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