: and they got to know him at least a little bit.
Speaker 9: He is six feet plus, okay, just his height commands
Speaker 9: the room. He is slow to speak. He does not
Speaker 9: speak with speed, and he does not speak with a
Speaker 9: Southern draw. There is a deliberateness about him, and you
Speaker 9: get the impression that he is an ema. So you
Speaker 9: can feel that he has seen parts of the world,
Speaker 9: and he's met with kings and queens and servants and slaves.
Speaker 9: You can get that impression and feeling when you talk
Speaker 9: to him.
Speaker 5: Allaman was one of the most genuine and polite class overhead,
Speaker 5: very self spoken, very a peacemaker. When you you say, well,
Speaker 5: how yell? I mean, how you doing? He says? Siety,
Speaker 5: he says, There's anything I can do for you. Have
Speaker 5: no other client ever said that to me. That personality
Speaker 5: just wasn't the same personality somebody get into a shootout
Speaker 5: with the police. So I don't know. He struck me
Speaker 5: as a very fascinating person great stories, very polite, very
Speaker 5: wanting to help us as much as he could.
Speaker 3: I heard from many people who met with the mam
Speaker 3: Jamil or who have known him over the years, that
Speaker 3: he would ask this question, is there anything I can
Speaker 3: do for you? It's his go to line. He'd ask
Speaker 3: folks across the counter at his corner store, He'd ask
Speaker 3: folks across the plexic class in prison. Maybe he even
Speaker 3: asked it in his days as a revolutionary. It's universally disarming.
Speaker 3: I know he had this will to serve. I know
Speaker 3: he had a fire inside. I know he enjoyed being
Speaker 3: in control. But why would he shoot those deputies with
Speaker 3: so much to lose? In these weeks that turned into months,
Speaker 3: when a Mam Jamial sat in jail. The defense and
Speaker 3: prosecution filed motions, often tedious and procedural, even if they
Speaker 3: were important. As part of a process called discovery, the
Speaker 3: prosecution was required to share with the defense the evidence
Speaker 3: they'd gathered, especially anything that might point to a mam
Speaker 3: Jamial's innocence. Martin asked the prosecution if they had anything
Speaker 3: in their files about surveillance of a Mam Jamial or
Speaker 3: informant in the mass ged. They said no, but that
Speaker 3: didn't necessarily mean those things weren't happening because the FBI
Speaker 3: wasn't required to turn anything over. So Martin kept pushing
Speaker 3: the prosecution to help.
Speaker 5: I was saying, listen, you can't get it, they'll give
Speaker 5: it to you, you know, But they refused to do that.
Speaker 3: The informant piece, you had a sense that there was
Speaker 3: one there. Why why did you think that?
Speaker 5: You know, that was more a suspicion of knowing the
Speaker 5: history of the FBI and all. I mean that they
Speaker 5: thought he was, you know, doing all sorts of things
Speaker 5: they never could prove, but we thought that they might
Speaker 5: have played somebody in the community to try to make
Speaker 5: a case against al Amine on all their suspicions of
Speaker 5: criminal activity.
Speaker 3: Which were not true, and if there were someone there,
Speaker 3: what would be the significance of that, Well, if there
Speaker 3: weren't a formant there that night, one.
Speaker 5: You know, this is all sort of speculation, of course,
Speaker 5: but one that that person might know more of what
Speaker 5: happened that night, might know whether there was somebody else
Speaker 5: was involved in the shooting, or that they were somehow
Speaker 5: other involved in this situation and involved in trying to
Speaker 5: frame all amine for this murder.
Speaker 3: I see, I see, well in either case that there
Speaker 3: was some type of exculpatory aspect to Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they may know stuff we don't know.
Speaker 3: The FBI orn't informant. They might have information that could
Speaker 3: help a manage meals defense that could prove them innocent,
Speaker 3: even it would be information that they weren't likely to
Speaker 3: just hand over. Martin filed a motion calling for the
Speaker 3: judge to order any confidential informants be revealed, and the
Speaker 3: judge said a series of hearings that were closed to
Speaker 3: the public, we were able to get the transcripts for
Speaker 3: at least some of them, although sections are blacked out,
Speaker 3: The FBI said, and lawyers to protect the bureau's information,
Speaker 3: but Martin was still able to question a few agents,
Speaker 3: including a key agent named Bill Gant. That's a name
Speaker 3: to remember, Bill Gant. Basically, what Martin uncovered before the
Speaker 3: trial was this Gant was investigating a Mam Jamil during
Speaker 3: the nineties. The reason for the investigation wasn't clear, but
Speaker 3: Gant had informants inside the mass Jet.
Speaker 2: Martin also learned that on March.
Speaker 3: Seventeen, two thousand, the day after the shootout, while law
Speaker 3: enforcement at all levels were looking for a Mam Jamil,
Speaker 3: Gant was in touch with the confidential source in the
Speaker 3: West End. Gant had informants in the West End. So
Speaker 3: what did they seen? What did they know? Could they
Speaker 3: have been involved in the shooting? These were the kind
Speaker 3: of questions Martin had for the FBI.
Speaker 5: You know, they were acting like, well, we're not the
Speaker 5: prosecuting agency in this case. We don't have to give
Speaker 5: you stuff, we don't need to give you or we're
Speaker 5: required to give you. We said, no, you guys were
Speaker 5: parcel of this. You were part of the arrest. But
Speaker 5: I never felt we got a full story from the
Speaker 5: FBI about what happened.
Speaker 3: The proceedings kept moving and finally, about a year and
Speaker 3: a half after a man Jimial was arrested. The trial
Speaker 3: was scheduled to begin, but the day before jury selection
Speaker 3: was September eleventh, two.
Speaker 2: Thousand and one.
Speaker 3: More on the next episode of Radical. Radical is a
Speaker 3: production of Campside Media, Tenderfoot TV, and iHeart Podcasts. Radical
Speaker 3: was reported and written by Johnny Kaufman and me Mosey.
Speaker 3: Secret Johnny Kauffman is our senior producer. Sheba Joseph is
Speaker 3: our associate producer. Editing by Eric Benson, Johnny Coffin, Emily
Speaker 3: Martinez and Matt Cher. Fact checking by Sophie Hurwitz, Kaylin Lynch,
Speaker 3: and Layla Dos. Original music by Kyle Murdoch and by
Speaker 3: Ray Murray of Organized Noise. Sound design and mixing by
Speaker 3: Kevin Seaman. Recording by Ewan Leed Treum Ewen and Sheba Joseph.
Speaker 3: Campside Media's operations team is Doug Slaywan, Ashley Warren, Eliah Papes,
Speaker 3: Destiny Dingle, and Sabina Merra.
Speaker 2: The executive producers at.
Speaker 3: Campside Media are Josh Dean, Vanessa, Gregoriatis, Adam Hoff, and
Speaker 3: Matt Cher. For Tenderfoot TV, executive producers are.
Speaker 2: 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.