Remembering Imam Jamil al-Amin

"Thus, negroes have always tried to aid and impress whites by eliminating Blackness…Any action or behavior which is not endorsed by whites, negroes consider 'acting a nigger.' What was 'acting a nigger' two years ago is now accepted as 'soul…' The negro, being unable to recognize who is the true enemy, becomes an enemy to Blacks. Negroes prefer 'living' to being free. To be Black in this country is to be a nigger. To be a nigger is to resist both white and negro death. It is to be free in spirit, if not body. It is the spirit of resistance which has prepared Blacks for the ultimate struggle." 

Imam Jamil al-Amin (fmr. H. Rap Brown), Die Nigger Die, 1969

Introduction 

From the South and beyond, we mourn the passing of Black Revolutionary and Islamic faith leader, Imam Jamil Abdullah al-Amin, who transitioned in federal prison custody on November 23, 2025 at the age of 82.

Al-Amin's political journey began at age 15, when he organized a student walkout at Southern High School in Baton Rouge in solidarity with Civil Rights organizing efforts at Southern University. In the summers of 1962 and 1963, he began organizing with the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), an affiliate of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); the following summer, he volunteered during the Mississippi Freedom Summer. He continued to organize with SNCC in the South, becoming a key organizer in the 1966 Greene County Alabama Freedom Vote campaign. 

Al-Amin succeeded Kwame Ture (fmr. Stokely Carmichael)—a close friend and Pan-African revolutionary—as SNCC Chairman,   serving from May 1967 to June 1968. Their successive tenures as chairmen radicalized SNCC, previously a nonviolent organization under Chairman John Lewis, prompting its renaming as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and pushing both SNCC  and the larger Black Liberation movement to endorse militant Black Power politics that favored self-defense as an essential means towards gaining political power. In the afterlife of the Civil Rights Movement's crescendo—specifically the 1964 Freedom Summer Campaign marked by Fannie Lou Hamer's DNC speech, the shortcomings of the larger Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party campaign and legal rights-oriented organizing strategy, and the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner—the movement entered a period of political crisis in which the prior nonviolent tactics fell short in terms of intervening the scale of mob terror and state violence still wielded against Black communities and their allies. It was in this climate that Brown and Carmichael met the insurgency of the late sixties and its urban riots with a more "by any and all means necessary" approach to Black political struggle. 

In alignment with the Black Power turn, SNCC formed a short-lived strategic alliance and attempted merger with the Black Panther Party. Al-Amin later served as the Black Panther Party's Minister of Justice, raising his national profile as a Black Power movement leader. 

In 1969, he published his seminal text, the political memoir Die N*gger Die! His militant oration and endorsement of organizing strategies sought to merge the southern Black freedom struggle with the anti-poverty and racism movements coalescing in northern urban centers. Al-Amin's politic affirmed the 1960s urban race rebellions as legitimate tactics for freedom struggle, which made him a police target subject to surveillance by the FBI's COINTELPRO program. 

After taking his shahada in the Rikers Island jail, and serving a five year sentence in Attica prison from 1971-76, al-Amin relocated to Atlanta, becoming a respected Imam and community leader in the West End. On March 14, 2002, he was wrongfully convicted of shooting two sheriffs, killing one and injuring another. Despite evidence that the charges were bogus—including an admission of guilt from Otis Jackson—and the Imam was indeed innocent, he served a life sentence for the March 2000 incident, positioning him among the longest held political prisoners in the U.S. 

Imam Jamil al-Amin died due to the medical neglect characteristic of the violence of the American carceral system. Despite the Free Jamil al-Amin campaign's efforts to mobilize the masses against his continued imprisonment on false charges, and to boost demands that the incarcerated elder have access to the care required, the continued captivity and negligence resulted in his death. 

His case remains under review by the Fulton County District Attorney's Conviction Integrity Unit. At the time of his death, freedom was in sight for al-Amin, who was awaiting the judge and district attorney's decision to grant him a new trial based on a legal motion that brought forth newly discovered evidence and constitutional violations before the court. The coalition formed to support his just acquittal and freedom is still raising funds to support his posthumous exoneration. Please consider donating to their cause.  

The following reflections hold these tensions between the legacy of our Black Liberation Struggle veterans—many of whom like Imam al-Amin are or lived more than half of their lives as political captives and exiles—and the Abolition Movement's political stagnancy around freeing them and all imprisoned captives. 

Da'Shaun's Reflection: "To all of those who have died resisting america's white death…"

I will never forget the first time I picked up Imam Jamil's Die Nigger Die! in 2015. I told any and everyone who would listen about this book. I was but a year into my life as a community organizer in Atlanta, and was trying to find belonging in the genealogy of black student and otherwise community organizing, especially out of the South. In that way, I was still struggling toward language that could hold the depth of what I was feeling: anger that could only be sharpened by clarity; clarity that had to be sharpened by responsibility; and responsibility that could only be sharpened by community. And it was in Imam Jamil's uninhibited words and precision that I found a space to accept my own. From his direct call outs of black politicians—at a time where I was writing about Atlanta's long history with using black (mis)leadership to restructure and "reimagine" white supremacy—to his sharp dissection of "poor white folks" who, despite their own poverty, accurately understand the racial hierarchy to be white-over-black. From his critique of black students at Howard who felt they were too good to engage with the surrounding communities—at a time where my friends and I were organizing against the AUC's ongoing efforts to gentrify the West End whilst telling the students that this community was too dangerous to engage alone—to his incisive analysis on armed revolutionary black resistance.

When I opened Imam Jamil's book, I found a lineage that I could be proud of. I found a voice that refused to soften itself for the sake of comfort—a voice that demanded the reader to confront not only state violence but also the violence we internalize from the state apparatus; that understood how the state uses social institutions like media, schools, religion, and family to propagandize or indoctrinate people into supporting the repressive power of the state wielded through the police, the military, and the government. I found a man who, above all else, was committed to black freedom and was unambiguous about what he understood to be the only way to experience it: guerrilla warfare.

Die Nigger Die! was not written to soothe, and nor should it have been. It was also not a perfect text, as Imam Jamil was not a perfect man. His analysis of colorism, or what he called "color prejudice," for example, was shallow and unsophisticated, at best; and in many ways, he represented a common theme among black revolutionary thinkers of that time, wherein hypermasculinist ideals shaped the ways resistance and the movement more largely were discussed. Nevertheless, Die Nigger Die! was written as real-time testimony and reflection, as indictment and outright condemnation, and as instruction. Imam Jamil gave us a text that pulsed with the urgency (and perhaps the limitations) of its time, yet carried lessons that reached far beyond the moment of its writing. For me, encountering his words felt like meeting an ancestor who had been waiting for me to show up.

Except he was not an ancestor. When I discovered his text, Imam Jamil was 13 years into his life sentence after being convicted of murdering a Georgia sheriff's deputy. Like another brilliant insurgent, Assata—who we also lost earlier this year—Imam Jamil maintained his position that he was wrongfully convicted for a crime he did not commit. Learning that he was still alive was almost haunting. Similar to Assata, we had discussed these revolutionary figures as if they were already dead. And I guess, in a sense, they were; when you are alienated from your home, your people, and are experiencing an unexplainable and unjustifiable violence like prison or exile, there isn't another word for it. Still, I am haunted by how easily black insurgents become legacies, even before they have passed away, and what that clarifies about our collective refusal to act beyond the performance.

Imam Jamil's analysis of antiblackness, state repression, and the unrelenting impossibilities of black freedom movements offered something I hadn't quite seen in the texts circulating through contemporary organizing spaces: an unflinching account of what it means to be bold despite and in spite of counterinsurgent operations, and what it means to maintain that boldness even when the state tries to silence you.

His writing forced me to understand organizing not simply as a series of actions or campaigns, or even as one-off commitments to protest, but as a lifelong ethic carried out in practice. In those pages, he reminds us that guerrilla warfare for the sake of liberation demands a clarity of purpose that cannot be purchased or performed. It must be practiced, and it has to be earned through consistency and a willingness to face consequences for telling the truth.

As I wrote in the foreword for Joy James's In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love,

"[It] calls us to acknowledge that the state and the state's violence are only a fragment of the sadistic nature of antiblackness; that our struggle for liberation cannot and must not be limited to critiques of state power but rather they must extend to the metaphysical, global structures through which the state apparatus maintains its power. It is a call to sacrifice; to sacrifice our lives, our relationships, our time, our livelihoods with the understanding that nothing is guaranteed in return.'"

I continued:

"… revolution requires us to die, and to do so in more ways than one. Revolutionary Love is not about being invested in our lives, but rather it is about being invested in and knowledgeable about our deaths. It is not about the romanticized fantasy and hallucinations that many revolutionaries have about being at war with the state, but rather it is about the death of Desire and of our desires. It is not about Black Love, or a romantic, familial, or platonic love at all. It is about sustained movements, political will, and laboring for the sake of revolution to kill the very things designed to kill us. It requires that we die to this world."

But while Die Nigger Die! does tell a necessary story, it doesn't tell the full story of who Imam Jamil was. For that, you also have to look at his speeches. His speeches extended the same ethic that shaped his writing, but they carried a different kind of electricity. It is one thing to encounter his words on the page, but it's something else entirely to feel the power of his voice. Imam Jamil spoke with a level of conviction that convinced me each syllable carried a mandate for the possibility of our shared liberation; as if he understood that language shapes our orientation to the world and the commitments we make (or that are thrust upon us) within it. He spoke with a measured and unwavering cadence that was so clearly rooted in a black Southern tradition that made him and sharpened by a political clarity that refused to bend.

Listening to his speeches and interviews, I understood that Imam Jamil's brilliance was, for him, not about performance—at least not in the way it's typically used. His brilliance was informed by his very real conviction and belief in everything he said. Said differently, the black folks he spoke in front of were not necessarily his audience; they were folks he seemed to really feel accountable to. His oratory became a kind of revolutionary and political pedagogy, and an opportunity to teach/demand that black folks become the insurgents we needed—a demand and lesson we still have not yet realized.

A decade after that first reading of Die Nigger Die!, I sit here as I write this reflection, revisiting both the book and his speeches with a deeper sense of gratitude but also grief. I feel gratitude for the clarity he offered, for the generations he fortified, and for the discipline he modeled. But I feel so much grief for the way, 23 years after his conviction, we have still not actualized the revolution he so boldly believed in. And because in the same year that we lost him, Miss Major, and Assata, both he and Assata died in a specific kind of captivity—be it bound by steel or in the open-air confinement of exile—still marked by a world that secures itself through the suffering and death of black insurgents. Their captivity was and is overdetermined by a world whose world-making capacity depends entirely on the eternal, internal, and external degradation and restraint of black revolutionaries, revolutionary possibility, and the unending vulnerability of blackness. As such, it feels almost deathly poetic that I am writing about his life and impact now, at a moment when movements across the South—and around the world—are still wrestling with the same antiblack, counterinsurgent forces he named so precisely.

Imam Jamil's legacy is not emblematic; it's instructional. It demands something of us beyond representation. There is so much more required of those of us who believe in the clarion call he audaciously put forth. His legacy requires that we speak honestly, even when honesty costs us something, and that we understand liberation as a horizon we will never reach but must still stumble toward. And because my role in movement is to organize media makers and newsrooms in opposition to the state apparatus, and developing narrative strategies that move us to action, I find this lesson could not be more relevant to me.

For those of us who found our political footing in his wake, Imam Jamil Abdullah al-Amin remains a guide and a force. Die Nigger Die! shaped my early organizing, and his speeches fine-tuned my understanding of narrative strategy. But he didn't just leave us with words; he left us a blueprint. And honoring him means traversing the path he laid for us with the seriousness and devotion he embodied.

With that, I leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Imam Jamil, spoken at a rally organized in support of Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, who was also imprisoned for the killing of a police officer:

"…There is no in-between: you're either free or you're a slave. There's no such thing as second-class citizenship. […] The only thing that's gon' free you is gunpowder." 

—Imam Jamil Abdullah al-Amin; Feb. 17, 1968. Free Huey Rally.

Tea's Reflection: Youth insurgency and the Southern movement

My reverence for Imam Jamil Abdullah al-Amin will forever be one rooted in our shared experience as youth insurgents bound to a Southern movement, destined to betray revolution. The Southern movement in question is the one that centers the whole South, in radical solidarity with freedom struggles across the Global South, that holds Atlanta as the center of its universe. 

Beyond the romanticism of all that The South(s) are bound to give The World—the generative capacity for empire's unceasing dynamic of crusade, conquest, and expansion and the Cultures of resistance that propel freedom movements as they, at the same time, fortify the technologies of imperial capture—doing life in The Black South endows those of us who dare to struggle here with an indispensable clarity regarding violence, power, suffering, and captivity. Imam al-Amin's contribution to the Black Liberation struggle is a testament to this clarity of sight. 

Jamil Abdullah al-Amin's six decades of dedication to liberation struggle in many ways mirrors the cyclical flows of the larger freedom movement tradition, and in this way, offers a prescient lens through which to assess the stakes of failed revolutions and their compromised afterlives. In the foreword of his seminal text, Die Nigger Die!, Ekwueme Michael Thelwell sketches the tension at the heart of al-Amin's legacy, which lies in incomplete conversion from the militant youth insurgent H. Rap Brown, to the respected spiritual leader, Imam Jamil al-Amin. He writes: 

"The fiery and impetuous young rebel who speaks out of the pages of this book has long since evolved into an austere religious scholar, disciplined by faith and projecting the aura of a spiritually disposed ascetic. After thirty years, al-Amin has become, in many important ways, a vastly different person from the author of this book. A respected Imam, he now sees—and for some time has seen—the world, his own role therein, and the eventual liberation of his people in quite different terms: those of faith, self-discipline, and spiritual development. This vision is reflected in both his demeanor and his language. Consequently he has, at this time, serious reservations about the appropriateness of reissuing this book of useful struggle." 

Revisiting the text upon elder comrade al-Amin's transition, it is this tension that animated the re-reading that informs this reflection. The foreword, like many other online writings of his legacy, draws a direct line between the Imam's inability to escape the spectre of H. Rap Brown, and the state's repeated attempts to frame him for acts of terror, that ultimately resulted in his life imprisonment.

I have for years considered the question, "What does it mean to age in movement work?" Recently, a Facebook memory resurfaced a nine year old post from Da'Shaun, commemorating the one year anniversary of our founding Atlanta Black Students United (ATLBSU) with our college organizing comrades. In reflecting on all we accomplished and all we conceded in our generation's Atlanta Student Movement and its afterlife, as direct inheritors of the SNCC legacy, the fascist present exists as a direct outgrowth of our larger movement's collective failure to meet the revolutionary demand. And the life and death of revolutionary political prisoners in particular, alongside the general conditions of all prisons, serve as horrific images of the inevitable outcomes of the radical insistence on doing everything except what is to be done to free them all.      

Beyond the sorrow over the many comrades, elders or contemporaries whom we now count as casualties, Assata, Miss Major, Dorian Johnson and Jamil al-Amin's recent, successive transitions re-center the question of aging in struggle. This struggle is indexed by the trade-off between the concessions made in lieu of the revolutionary demand and the countless casualties. Those deaths will continue to toll if we continue to choose radical reform and transformation over revolutionary insurgency in increasingly violent times. 

Terror and the Stain of Youth Insurgency 

In Die Nigger Die, a pre-conversion H. Rap Brown opens the memoir with the provocative assertion: 

"But who would insure my freedom? Who would make democracy safe for Black people? America recognized long ago what negroes now examine in disbelief: every Black birth in america is political. With each new birth comes a potential challenge to the existing order. Each new generation brings forth untested militancy… America doesn't know which Black birth is going to be the birth that will overthrow this country."

The militant youth organizer speaks prophetically of the untimely nature of Black Revolution, and with it, demonstrates with clarity that each generation born in the afterlife of an unrealized revolution poses a fatal threat to the antiBlack order of the imperial world. As direct inheritors of the Atlanta Student Movement once led by SNCC, we know all too well the seductive nature of belonging to insurgent movements and radical political traditions. 

The generations of youth movements birthed in the afterlife of Chairmen Carmichael and Brown's Black Power turn have, like our revolutionary predecessors, studied until fluently proficient The Black Radical Tradition and that of wider radical and revolutionary left politics. Through discipline and struggle, we indeed have (had) the potential to be the generation capable of overthrow. Yet despite the heightened consciousness of each generation, and stakes of the reddening records of violence, the desire for rebellion pales in comparison to that of belonging to radical cultures, content with rehearsing "everyday acts of resistance." 

Put differently, the intergenerational nature of Black Liberation Struggle has, in its petrified stagnancy, conceded the demand for revolution for the sake of ever-transforming movement cultures. Cultures that favor, in their "plurality of strategies," radical thought and praxis that betray the demand for revolution for the sake of preserving the tradition, even at their most capacious. 

In the age of Radical Abolitionism's reign as the Left's consensus mode of counter-hegemonic struggle, this dynamic is especially sinister given that our movement's betrayal of the revolutionary demand requires captives in prisons, genocidal cleansing zones, settler states, and other zones of non-being. 

And history has demonstrated that these intergenerational concessions have proven fruitful for sustaining not only radical movements, but the technologies of violence, captivity, and exploitation constitutive of the structure of predation that conditions the possibility for empire's continued expansion. The blueprint for the reformist concessions constitutive of George Jackson's definition of fascism are rooted in the settlements our movements accept in rendering themselves viable alternatives to revolution. 

Decades prior to Jamil al-Amin's wrongful conviction and subsequent life sentence, The 1968 H. Rap Brown Law foreshadowed the 40 year period of incarcerating, exiling, and disciplining the youth revolutionaries who incited and affirmed the 1960s rebellions. 

Evident of the violent nature of counter-insurgent radical concessions, The Civil Rights Act of 1968—which contains within it a number of hard-fought state reforms, including the Indian Civil Rights Act, Fair Housing Act, federal Hate Crimes protections—also includes Title X: Anti-Riot Act. It criminalized the use of interstate or foreign commerce routes or facilities. Crossing state lines, sending mail, using the Internet, or phone calls to incite, organize, promote, participate in, or extend the activities of a riot, or to aid and abet any person performing such riot-related activities, became federal offenses. 

The law was named for al-Amin's legal battle which culminated in a 1970 trial to convict him of inciting a riot in Cambridge, Maryland in 1967 after a portion of the community's Black neighborhood mysteriously caught fire following one of his speeches. 

The specter of H. Rap Brown, his militance, the militance of the revolution he insisted on waging, and that of the riots against which the freedom struggle is foregrounded, in many ways mirrors the long 21st century and the upheavals that yielded a more perfect fascist carceral apparatus. 

This is a time where fascism perfects itself to reign supreme until climate catastrophe renders us extinct en masse through mechanisms of control, including terrorist charges for protests, unraveling of the care safety net, rampant Islamophobia, media censorship, elimination of care access, mass surveillance, racial profiling, genocidal cleansing and political deportations. Our contemporary period demonstrates a quotidian arrangement wherein the reasonable suspicion of dissent is grounds for incarcerating a wider section of society than ever before. 

Prisons have never been further from obsolete, and the conditions prison captives everywhere face on the inside demand more than ever that we exhaust every means available to us to free them all en masse. And yet, we continue to build movements that are only serious about their freedom in slogan and in chant, but not in action. 

Conversion and the unforgettable legacy of insurgency 

After converting to Islam and moving to Atlanta to serve the community as an Imam and organizer, Jamil al-Amin owned a grocery store in the West End neighborhood, and committed to religious study and spiritual transformation. This life, one in many ways antithetical to that of his youth, could not remove the stain of H. Rap Brown's riotous threat to the compromised order structured after the militant mid-20th century. 

What his life paradigm reveals regarding the high stakes of failed revolutions is the limited course of redemptive action permitted for revolutionaries once at the forefront of the struggles that endorse anti-imperial violence, despite their conceding to reform and changemaking in lieu of revolutionary action. 

Perhaps most devastatingly, his story demonstrates there is, in fact, no redemption for Black militants, nor is there proof possible that those of us born capable of wielding Black violence to overthrow the structure of predation have the capacity for appeal, legally or ontologically. 

Imam al-Amin's transition after decades of suffering and medical neglect in prison only accentuates the urgency absent from our movements regarding the immediate liberation of political prisoners in particular, and the mass incarcerated population in general. 

Since 2020, Delbert Africa, Mutulu Shakur, Assata Shakur, Russell Maroon Shoatz, and Sekou Odinga have all died—and all but Assata transitioned soon after their "compassionate" and widely advocated release from prison captivity. In the years since our BLM-era movements conceded to having and belonging to desirable movements over devoting the full capacity of our movement towards meeting the abolitionist demand of the captives, we have dedicated our capacity towards building a thriving movement media ecosystem. 

In this compromised position, Scalawag and our movement media comrades publish countless firsthand accounts from prison captives navigating medical neglect, heightened vulnerability to extreme weather events, sexual exploitation, hygiene resource deprivation, labor exploitation, worsening mental health crises, reproductive violence, and the dismal prospects associated with serving life and death row sentences. They, along with captives in Gaza's open-air prison, native people resisting settler dominance, and migrants from Sudan to the Mediterranean and Mexico on the frontline of the endless border wars, join the chorus of abolitionists and Left radicals in making the case for the end of carceral apparatus. 

Despite this, we have a booming abolitionist movement and a thriving movement media apparatus. The robust abolitionist literary canon is successful at raising awareness about the conditions incarcerated folks face, and minting new abolitionists proud to participate in the cause, yet fails to ignite what is necessary: the full suspension of society's terms of order and the mass liberation of every prison captive. 

With each death of a captive, be they globally-renowned freedom fighters like al-Amin, Shakur, Odinga or Shoatz or captives in county, city, state, federal, war zone or international migrant detention facilities, we so-called Left Radicals and Abolitionists must start with the admission that they died in bondage because we have left them in chains to languish while we dream of suitable solutions. 

Imam al-Amin's incarceration, medical condition on the inside and violent transition forces me to reiterate a question written at the close of an earlier meditation on George Jackson and the tradition of Black August: 

"How much closer to death must we and these systems get before we take George Jackson seriously and remove the restrictor plates from the engine of revolution? He is after all clear that the end of any urban order—which, in an "urban age" stands in for global hegemony—is to create perfect disorder."