What Imam Jamil, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali & Dr. King has in Common: COINTELPRO
by the volunteer staff of Justice for All

What do El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X), Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali and Imam Jamil Al-Amin have in common?

Apart from the fact that they are all dynamic African-American leaders and personalities, they were also spied on and harassed by a shady US government organization called COINTELPRO in the 1960s.

COINTELPRO is an acronym for CounterIntelligence Program, which was established by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In the words of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI's director in the 1960s, COINTELPRO was designed to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" groups whose views the FBI considered threatening to the status quo.

COINTELPRO's operations were exposed in 1971 after secret files from one of the FBI's offices were removed and released to news media.

The FBI disclosed six official counterintelligence programs aimed at different politically active sectors of the American population between 1956 and 1971. One of these was "Black Nationalist Hate Groups".

COINTELPRO used three ways to achieve its goal of political destruction and neutralization of dissent - infiltration, deception and harassment.

By using infiltration, agents and informers not only spied on political activists, but also discredited them and disrupted their activities
Deception was also used. This took the form of publishing false
publications and forging letters, for example.

Tactics of harassment included eviction, job loss, break-ins, vandalism,
grand jury subpoenas, false arrests, frame- ups, and physical violence.

In the case of African-American and Native American movements, these assaults including outright political assassinations. COINTELPRO'S tactics worked. A number of the most committed groups that were targeted withdrew from grassroots organizing, depriving their activist circles of much needed leadership.

Imam Jamil Al-Amin and COINTELPRO

Imam Jamil Al-Amin, known as H. Rap Brown in the turbulent and revolutionary political atmosphere of the 1960s, was also spied on, harassed, pursued, arrested and targeted by covert operations.

His crime: he was a member of two of the organizations targeted by COINTELPRO: the Black Panther Party and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He joined the SNCC in the mid-1960s. In May 1967, at the age of 23, H. Rap Brown was elected the group's chairman.

By 1968, much of SNCC's leadership had merged into the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, which had been organized in Oakland, California, by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. H. Rap Brown became the Minister of Justice of this party.

The year 1968 was also when FBI Director Hoover declared the Black Panther Party to be "the single greatest threat to the internal security of the United States" in the New York Times newspaper and pledged to use any means necessary to eliminate the party and its members

The Black Panthers came under attack at a time when their work included free food and health care programs, as well as community control of schools and police. What gave them the tag of "militant" in the eyes of the country's law enforcement was their call for African-Americans to take up arms to defend themselves against violence.

FBI and COINTELPRO successfully destroyed the Black Panther Party and the lives of its members. According to Elaine Brown, a former chairperson of the party, COINTELPRO directed violent, local police raids on party offices, executed assassinations of members and otherwise destroyed the lives of party family members, community and other supporters. She adds that H. Rap Brown was the target of a crusade to discredit and destroy him orchestrated by the then-governor of Maryland Spiro Agnew.

Congress passed a notorious law, the "Rap Brown Amendment," specifically aimed at stopping Brown and radical activists like him from organizing resistance among the people. Brown was "neutralized" from political activism by being charged with inciting a race riot in Maryland (put link to factsheet article) . He was eventually sentenced to five years in a federal penitentiary, where he accepted Islam. He emerged a changed man, a Muslim, by the name of Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin.

Post-Muslim harassment

But despite coming clean and being an upstanding community leader and reformer in Atlanta, Georgia, government and local authorities never stopped targeting Imam Jamil.

For example, in August 1995, Imam Jamil, while driving his son to school, was arrested in connection with the July shooting of a young man in Atlanta.

After the arrest, the police interrogated his seven-year-old son for six hours before notifying someone to pick up the child.

The victim initially pointed to Imam Jamil as being his assailant. However, later, in a news conference in Washington, DC, the man announced he did not know who wounded him and that the police pressured him into making the identification.

In the latest case involving the shooting death of police officer Ricky Kinchen last year, one new development that the FBI kept hidden was a written confession to the murder last summer. But after persistent meetings with the FBI, the individual withdrew his confession.

It is clear that Imam Jamil is still the target of US government authorities, despite "coming clean" for almost a quarter of a century.

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