December 12, 2023 • 39 mins
Imam Jamil was the target of a government conspiracy in the 1960s, and now he alleges it’s happening again. His defense lawyers find evidence that only intensifies those suspicions.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely
those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast,
and do not represent those of iHeartRadio or their employees.
This podcast also contains subject matter which may not be
suitable for everyone.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Radical was released every Tuesday and brought to you absolutely free,
But if you want ad free listening and early access
to next week's episode, subscribe to tenderfoot Plus. For more information,
check out tenderfootplus dot com.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Enjoy the episode.
Speaker 4 (00:42):
Gamsite Media.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
After he was arrested in Lowndes County, a ma'am Jamil
Elamine was taken to a jail in Montgomery, Alabama. He
had been free for twenty five years, but now he
was back behind bars and back in the court system.
His first appearance would be the next morning at a
courthouse named for a man whose career in politics started
with the KKK and ended on the US Supreme Court.
(01:10):
It was Alabama. Armed marshals drove a Mamjamial there. Shackled
and handcuffed. He emerged from a van into public view,
wearing loose fitting gray sweats pants, pockets hanging inside out disheveled.
He said just a few words to a gaggle of reporters.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
The governmental conspiracy. Man, this is a governmental conspiracy.
Speaker 5 (01:30):
Weren't involved in news.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
This is a governmental conspiracy, he said, and he denied
being involved in the shooting. US Marshal James Ergus was
also still in Alabama. He had stuck round after helping
to capture a Mamjamil, and he was among those waiting
inside the courtroom when a Mam Jamil was brought in.
James was standing at the entrance when he felt something.
Speaker 6 (01:57):
It was just a horrible energy and I didn't know why,
and then I and then I realized that he was
right behind me.
Speaker 4 (02:04):
It was just a.
Speaker 6 (02:05):
Very unusual I just felt bad. I mean, I don't know.
I don't know how sixplained it is. I went from
feeling great and fine to just feeling bad for a second.
You know, they went away, But it was it exactly
correlated with his.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
Closeness to me, James said, he since the force of evil,
I won't argue with the fact that he felt something.
I imagine that we can pick up on phenomena that
we might call energy. Everyone has walked into a room
and said something feels off, But those perceptions are subjective.
(02:52):
I bet I would have picked up on something different
if I'd been in the courtroom that day and Ma'am
Jamil had been in a cell all night, forced into
a moment of stillness after four days on the run,
his mind must have been racing, and he emerged from
whatever darkness that was into the glare of the press,
and then suddenly he was at the mercy of the court.
(03:13):
Who's to say that in that moment something wasn't radiating
off of him, something that we don't really have words.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
For, but evil.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
I don't really use the word, and so I'm not
sure I would have felt it. We perceive what we
focus on. James everyone, we're all moving through slightly different realities.
Crazy to think about that in the context of a
court case.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
In Alabama.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
There was some legal bureaucracy that needed to play itself
out issues not directly related to the shooting in the
West End. Ammamdmil was indicted in Fulton County relatively quickly,
in a little over a month, and so it was
time for him to be brought back to Georgia. The
news media TV especially had been following the legal procedures closely,
(04:06):
and a mam Jamil's trip back was something of a climax.
Speaker 6 (04:10):
There was a bajillion news cruise that wanted to follow
the motorcade back, but if the motorcade was a trick,
he was never in the motorcade.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
Instead, a mam Jamil was taken in a helicopter. James
said he was quiet on the trip, no supervillain vibes.
Speaker 6 (04:29):
We put him in an suv without a motorcade, drove
him to a landing site, and they flew him directly
to the prison and unloaded him in Atlanta.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
Before that first appearance in court, when a mam Jamil
called out a conspiracy, he wanted people to see a
government capable of trickery and deceit, for people to shift
their focus. I'm not sure many were convinced. I'm not
sure I'm convinced, but there's no doubt that a mam
Jmi in his days as a revolutionary was the target
(05:03):
of a government conspiracy at the highest levels. The press
were none the wiser, and it would take decades for
the public to come to grips with what happened to him.
The force of evil, James said he felt in the courtroom.
Maybe it was just the anger of the old h
Rap Brown from Campside Media, Tenderfoot TV, and iHeart podcasts.
(05:29):
This is Radical, I'm Mostly Secret, Episode three, Messiah. If
(05:50):
Rap Brown was larger than life, there's one moment that
supersized him, that landed his name in the newspaper headlines
and on the evening news. It was a speed she
gave in nineteen sixty seven at a rally and a
town in Maryland called Cambridge. The irony is that few
people seemed to know for sure what actually happened at
this rally, like what really happened on the ground, But
(06:14):
stories about Rap took flight afterwards, stories that forced people
to pick sides and to reinforce narratives that weren't necessarily true.
The late sixties was a time when white people were
scared and black people were angry, and people saw in
Rap who.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
They needed to see.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
He emerged as this phantasm with a shaky foundation in reality,
not that there was even a consensus on reality. Cambridge, Maryland,
is an industrial city of about ten thousand on Maryland's
eastern shore. Peter Levy, a historian, wrote a book about it.
Speaker 7 (06:51):
So in the early sixties. From roughly nineteen sixty two
through nineteen sixty four, Cambridge had been really one of
the hotbeds of civil rights activism in the country. Though
not as well known as a place like Birmingham or Selma,
it garnered a great deal of attention.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
In Cambridge, there was an all white fire company that
basically ran the city. It was technically private, but the
fire company was funded with public money and the members
usually decided who held political office in city government. Civil
rights activists in Cambridge had some wins, though They pushed
the city to pass a disegregation ordinance, but it was
(07:28):
a victory that stoked the backlash. White residents who wanted
to maintain the status quo began to raise their voices.
The fire company operated the community pool, and instead of desegregating,
they just shut it down.
Speaker 7 (07:42):
It would rather have no community pool than how blacks
swim with them in a desegregated fashion. So it is,
you know, it is the power broker, and it had
been at juggernauts with the black community for years.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
George Wallace, the staunch segregationist and governor of Alabama, was
running for president, and he held a rally at the
building operated by the fire company.
Speaker 7 (08:04):
The percentage of whites who showed up for that was
really really high. And in fact, the political leadership in
Cambridge changes after that, and now more conservative elements took.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
Over the right word shift in Cambridge among the white community.
Is it fair to call that like a more open
embrace of white supremacist ideology.
Speaker 7 (08:24):
Yeah, I mean, it's the whole difficulty with the term backlash.
It's more of a maybe I wish I called as
a retrenchment. I see it as partly it's almost a
premonition of the times we're in today, of a populist
white populist upsearch that takes place.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
And in nineteen sixty seven, the National States Rights Party
held a white power.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Rally in Cambridge.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
The organization had ties to the KKK and the American
Nazi Party. After the event, the Cambridge police chief Bryce Kinneman,
he walked off with the party's leader appearing to protect him.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
About a week later, rap would come to town.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
He was chairman of SNAK at the time, the Student
on Violent Coordinating Committee and some activists in Cambridge invited
him to come speak.
Speaker 7 (09:14):
He's really relatively unknown until he goes to Cambridge in
nineteen sixty seven. Brown, like a lot of black activists,
thinks that there is a lot of change taking place,
and if he can foster that change, he's going to
do it. I mean, he understood, having been in the South,
that sometimes the change would take place first and foremost
at the community level, and he's trying to help community
(09:36):
activists out.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Before Rap got to Cambridge, the police chief Kinneman, he
ordered his officers into the streets. State troopers were mobilized too,
and the National Guard was on standby. Rap arrived at
around eight forty five at night. A crowd of at
least three hundred and fifty people had gathered in the
city's Black neighborhood. He climbed on top of a car.
(10:00):
Rap stood tall above the crowd. He had a small afro,
black sunglasses, looked like he was wearing jeans and a
denim jacket. When he spoke, he jabbed his right corner
finger in front of him. No microphone, no megaphone.
Speaker 4 (10:16):
Animals, Monkeys are animal.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
We got this recording from the Maryland State Archives. It's incomplete,
and it seems to only include the most inflammatory parts
of Rap's speech. He's using a lot of language that
I wouldn't use, and then I don't like, but I'm
going to use some of it here just to make
sure you can understand what he's saying.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
We're going to carry you.
Speaker 7 (10:41):
And the only thing I have to respects first.
Speaker 5 (10:44):
The.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Man is moving to kill you. He said.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
The only thing that the honky respects this force. In
nineteen sixty seven, the epithets and the naked calls for
violence grabbed most of the attention, but in the less
traffic parts of the speech that we don't have audio of,
there's a pretty clear eyed assessment of the hypocrisy of
the white establishment. You call us lazy, but you built
(11:10):
a country with slave labor. You kill over in Vietnam
for your cause. Send black people to kill for your cause,
but we shouldn't kill for our cause. You talk about
black people looting, but you looted this land from its
native inhabitants. Rapp's response to the double standard was pragmatic.
What gives them power over us is their willingness to
(11:33):
use violence, so we should use it to What he
seemed to overlook were the ways that brute force wasn't
sustainable for white people. For one thing, they had a
major revolt on their hands. Violence as an idea was spreading.
Speaker 8 (11:53):
Because that's what he about to do to you, believe me,
unlike he would do to you.
Speaker 6 (11:56):
But do it to him first.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
Rap said, don't try to love the honky to death.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
Shoot him to death before he shoots you.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
He also spoke about what was happening in Cambridge. Nearby
there was a dilapidated school, a symbol of unequal education
in the city.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
Rap said it should have been burned all.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
The way down a long time ago. Burn that school
down and take over the white school. If America don't
come around, he said, we should burn it down. Rap
spoke for about an hour, and afterward the crowd mostly dispersed.
(12:41):
There's no riot, no fire. Law enforcement and the police
chief Keneman, they got a recording of the speech, probably
the same one we have.
Speaker 7 (12:53):
I think you have to see. Keineman is a kind
of a boiling cattle and kind of a pressure cooker,
and the pressure has been building.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
Up for years.
Speaker 7 (13:02):
He's getting really really angry. And other authorities at the
state attorney General, the head of the state police, they're
actually trying to calm Bryce Kineman down. You know, he
wants to just go in and clean the place up.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
At this point, it's late at night, and the story
goes that Rap and a few other activists are walking
a woman home a deputy sheriff fired what he alleged
were two warning shots, one on the ground and one
in the air. It's a shotgun, though book shot and
a pellet hit Rap in the head.
Speaker 7 (13:34):
Brown scared for his life, maybe rightfully so.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Rap wasn't there for long though There's.
Speaker 7 (13:39):
Some people actually said that he was actually secreted out
in a casket and he leaves town now. I'm not
sure if the police officers knew that, but he's gone.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
Many of the people who heard Raps speak, they.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
Went back to their homes on the Black side of town.
Cambridge was relatively quiet, but a fire was about to catch,
a fire that draw the attention of the most powerful
men in the country, and even though Rap was on
his way out of Cambridge, those men would decide to
come after him. In nineteen sixty seven, the same year
(14:34):
that Rapp spoke in Cambridge, Maryland, there were more than
one hundred and fifty uprisings of black people and cities
around the country.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
And one hundred places Detroit is a fired.
Speaker 7 (14:44):
One hundred square blocks are now under sea.
Speaker 5 (14:46):
Looting and shooting by both police and rooftop snipers, and
three Negroes were killed.
Speaker 4 (14:52):
And still the.
Speaker 6 (14:52):
Sirens whine and the victims come in.
Speaker 7 (14:55):
The fire has been raging for more than thirty.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Minutes for then.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
This is where the riot in the city hospital WCBSTV
news in Newark.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
Forty three people killed in Detroit, twenty six killed in Newark,
thousands arrested. The period came to be known as the
Long Hot Summer. Black people were angry and white people
were scared. Everyone was watching, not least of all the
President of the United States, Lyndon Johnson. He was concerned,
maybe even angry. A few years earlier he had signed
(15:27):
the Voting Rights Act, but that hadn't really eased the tension.
America was still in distress.
Speaker 4 (15:33):
We will not tolerate lawlessness. We will not endure violence.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
This is Johnson speaking at a press conference about the uprisings.
Speaker 4 (15:43):
It will not be tolerated. This nation will do whatever
it is necessary to do to suppress and to punish
those who engage in it.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
He meant black people, especially black leaders of the uprisings.
The rebellions because President Johnson's government, the FBI in particular,
would set law and order aside when it came to
and I'm using Johnson's words here, suppressing and punishing those involved.
The FBI would employ covert, extra judicial, many would say,
(16:23):
illegal actions to target Rap and other black leaders whatever
was necessary. Rap would feel the effects of this for years.
The night that Rap delivered his speech in Cambridge, Johnson
and lots of other powerful white men in Washington, they
would have been watching TV reports about uprisings around the country.
(16:45):
In Cambridge, after Rap had left town, maybe in a casket,
a fire was about to catch the historian Peter Levy,
he spent years looking into how things went down. Cambridge
was quiet that night until a bunch of white men
night writers drove through the black.
Speaker 7 (17:05):
Neighborhood, and there are disputes about what they were doing,
but many in the black community thought that they were
being fired upon. Generally speaking, the police would not stop
these night riders. Later on in the evening, they did
stop him and claim they found no weapons, but many
of the black community didn't believe that. Some police reported
(17:27):
that they were actually shooting off fireworks, and at one
point some black individuals began to arm themselves, and two
black men were later arrested for firing back, and one
of those shots hit an officer. Didn't seriously do any harm,
but when the police chief, Rice Kunnerman, heard that his
officer officer wrote and had been hit, he just goes
(17:48):
you know, he goes crazy.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
Meanwhile, a small fire had started in that old elementary
school that it spoken about, the symbol of unequal education
that he said should burn to the ground. It took
forty five minutes for that all white fire company to
even be alerted, and when the company got there, the
firefighters kept their distance just beyond the border of the
(18:15):
black section of town for at least an hour, if
not longer.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
The head of the fire companies said his men.
Speaker 3 (18:21):
Didn't feel safe enough to go into the neighborhood, even
though other white people had gone in that night.
Speaker 7 (18:26):
The black city councilmen and leading business leaders asked for
the right to put the fire out. You know, said
give us. The equipment wasn't given to him, and the
response essentially of the police chief was you know you
and he used the N word started this fire. You know,
you guys can put it out. But then they weren't
wouldn't help him put it out.
Speaker 3 (18:47):
Finally, the state attorney General got involved, and he convinced
the fire company to extinguish the fire.
Speaker 7 (18:54):
And by then two whole square blocks of the black community,
including a number of businesses and a church of homes,
had been burned to the ground.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
The night of the fire, President Johnson called an emergency
meeting at the White House about the uprisings. There was
a small gathering of powerful men. The Secretary of Defense
was there, the Attorney General, a Supreme Court justice, and
maybe most importantly, j Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI.
Hoover had been leading the bureau for decades, and he
(19:25):
was the one who launched the notorious counterintelligence program known
as Cointel pro. It was aimed at surveilling and disrupting
American political organizations, mostly on the left. According to Hoover,
in this meeting at the White House, President Johnson was
of the opinion that the uprisings of the Long Hot
Summer they were coordinated by black activists. The next day,
(19:48):
Hoover from the FBI called Johnson. Even with all the
intelligence at his disposal, Hoover wasn't able to point to
any coordinated conspiracy, but he named a Trap Brown that
someone the President might blame and called him, quote, one
of the worst in the country. A warrant was put
out for Rap's arrest. The government would do whatever it
(20:10):
took to stop him. FBI agents visited Rap's lawyer.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Afterward. The lawyer called Rap.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
And they made plans for Rap to fly from Washington,
DC to New York City, where he would turn himself in.
But Rap's lawyer alleged the FBI was listening in on
that call because when Rap went to the airport, he
was arrested and charged with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.
Speaker 4 (20:37):
My fellow Americans, we have endured a week such as
no nation should live through a time of violence and tragedy.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
Three days after Cambridge, President Johnson delivered a televised address.
It was like he was speaking directly to Rap.
Speaker 4 (20:57):
The apostles of violence were their ugly drum beat of hatred.
Must know that they're now heading for a ruin and disaster,
and every man who really wants progress, our justice, our
equality must stand against them and against their miserable virus
(21:22):
of hate.
Speaker 3 (21:25):
Targeting Rap. It was an easy way to shift a
tension from the crappy condition to police violence that often
spark black people to take to the streets in the
first place. Then a month after Cambridge, the FBI Director
j Edgar Hoover kicked off a new operation under the
Cointel pro umbrella. It would target what he called black
(21:45):
nationalist hate groups.
Speaker 7 (21:48):
And so it begins to launch efforts to and this
is Hoover's words, to neutralize black radicals. Another definition of
black radicals is quite expansive because in that includes Martin
Luther King, who had been disliked by Hoover, disliked as
a wrong term, hated by Hoover for years.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
Expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
Those were the goals Hoover and.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
The FBI wanted to prevent the rise of what they
called a messiah. The FBI paid informants who infiltrated civil
rights and black power organizations. Regular reports came in to
FBI headquarters from agents surveilling leaders like Rap reading the
documents that have been declassified. It looks like the FBI
(22:36):
was trying to secretly create conflict between Rap and other.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
Black power leaders.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
And then there's this wild one which actually got approval
from FBI headquarters to make a comic book vilifying Rap.
From what I can tell for Rap, at least, none
of these dirty tricks amounted to much. What was truly
damaging was a scheme among federal and local law enforcement
to Rapp caught up in the legal system. This unfolded
(23:02):
over years. It began in Cambridge, where Rap was charged
with arson the same day. I should point out that
Hoover mentioned Rap to the President. The county prosecutor in
Maryland later told a reporter that he charged Rap to
quote get him on the FBI Most Wanted list.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
The charges weren't based on any evidence.
Speaker 3 (23:26):
A few days after Rap was indicted on those charges,
he flew to Louisiana to visit his family in Baton Rouge,
and he took a gun with him, an M one carbine.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
You could do that kind of.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
Thing back then, take a gun on a plane, check
it in with the crew. The whole time he was
in Louisiana, a Rap was followed by local police, and
when he got back to New York, he was arrested
by the FBI for carrying a gun across state lines.
A while under indictment, and the judge in the gun
case appeared to hardly even pretend to play by the rules.
(23:58):
He was a former FBI agent, and at some point
he was overheard saying that he was going to quote
get that nigger, referring to Rap. On top of that,
the legal bureaucracy took its toll filings and hearings. Rapp
actually spent some time in jail for violating his bond.
It was a lot, and he stepped down as chairman
(24:20):
of SNICK. To survive as a leader in a black
activist at the time, it was something like a small miracle.
Malcolm X was assassinated in nineteen sixty five and the
FBI was involved, Martin Luther King Junior in nineteen sixty eight,
the Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in nineteen sixty nine,
and what many consider a plot orchestrated by the FBI.
(24:43):
And then in nineteen seventy, the night before Rap was
set to face trial in Maryland for those fake arson
charges and explosion.
Speaker 7 (24:51):
The bomb was so bad that it totally eviscerated the car.
If there were people who were trying to kill Brown
and maybe even tracking Brown, they might have had good
reas reason to believe that Brown was in the car,
and most people argue that Brown was the target.
Speaker 3 (25:08):
But Rap wasn't in the car. Two other Snake activists
were killed, Ralph Featherstone and William J. Payne, were in
Maryland to try to protect Rap. In the aftermath, law
enforcement argued that Featherstone, in pain had plans to bomb
the courthouse and those plans went awry. But the Black
press and Black activists they saw a failed assassination attempt
(25:30):
with good reason to fear for his life, Rap went underground.
Hoover put him on the FBI ten Most Wanted list. Ultimately,
Rap wasn't convicted of any of those charges. I don't
think it's a stretch to say there was a bona
fide conspiracy against him, as much as these kinds of
things can truly be coordinated. And so three decades later,
(25:55):
in two thousand, as a Maam Jimil Alamin's trial approached,
his defense this team wanted to make the jurors see
that conspiracy, but see that it never really stopped, that
it continued through the night of the shootout, and the
defense wasn't just coming up with this out of nowhere.
Evidence would emerge that showed law enforcement was surveilling a
Ma'am Jamil in the years and even the weeks leading
(26:18):
up to March sixteenth, two thousand, when gunfire erupted in
the West End. By April of two thousand, about a
month after the shootout in the West End, a Ma'am
Jamil Elamin was in jail in Atlanta at an overcrowded
(26:41):
facility known for being short staffed and violent. He pleaded
not guilty when he went to court in Fulton County
and was ordered to be detained until trial.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
It was decades after the.
Speaker 3 (26:53):
Long hot Summer and that meeting of powerful men at
the White House. The surveillance of cointail pro was considered
an artific of the sixties and seventies. But what if
it never really stopped. What if there's surveillance and legal
harassment followed Rapp when he left prison, moved to Atlanta,
and became a man Jamil. That's what a Mam Jamil alleged.
(27:16):
During conversations with his defense team. He said that in
the weeks, months, and even years before he was arrested
in Alabama, he still felt that he was being watched.
He even figured there were informants in the mass jed
in the West End.
Speaker 5 (27:30):
I think all means just because of his history with
the FBI, was suspicious about that was he had reason
to believe that might be true, but no hard evidence.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
Jack Martin was a Man Jamil's lead defense attorney. Martin
and the other lawyers on the team, they didn't consider
a Man Jamil paranoid. They shared his suspicions, and if
the FBI was surveiling a Man Jamil, or if there
was an informant in the mass jed, they wanted to know.
That kind of information could be useful. It could even
prove a Maam Jamil was innocent. What if an informant
(28:04):
was at the scene of the shootout or if they
were somehow involved.
Speaker 5 (28:09):
We felt that maybe some informant or somebody working for
the FBI in the community, we'd know something and that
they knew something that we didn't know.
Speaker 3 (28:20):
And so as they prepared for a Mam Jamil's trial,
the defense team tried to squeeze as much information as
possible from the prosecution.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
In federal law enforcement, the.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
Fulton County DA had given notice he'd seek the death penalty.
He wanted the state of Georgia to kill a Mam
jamial for the murder of Deputy Ricky Kinchin and the
shooting of Deputy Algernon English. The court determined that Maam
Jamil couldn't afford to pay an attorney for an adequate defense.
His salary was listed as seven hundred dollars a month
(28:55):
and the savings were valued at twelve hundred dollars. But
that didn't mean he would end up with a lawyer
from the Public Defender's Office in Georgia. For death penalty cases,
the state will pay extra for the defense of the accused.
The judge would still have to approve the lawyers. But
a man Jimiale's family and closest supporters, they got to
work assembling a high powered legal team. There was Jack Martin,
(29:18):
a white guy who had lots of experience with death
penalty cases, and Tony Akxom, who's black.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
He had a.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
Reputation for representing civil rights leaders and politicians.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
Here's Axom.
Speaker 9 (29:32):
I could see myself not having been a lawyer, but
having been a stokely Carmichael on a trap round. It
is a thin line that separates who he was to
where I am.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
Axelm and Martin were the two attorneys on the team
who I was able to interview. There was also Bruce Harvey,
a white ponytail liberal, and there was Michael Warren, an
African American Muslim from New York who helped get the
Central Park five exonerated.
Speaker 9 (30:06):
If Jack would not a lawyer, he'd be a mathematician.
If Bruce was not a lawyer, Bruce would be a hippie. Okay,
So all of us brought something different.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
And if Michael Warren were not a lawyer.
Speaker 8 (30:22):
Oh, Michael would be in the pits. I mean Michael
would be He'd be fighting the Russians. That's That's that's
who Michael would be. Absolutely all of us brought a different.
Speaker 4 (30:33):
Mix to it.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
With these different personalities, the hippie, the warrior, the mathematician
that's Martin, and the civil rights worker that's Axom. There
was sometimes conflict on the team, but Axholm said it
never created a serious problem because ultimately a man, Jamil
had final say.
Speaker 9 (30:53):
If there's conflict, we say, Jamil, it's your call. So tension,
uh is not enough tension that it breaks or it
causes a ripple effect that we can't do what we
need to do.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
With this outsized persona following him around a Mam Demio
managed to convey an image of courtesy and respectability in
the run up to the trial. In my quest to
pin him down, I'm finding him really slippery. Not only
do other people distort him into the embodiment of whatever
ends there seeking, he has his own way of shifting form.
(31:37):
I'm still trying to figure out if that's something unique
to him or what we all do. But yeah, slippery
and Mam Dmil's case did not go to trial quickly.
He sat in jail after he was arrested, weeks past,
then months. Tony Axam, Jack Martin, they met with him
and they got to know him at least a little bit.
Speaker 9 (32:02):
He is six feet plus, okay, just his height commands
the room. He is slow to speak. He does not
speak with speed, and he does not speak with a
Southern draw. There is a deliberateness about him, and you
(32:27):
get the impression that he is an ema. So you
can feel that he has seen parts of the world,
and he's met with kings and queens and servants and slaves.
You can get that impression and feeling when you talk
to him.
Speaker 5 (32:44):
Allaman was one of the most genuine and polite class overhead,
very self spoken, very a peacemaker. When you you say, well,
how yell? I mean, how you doing? He says? Siety,
he says, There's anything I can do for you. Have
no other client ever said that to me. That personality
(33:05):
just wasn't the same personality somebody get into a shootout
with the police. So I don't know. He struck me
as a very fascinating person great stories, very polite, very
wanting to help us as much as he could.
Speaker 3 (33:24):
I heard from many people who met with the mam
Jamil or who have known him over the years, that
he would ask this question, is there anything I can
do for you? It's his go to line. He'd ask
folks across the counter at his corner store, He'd ask
folks across the plexic class in prison. Maybe he even
asked it in his days as a revolutionary. It's universally disarming.
(33:47):
I know he had this will to serve. I know
he had a fire inside. I know he enjoyed being
in control. But why would he shoot those deputies with
so much to lose? In these weeks that turned into months,
when a Mam Jamial sat in jail. The defense and
prosecution filed motions, often tedious and procedural, even if they
(34:10):
were important. As part of a process called discovery, the
prosecution was required to share with the defense the evidence
they'd gathered, especially anything that might point to a mam
Jamial's innocence. Martin asked the prosecution if they had anything
in their files about surveillance of a Mam Jamial or
informant in the mass ged. They said no, but that
didn't necessarily mean those things weren't happening because the FBI
(34:33):
wasn't required to turn anything over. So Martin kept pushing
the prosecution to help.
Speaker 5 (34:39):
I was saying, listen, you can't get it, they'll give
it to you, you know, But they refused to do that.
Speaker 3 (34:47):
The informant piece, you had a sense that there was
one there. Why why did you think that?
Speaker 5 (34:53):
You know, that was more a suspicion of knowing the
history of the FBI and all. I mean that they
thought he was, you know, doing all sorts of things
they never could prove, but we thought that they might
have played somebody in the community to try to make
a case against al Amine on all their suspicions of
criminal activity.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
Which were not true, and if there were someone there,
what would be the significance of that, Well, if there
weren't a formant there that night, one.
Speaker 5 (35:22):
You know, this is all sort of speculation, of course,
but one that that person might know more of what
happened that night, might know whether there was somebody else
was involved in the shooting, or that they were somehow
other involved in this situation and involved in trying to
frame all amine for this murder.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
I see, I see, well in either case that there
was some type of exculpatory aspect to Yeah.
Speaker 5 (35:48):
Yeah, they may know stuff we don't know.
Speaker 3 (35:51):
The FBI orn't informant. They might have information that could
help a manage meals defense that could prove them innocent,
even it would be information that they weren't likely to
just hand over. Martin filed a motion calling for the
judge to order any confidential informants be revealed, and the
(36:13):
judge said a series of hearings that were closed to
the public, we were able to get the transcripts for
at least some of them, although sections are blacked out,
The FBI said, and lawyers to protect the bureau's information,
but Martin was still able to question a few agents,
including a key agent named Bill Gant. That's a name
to remember, Bill Gant. Basically, what Martin uncovered before the
(36:37):
trial was this Gant was investigating a Mam Jamil during
the nineties. The reason for the investigation wasn't clear, but
Gant had informants inside the mass Jet.
Speaker 2 (36:49):
Martin also learned that on March.
Speaker 3 (36:50):
Seventeen, two thousand, the day after the shootout, while law
enforcement at all levels were looking for a Mam Jamil,
Gant was in touch with the confidential source in the
West End. Gant had informants in the West End. So
what did they seen? What did they know? Could they
have been involved in the shooting? These were the kind
of questions Martin had for the FBI.
Speaker 5 (37:14):
You know, they were acting like, well, we're not the
prosecuting agency in this case. We don't have to give
you stuff, we don't need to give you or we're
required to give you. We said, no, you guys were
parcel of this. You were part of the arrest. But
I never felt we got a full story from the
FBI about what happened.
Speaker 3 (37:33):
The proceedings kept moving and finally, about a year and
a half after a man Jimial was arrested. The trial
was scheduled to begin, but the day before jury selection
was September eleventh, two.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
Thousand and one.
Speaker 3 (37:50):
More on the next episode of Radical. Radical is a
(38:13):
production of Campside Media, Tenderfoot TV, and iHeart Podcasts. Radical
was reported and written by Johnny Kaufman and me Mosey.
Secret Johnny Kauffman is our senior producer. Sheba Joseph is
our associate producer. Editing by Eric Benson, Johnny Coffin, Emily
Martinez and Matt Cher. Fact checking by Sophie Hurwitz, Kaylin Lynch,
(38:37):
and Layla Dos. Original music by Kyle Murdoch and by
Ray Murray of Organized Noise. Sound design and mixing by
Kevin Seaman. Recording by Ewan Leed Treum Ewen and Sheba Joseph.
Campside Media's operations team is Doug Slaywan, Ashley Warren, Eliah Papes,
Destiny Dingle, and Sabina Merra.
Speaker 2 (38:58):
The executive producers at.
Speaker 3 (38:59):
Campside Media are Josh Dean, Vanessa, Gregoriatis, Adam Hoff, and
Matt Cher. For Tenderfoot TV, executive producers are.
Speaker 2 (39:09):
Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay.
Speaker 3 (39:12):
The Executive producers at iHeart Podcasts are Matt Frederick and
Alex Williams, with additional support from Trevor Young.
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely
those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast,
and do not represent those of iHeartRadio or their employees.
This podcast also contains subject matter which may not be
suitable for everyone.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Radical was released every Tuesday and brought to you absolutely free,
But if you want ad free listening and early access
to next week's episode, subscribe to tenderfoot Plus. For more information,
check out tenderfootplus dot com.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Enjoy the episode.
Speaker 4 (00:42):
Gamsite Media.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
After he was arrested in Lowndes County, a ma'am Jamil
Elamine was taken to a jail in Montgomery, Alabama. He
had been free for twenty five years, but now he
was back behind bars and back in the court system.
His first appearance would be the next morning at a
courthouse named for a man whose career in politics started
with the KKK and ended on the US Supreme Court.
(01:10):
It was Alabama. Armed marshals drove a Mamjamial there. Shackled
and handcuffed. He emerged from a van into public view,
wearing loose fitting gray sweats pants, pockets hanging inside out disheveled.
He said just a few words to a gaggle of reporters.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
The governmental conspiracy. Man, this is a governmental conspiracy.
Speaker 5 (01:30):
Weren't involved in news.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
This is a governmental conspiracy, he said, and he denied
being involved in the shooting. US Marshal James Ergus was
also still in Alabama. He had stuck round after helping
to capture a Mamjamil, and he was among those waiting
inside the courtroom when a Mam Jamil was brought in.
James was standing at the entrance when he felt something.
Speaker 6 (01:57):
It was just a horrible energy and I didn't know why,
and then I and then I realized that he was
right behind me.
Speaker 4 (02:04):
It was just a.
Speaker 6 (02:05):
Very unusual I just felt bad. I mean, I don't know.
I don't know how sixplained it is. I went from
feeling great and fine to just feeling bad for a second.
You know, they went away, But it was it exactly
correlated with his.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
Closeness to me, James said, he since the force of evil,
I won't argue with the fact that he felt something.
I imagine that we can pick up on phenomena that
we might call energy. Everyone has walked into a room
and said something feels off, But those perceptions are subjective.
(02:52):
I bet I would have picked up on something different
if I'd been in the courtroom that day and Ma'am
Jamil had been in a cell all night, forced into
a moment of stillness after four days on the run,
his mind must have been racing, and he emerged from
whatever darkness that was into the glare of the press,
and then suddenly he was at the mercy of the court.
(03:13):
Who's to say that in that moment something wasn't radiating
off of him, something that we don't really have words.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
For, but evil.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
I don't really use the word, and so I'm not
sure I would have felt it. We perceive what we
focus on. James everyone, we're all moving through slightly different realities.
Crazy to think about that in the context of a
court case.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
In Alabama.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
There was some legal bureaucracy that needed to play itself
out issues not directly related to the shooting in the
West End. Ammamdmil was indicted in Fulton County relatively quickly,
in a little over a month, and so it was
time for him to be brought back to Georgia. The
news media TV especially had been following the legal procedures closely,
(04:06):
and a mam Jamil's trip back was something of a climax.
Speaker 6 (04:10):
There was a bajillion news cruise that wanted to follow
the motorcade back, but if the motorcade was a trick,
he was never in the motorcade.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
Instead, a mam Jamil was taken in a helicopter. James
said he was quiet on the trip, no supervillain vibes.
Speaker 6 (04:29):
We put him in an suv without a motorcade, drove
him to a landing site, and they flew him directly
to the prison and unloaded him in Atlanta.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
Before that first appearance in court, when a mam Jamil
called out a conspiracy, he wanted people to see a
government capable of trickery and deceit, for people to shift
their focus. I'm not sure many were convinced. I'm not
sure I'm convinced, but there's no doubt that a mam
Jmi in his days as a revolutionary was the target
(05:03):
of a government conspiracy at the highest levels. The press
were none the wiser, and it would take decades for
the public to come to grips with what happened to him.
The force of evil, James said he felt in the courtroom.
Maybe it was just the anger of the old h
Rap Brown from Campside Media, Tenderfoot TV, and iHeart podcasts.
(05:29):
This is Radical, I'm Mostly Secret, Episode three, Messiah. If
(05:50):
Rap Brown was larger than life, there's one moment that
supersized him, that landed his name in the newspaper headlines
and on the evening news. It was a speed she
gave in nineteen sixty seven at a rally and a
town in Maryland called Cambridge. The irony is that few
people seemed to know for sure what actually happened at
this rally, like what really happened on the ground, But
(06:14):
stories about Rap took flight afterwards, stories that forced people
to pick sides and to reinforce narratives that weren't necessarily true.
The late sixties was a time when white people were
scared and black people were angry, and people saw in
Rap who.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
They needed to see.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
He emerged as this phantasm with a shaky foundation in reality,
not that there was even a consensus on reality. Cambridge, Maryland,
is an industrial city of about ten thousand on Maryland's
eastern shore. Peter Levy, a historian, wrote a book about it.
Speaker 7 (06:51):
So in the early sixties. From roughly nineteen sixty two
through nineteen sixty four, Cambridge had been really one of
the hotbeds of civil rights activism in the country. Though
not as well known as a place like Birmingham or Selma,
it garnered a great deal of attention.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
In Cambridge, there was an all white fire company that
basically ran the city. It was technically private, but the
fire company was funded with public money and the members
usually decided who held political office in city government. Civil
rights activists in Cambridge had some wins, though They pushed
the city to pass a disegregation ordinance, but it was
(07:28):
a victory that stoked the backlash. White residents who wanted
to maintain the status quo began to raise their voices.
The fire company operated the community pool, and instead of desegregating,
they just shut it down.
Speaker 7 (07:42):
It would rather have no community pool than how blacks
swim with them in a desegregated fashion. So it is,
you know, it is the power broker, and it had
been at juggernauts with the black community for years.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
George Wallace, the staunch segregationist and governor of Alabama, was
running for president, and he held a rally at the
building operated by the fire company.
Speaker 7 (08:04):
The percentage of whites who showed up for that was
really really high. And in fact, the political leadership in
Cambridge changes after that, and now more conservative elements took.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
Over the right word shift in Cambridge among the white community.
Is it fair to call that like a more open
embrace of white supremacist ideology.
Speaker 7 (08:24):
Yeah, I mean, it's the whole difficulty with the term backlash.
It's more of a maybe I wish I called as
a retrenchment. I see it as partly it's almost a
premonition of the times we're in today, of a populist
white populist upsearch that takes place.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
And in nineteen sixty seven, the National States Rights Party
held a white power.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Rally in Cambridge.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
The organization had ties to the KKK and the American
Nazi Party. After the event, the Cambridge police chief Bryce Kinneman,
he walked off with the party's leader appearing to protect him.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
About a week later, rap would come to town.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
He was chairman of SNAK at the time, the Student
on Violent Coordinating Committee and some activists in Cambridge invited
him to come speak.
Speaker 7 (09:14):
He's really relatively unknown until he goes to Cambridge in
nineteen sixty seven. Brown, like a lot of black activists,
thinks that there is a lot of change taking place,
and if he can foster that change, he's going to
do it. I mean, he understood, having been in the South,
that sometimes the change would take place first and foremost
at the community level, and he's trying to help community
(09:36):
activists out.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Before Rap got to Cambridge, the police chief Kinneman, he
ordered his officers into the streets. State troopers were mobilized too,
and the National Guard was on standby. Rap arrived at
around eight forty five at night. A crowd of at
least three hundred and fifty people had gathered in the
city's Black neighborhood. He climbed on top of a car.
(10:00):
Rap stood tall above the crowd. He had a small afro,
black sunglasses, looked like he was wearing jeans and a
denim jacket. When he spoke, he jabbed his right corner
finger in front of him. No microphone, no megaphone.
Speaker 4 (10:16):
Animals, Monkeys are animal.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
We got this recording from the Maryland State Archives. It's incomplete,
and it seems to only include the most inflammatory parts
of Rap's speech. He's using a lot of language that
I wouldn't use, and then I don't like, but I'm
going to use some of it here just to make
sure you can understand what he's saying.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
We're going to carry you.
Speaker 7 (10:41):
And the only thing I have to respects first.
Speaker 5 (10:44):
The.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Man is moving to kill you. He said.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
The only thing that the honky respects this force. In
nineteen sixty seven, the epithets and the naked calls for
violence grabbed most of the attention, but in the less
traffic parts of the speech that we don't have audio of,
there's a pretty clear eyed assessment of the hypocrisy of
the white establishment. You call us lazy, but you built
(11:10):
a country with slave labor. You kill over in Vietnam
for your cause. Send black people to kill for your cause,
but we shouldn't kill for our cause. You talk about
black people looting, but you looted this land from its
native inhabitants. Rapp's response to the double standard was pragmatic.
What gives them power over us is their willingness to
(11:33):
use violence, so we should use it to What he
seemed to overlook were the ways that brute force wasn't
sustainable for white people. For one thing, they had a
major revolt on their hands. Violence as an idea was spreading.
Speaker 8 (11:53):
Because that's what he about to do to you, believe me,
unlike he would do to you.
Speaker 6 (11:56):
But do it to him first.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
Rap said, don't try to love the honky to death.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
Shoot him to death before he shoots you.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
He also spoke about what was happening in Cambridge. Nearby
there was a dilapidated school, a symbol of unequal education
in the city.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
Rap said it should have been burned all.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
The way down a long time ago. Burn that school
down and take over the white school. If America don't
come around, he said, we should burn it down. Rap
spoke for about an hour, and afterward the crowd mostly dispersed.
(12:41):
There's no riot, no fire. Law enforcement and the police
chief Keneman, they got a recording of the speech, probably
the same one we have.
Speaker 7 (12:53):
I think you have to see. Keineman is a kind
of a boiling cattle and kind of a pressure cooker,
and the pressure has been building.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
Up for years.
Speaker 7 (13:02):
He's getting really really angry. And other authorities at the
state attorney General, the head of the state police, they're
actually trying to calm Bryce Kineman down. You know, he
wants to just go in and clean the place up.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
At this point, it's late at night, and the story
goes that Rap and a few other activists are walking
a woman home a deputy sheriff fired what he alleged
were two warning shots, one on the ground and one
in the air. It's a shotgun, though book shot and
a pellet hit Rap in the head.
Speaker 7 (13:34):
Brown scared for his life, maybe rightfully so.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Rap wasn't there for long though There's.
Speaker 7 (13:39):
Some people actually said that he was actually secreted out
in a casket and he leaves town now. I'm not
sure if the police officers knew that, but he's gone.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
Many of the people who heard Raps speak, they.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
Went back to their homes on the Black side of town.
Cambridge was relatively quiet, but a fire was about to catch,
a fire that draw the attention of the most powerful
men in the country, and even though Rap was on
his way out of Cambridge, those men would decide to
come after him. In nineteen sixty seven, the same year
(14:34):
that Rapp spoke in Cambridge, Maryland, there were more than
one hundred and fifty uprisings of black people and cities
around the country.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
And one hundred places Detroit is a fired.
Speaker 7 (14:44):
One hundred square blocks are now under sea.
Speaker 5 (14:46):
Looting and shooting by both police and rooftop snipers, and
three Negroes were killed.
Speaker 4 (14:52):
And still the.
Speaker 6 (14:52):
Sirens whine and the victims come in.
Speaker 7 (14:55):
The fire has been raging for more than thirty.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Minutes for then.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
This is where the riot in the city hospital WCBSTV
news in Newark.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
Forty three people killed in Detroit, twenty six killed in Newark,
thousands arrested. The period came to be known as the
Long Hot Summer. Black people were angry and white people
were scared. Everyone was watching, not least of all the
President of the United States, Lyndon Johnson. He was concerned,
maybe even angry. A few years earlier he had signed
(15:27):
the Voting Rights Act, but that hadn't really eased the tension.
America was still in distress.
Speaker 4 (15:33):
We will not tolerate lawlessness. We will not endure violence.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
This is Johnson speaking at a press conference about the uprisings.
Speaker 4 (15:43):
It will not be tolerated. This nation will do whatever
it is necessary to do to suppress and to punish
those who engage in it.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
He meant black people, especially black leaders of the uprisings.
The rebellions because President Johnson's government, the FBI in particular,
would set law and order aside when it came to
and I'm using Johnson's words here, suppressing and punishing those involved.
The FBI would employ covert, extra judicial, many would say,
(16:23):
illegal actions to target Rap and other black leaders whatever
was necessary. Rap would feel the effects of this for years.
The night that Rap delivered his speech in Cambridge, Johnson
and lots of other powerful white men in Washington, they
would have been watching TV reports about uprisings around the country.
(16:45):
In Cambridge, after Rap had left town, maybe in a casket,
a fire was about to catch the historian Peter Levy,
he spent years looking into how things went down. Cambridge
was quiet that night until a bunch of white men
night writers drove through the black.
Speaker 7 (17:05):
Neighborhood, and there are disputes about what they were doing,
but many in the black community thought that they were
being fired upon. Generally speaking, the police would not stop
these night riders. Later on in the evening, they did
stop him and claim they found no weapons, but many
of the black community didn't believe that. Some police reported
(17:27):
that they were actually shooting off fireworks, and at one
point some black individuals began to arm themselves, and two
black men were later arrested for firing back, and one
of those shots hit an officer. Didn't seriously do any harm,
but when the police chief, Rice Kunnerman, heard that his
officer officer wrote and had been hit, he just goes
(17:48):
you know, he goes crazy.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
Meanwhile, a small fire had started in that old elementary
school that it spoken about, the symbol of unequal education
that he said should burn to the ground. It took
forty five minutes for that all white fire company to
even be alerted, and when the company got there, the
firefighters kept their distance just beyond the border of the
(18:15):
black section of town for at least an hour, if
not longer.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
The head of the fire companies said his men.
Speaker 3 (18:21):
Didn't feel safe enough to go into the neighborhood, even
though other white people had gone in that night.
Speaker 7 (18:26):
The black city councilmen and leading business leaders asked for
the right to put the fire out. You know, said
give us. The equipment wasn't given to him, and the
response essentially of the police chief was you know you
and he used the N word started this fire. You know,
you guys can put it out. But then they weren't
wouldn't help him put it out.
Speaker 3 (18:47):
Finally, the state attorney General got involved, and he convinced
the fire company to extinguish the fire.
Speaker 7 (18:54):
And by then two whole square blocks of the black community,
including a number of businesses and a church of homes,
had been burned to the ground.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
The night of the fire, President Johnson called an emergency
meeting at the White House about the uprisings. There was
a small gathering of powerful men. The Secretary of Defense
was there, the Attorney General, a Supreme Court justice, and
maybe most importantly, j Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI.
Hoover had been leading the bureau for decades, and he
(19:25):
was the one who launched the notorious counterintelligence program known
as Cointel pro. It was aimed at surveilling and disrupting
American political organizations, mostly on the left. According to Hoover,
in this meeting at the White House, President Johnson was
of the opinion that the uprisings of the Long Hot
Summer they were coordinated by black activists. The next day,
(19:48):
Hoover from the FBI called Johnson. Even with all the
intelligence at his disposal, Hoover wasn't able to point to
any coordinated conspiracy, but he named a Trap Brown that
someone the President might blame and called him, quote, one
of the worst in the country. A warrant was put
out for Rap's arrest. The government would do whatever it
(20:10):
took to stop him. FBI agents visited Rap's lawyer.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Afterward. The lawyer called Rap.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
And they made plans for Rap to fly from Washington,
DC to New York City, where he would turn himself in.
But Rap's lawyer alleged the FBI was listening in on
that call because when Rap went to the airport, he
was arrested and charged with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.
Speaker 4 (20:37):
My fellow Americans, we have endured a week such as
no nation should live through a time of violence and tragedy.
Speaker 3 (20:49):
Three days after Cambridge, President Johnson delivered a televised address.
It was like he was speaking directly to Rap.
Speaker 4 (20:57):
The apostles of violence were their ugly drum beat of hatred.
Must know that they're now heading for a ruin and disaster,
and every man who really wants progress, our justice, our
equality must stand against them and against their miserable virus
(21:22):
of hate.
Speaker 3 (21:25):
Targeting Rap. It was an easy way to shift a
tension from the crappy condition to police violence that often
spark black people to take to the streets in the
first place. Then a month after Cambridge, the FBI Director
j Edgar Hoover kicked off a new operation under the
Cointel pro umbrella. It would target what he called black
(21:45):
nationalist hate groups.
Speaker 7 (21:48):
And so it begins to launch efforts to and this
is Hoover's words, to neutralize black radicals. Another definition of
black radicals is quite expansive because in that includes Martin
Luther King, who had been disliked by Hoover, disliked as
a wrong term, hated by Hoover for years.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
Expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
Those were the goals Hoover and.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
The FBI wanted to prevent the rise of what they
called a messiah. The FBI paid informants who infiltrated civil
rights and black power organizations. Regular reports came in to
FBI headquarters from agents surveilling leaders like Rap reading the
documents that have been declassified. It looks like the FBI
(22:36):
was trying to secretly create conflict between Rap and other.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
Black power leaders.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
And then there's this wild one which actually got approval
from FBI headquarters to make a comic book vilifying Rap.
From what I can tell for Rap, at least, none
of these dirty tricks amounted to much. What was truly
damaging was a scheme among federal and local law enforcement
to Rapp caught up in the legal system. This unfolded
(23:02):
over years. It began in Cambridge, where Rap was charged
with arson the same day. I should point out that
Hoover mentioned Rap to the President. The county prosecutor in
Maryland later told a reporter that he charged Rap to
quote get him on the FBI Most Wanted list.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
The charges weren't based on any evidence.
Speaker 3 (23:26):
A few days after Rap was indicted on those charges,
he flew to Louisiana to visit his family in Baton Rouge,
and he took a gun with him, an M one carbine.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
You could do that kind of.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
Thing back then, take a gun on a plane, check
it in with the crew. The whole time he was
in Louisiana, a Rap was followed by local police, and
when he got back to New York, he was arrested
by the FBI for carrying a gun across state lines.
A while under indictment, and the judge in the gun
case appeared to hardly even pretend to play by the rules.
(23:58):
He was a former FBI agent, and at some point
he was overheard saying that he was going to quote
get that nigger, referring to Rap. On top of that,
the legal bureaucracy took its toll filings and hearings. Rapp
actually spent some time in jail for violating his bond.
It was a lot, and he stepped down as chairman
(24:20):
of SNICK. To survive as a leader in a black
activist at the time, it was something like a small miracle.
Malcolm X was assassinated in nineteen sixty five and the
FBI was involved, Martin Luther King Junior in nineteen sixty eight,
the Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in nineteen sixty nine,
and what many consider a plot orchestrated by the FBI.
(24:43):
And then in nineteen seventy, the night before Rap was
set to face trial in Maryland for those fake arson
charges and explosion.
Speaker 7 (24:51):
The bomb was so bad that it totally eviscerated the car.
If there were people who were trying to kill Brown
and maybe even tracking Brown, they might have had good
reas reason to believe that Brown was in the car,
and most people argue that Brown was the target.
Speaker 3 (25:08):
But Rap wasn't in the car. Two other Snake activists
were killed, Ralph Featherstone and William J. Payne, were in
Maryland to try to protect Rap. In the aftermath, law
enforcement argued that Featherstone, in pain had plans to bomb
the courthouse and those plans went awry. But the Black
press and Black activists they saw a failed assassination attempt
(25:30):
with good reason to fear for his life, Rap went underground.
Hoover put him on the FBI ten Most Wanted list. Ultimately,
Rap wasn't convicted of any of those charges. I don't
think it's a stretch to say there was a bona
fide conspiracy against him, as much as these kinds of
things can truly be coordinated. And so three decades later,
(25:55):
in two thousand, as a Maam Jimil Alamin's trial approached,
his defense this team wanted to make the jurors see
that conspiracy, but see that it never really stopped, that
it continued through the night of the shootout, and the
defense wasn't just coming up with this out of nowhere.
Evidence would emerge that showed law enforcement was surveilling a
Ma'am Jamil in the years and even the weeks leading
(26:18):
up to March sixteenth, two thousand, when gunfire erupted in
the West End. By April of two thousand, about a
month after the shootout in the West End, a Ma'am
Jamil Elamin was in jail in Atlanta at an overcrowded
(26:41):
facility known for being short staffed and violent. He pleaded
not guilty when he went to court in Fulton County
and was ordered to be detained until trial.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
It was decades after the.
Speaker 3 (26:53):
Long hot Summer and that meeting of powerful men at
the White House. The surveillance of cointail pro was considered
an artific of the sixties and seventies. But what if
it never really stopped. What if there's surveillance and legal
harassment followed Rapp when he left prison, moved to Atlanta,
and became a man Jamil. That's what a Mam Jamil alleged.
(27:16):
During conversations with his defense team. He said that in
the weeks, months, and even years before he was arrested
in Alabama, he still felt that he was being watched.
He even figured there were informants in the mass jed
in the West End.
Speaker 5 (27:30):
I think all means just because of his history with
the FBI, was suspicious about that was he had reason
to believe that might be true, but no hard evidence.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
Jack Martin was a Man Jamil's lead defense attorney. Martin
and the other lawyers on the team, they didn't consider
a Man Jamil paranoid. They shared his suspicions, and if
the FBI was surveiling a Man Jamil, or if there
was an informant in the mass jed, they wanted to know.
That kind of information could be useful. It could even
prove a Maam Jamil was innocent. What if an informant
(28:04):
was at the scene of the shootout or if they
were somehow involved.
Speaker 5 (28:09):
We felt that maybe some informant or somebody working for
the FBI in the community, we'd know something and that
they knew something that we didn't know.
Speaker 3 (28:20):
And so as they prepared for a Mam Jamil's trial,
the defense team tried to squeeze as much information as
possible from the prosecution.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
In federal law enforcement, the.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
Fulton County DA had given notice he'd seek the death penalty.
He wanted the state of Georgia to kill a Mam
jamial for the murder of Deputy Ricky Kinchin and the
shooting of Deputy Algernon English. The court determined that Maam
Jamil couldn't afford to pay an attorney for an adequate defense.
His salary was listed as seven hundred dollars a month
(28:55):
and the savings were valued at twelve hundred dollars. But
that didn't mean he would end up with a lawyer
from the Public Defender's Office in Georgia. For death penalty cases,
the state will pay extra for the defense of the accused.
The judge would still have to approve the lawyers. But
a man Jimiale's family and closest supporters, they got to
work assembling a high powered legal team. There was Jack Martin,
(29:18):
a white guy who had lots of experience with death
penalty cases, and Tony Akxom, who's black.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
He had a.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
Reputation for representing civil rights leaders and politicians.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
Here's Axom.
Speaker 9 (29:32):
I could see myself not having been a lawyer, but
having been a stokely Carmichael on a trap round. It
is a thin line that separates who he was to
where I am.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
Axelm and Martin were the two attorneys on the team
who I was able to interview. There was also Bruce Harvey,
a white ponytail liberal, and there was Michael Warren, an
African American Muslim from New York who helped get the
Central Park five exonerated.
Speaker 9 (30:06):
If Jack would not a lawyer, he'd be a mathematician.
If Bruce was not a lawyer, Bruce would be a hippie. Okay,
So all of us brought something different.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
And if Michael Warren were not a lawyer.
Speaker 8 (30:22):
Oh, Michael would be in the pits. I mean Michael
would be He'd be fighting the Russians. That's That's that's
who Michael would be. Absolutely all of us brought a different.
Speaker 4 (30:33):
Mix to it.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
With these different personalities, the hippie, the warrior, the mathematician
that's Martin, and the civil rights worker that's Axom. There
was sometimes conflict on the team, but Axholm said it
never created a serious problem because ultimately a man, Jamil
had final say.
Speaker 9 (30:53):
If there's conflict, we say, Jamil, it's your call. So tension,
uh is not enough tension that it breaks or it
causes a ripple effect that we can't do what we
need to do.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
With this outsized persona following him around a Mam Demio
managed to convey an image of courtesy and respectability in
the run up to the trial. In my quest to
pin him down, I'm finding him really slippery. Not only
do other people distort him into the embodiment of whatever
ends there seeking, he has his own way of shifting form.
(31:37):
I'm still trying to figure out if that's something unique
to him or what we all do. But yeah, slippery
and Mam Dmil's case did not go to trial quickly.
He sat in jail after he was arrested, weeks past,
then months. Tony Axam, Jack Martin, they met with him
and they got to know him at least a little bit.
Speaker 9 (32:02):
He is six feet plus, okay, just his height commands
the room. He is slow to speak. He does not
speak with speed, and he does not speak with a
Southern draw. There is a deliberateness about him, and you
(32:27):
get the impression that he is an ema. So you
can feel that he has seen parts of the world,
and he's met with kings and queens and servants and slaves.
You can get that impression and feeling when you talk
to him.
Speaker 5 (32:44):
Allaman was one of the most genuine and polite class overhead,
very self spoken, very a peacemaker. When you you say, well,
how yell? I mean, how you doing? He says? Siety,
he says, There's anything I can do for you. Have
no other client ever said that to me. That personality
(33:05):
just wasn't the same personality somebody get into a shootout
with the police. So I don't know. He struck me
as a very fascinating person great stories, very polite, very
wanting to help us as much as he could.
Speaker 3 (33:24):
I heard from many people who met with the mam
Jamil or who have known him over the years, that
he would ask this question, is there anything I can
do for you? It's his go to line. He'd ask
folks across the counter at his corner store, He'd ask
folks across the plexic class in prison. Maybe he even
asked it in his days as a revolutionary. It's universally disarming.
(33:47):
I know he had this will to serve. I know
he had a fire inside. I know he enjoyed being
in control. But why would he shoot those deputies with
so much to lose? In these weeks that turned into months,
when a Mam Jamial sat in jail. The defense and
prosecution filed motions, often tedious and procedural, even if they
(34:10):
were important. As part of a process called discovery, the
prosecution was required to share with the defense the evidence
they'd gathered, especially anything that might point to a mam
Jamial's innocence. Martin asked the prosecution if they had anything
in their files about surveillance of a Mam Jamial or
informant in the mass ged. They said no, but that
didn't necessarily mean those things weren't happening because the FBI
(34:33):
wasn't required to turn anything over. So Martin kept pushing
the prosecution to help.
Speaker 5 (34:39):
I was saying, listen, you can't get it, they'll give
it to you, you know, But they refused to do that.
Speaker 3 (34:47):
The informant piece, you had a sense that there was
one there. Why why did you think that?
Speaker 5 (34:53):
You know, that was more a suspicion of knowing the
history of the FBI and all. I mean that they
thought he was, you know, doing all sorts of things
they never could prove, but we thought that they might
have played somebody in the community to try to make
a case against al Amine on all their suspicions of
criminal activity.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
Which were not true, and if there were someone there,
what would be the significance of that, Well, if there
weren't a formant there that night, one.
Speaker 5 (35:22):
You know, this is all sort of speculation, of course,
but one that that person might know more of what
happened that night, might know whether there was somebody else
was involved in the shooting, or that they were somehow
other involved in this situation and involved in trying to
frame all amine for this murder.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
I see, I see, well in either case that there
was some type of exculpatory aspect to Yeah.
Speaker 5 (35:48):
Yeah, they may know stuff we don't know.
Speaker 3 (35:51):
The FBI orn't informant. They might have information that could
help a manage meals defense that could prove them innocent,
even it would be information that they weren't likely to
just hand over. Martin filed a motion calling for the
judge to order any confidential informants be revealed, and the
(36:13):
judge said a series of hearings that were closed to
the public, we were able to get the transcripts for
at least some of them, although sections are blacked out,
The FBI said, and lawyers to protect the bureau's information,
but Martin was still able to question a few agents,
including a key agent named Bill Gant. That's a name
to remember, Bill Gant. Basically, what Martin uncovered before the
(36:37):
trial was this Gant was investigating a Mam Jamil during
the nineties. The reason for the investigation wasn't clear, but
Gant had informants inside the mass Jet.
Speaker 2 (36:49):
Martin also learned that on March.
Speaker 3 (36:50):
Seventeen, two thousand, the day after the shootout, while law
enforcement at all levels were looking for a Mam Jamil,
Gant was in touch with the confidential source in the
West End. Gant had informants in the West End. So
what did they seen? What did they know? Could they
have been involved in the shooting? These were the kind
of questions Martin had for the FBI.
Speaker 5 (37:14):
You know, they were acting like, well, we're not the
prosecuting agency in this case. We don't have to give
you stuff, we don't need to give you or we're
required to give you. We said, no, you guys were
parcel of this. You were part of the arrest. But
I never felt we got a full story from the
FBI about what happened.
Speaker 3 (37:33):
The proceedings kept moving and finally, about a year and
a half after a man Jimial was arrested. The trial
was scheduled to begin, but the day before jury selection
was September eleventh, two.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
Thousand and one.
Speaker 3 (37:50):
More on the next episode of Radical. Radical is a
(38:13):
production of Campside Media, Tenderfoot TV, and iHeart Podcasts. Radical
was reported and written by Johnny Kaufman and me Mosey.
Secret Johnny Kauffman is our senior producer. Sheba Joseph is
our associate producer. Editing by Eric Benson, Johnny Coffin, Emily
Martinez and Matt Cher. Fact checking by Sophie Hurwitz, Kaylin Lynch,
(38:37):
and Layla Dos. Original music by Kyle Murdoch and by
Ray Murray of Organized Noise. Sound design and mixing by
Kevin Seaman. Recording by Ewan Leed Treum Ewen and Sheba Joseph.
Campside Media's operations team is Doug Slaywan, Ashley Warren, Eliah Papes,
Destiny Dingle, and Sabina Merra.
Speaker 2 (38:58):
The executive producers at.
Speaker 3 (38:59):
Campside Media are Josh Dean, Vanessa, Gregoriatis, Adam Hoff, and
Matt Cher. For Tenderfoot TV, executive producers are.
Speaker 2 (39:09):
Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay.
Speaker 3 (39:12):
The Executive producers at iHeart Podcasts are Matt Frederick and
Alex Williams, with additional support from Trevor Young.
Popular Podcasts
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.