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Speaker 4: Gamsite Media.
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Speaker 3: 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. 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.
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Speaker 2: The governmental conspiracy. Man, this is a governmental conspiracy.
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Speaker 5: Weren't involved in news.
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Speaker 3: 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.
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Speaker 6: 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.
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Speaker 4: It was just a.
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Speaker 6: 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.
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Speaker 3: 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. 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. Who's to say that in that moment something wasn't radiating off of him, something that we don't really have words.
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Speaker 2: For, but evil.
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Speaker 3: 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.
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Speaker 2: In Alabama.
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Speaker 3: 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, and a mam Jamil's trip back was something of a climax.
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Speaker 6: 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.
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Speaker 3: Instead, a mam Jamil was taken in a helicopter. James said he was quiet on the trip, no supervillain vibes.
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Speaker 6: 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.
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Speaker 3: 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 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. This is Radical, I'm Mostly Secret, Episode three, Messiah. If 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 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.
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Speaker 2: They needed to see.
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Speaker 3: 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.
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Speaker 7: 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.
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Speaker 3: 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 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.
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Speaker 7: 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.
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Speaker 3: 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.
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Speaker 7: 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.
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Speaker 3: 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.
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Speaker 7: 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.
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Speaker 3: And in nineteen sixty seven, the National States Rights Party held a white power.
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Speaker 2: Rally in Cambridge.
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Speaker 3: 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.
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Speaker 2: About a week later, rap would come to town.
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Speaker 3: He was chairman of SNAK at the time, the Student on Violent Coordinating Committee and some activists in Cambridge invited him to come speak.
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Speaker 7: 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 activists out.
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Speaker 3: 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. 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.
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Speaker 4: Animals, Monkeys are animal.
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Speaker 3: 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.
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Speaker 2: We're going to carry you.
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Speaker 7: And the only thing I have to respects first.
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Speaker 5: The.
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Speaker 2: Man is moving to kill you. He said.
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Speaker 3: 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 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 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.
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Speaker 8: Because that's what he about to do to you, believe me, unlike he would do to you.
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Speaker 6: But do it to him first.
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Speaker 3: Rap said, don't try to love the honky to death.
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Speaker 2: Shoot him to death before he shoots you.
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Speaker 3: He also spoke about what was happening in Cambridge. Nearby there was a dilapidated school, a symbol of unequal education in the city.
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Speaker 2: Rap said it should have been burned all.
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Speaker 3: 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. 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.
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Speaker 7: 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.
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Speaker 2: Up for years.
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Speaker 7: 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.
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Speaker 3: 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.
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Speaker 7: Brown scared for his life, maybe rightfully so.
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Speaker 2: Rap wasn't there for long though There's.
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Speaker 7: 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.
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Speaker 2: Many of the people who heard Raps speak, they.
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Speaker 3: 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 that Rapp spoke in Cambridge, Maryland, there were more than one hundred and fifty uprisings of black people and cities around the country.
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Speaker 2: And one hundred places Detroit is a fired.
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Speaker 7: One hundred square blocks are now under sea.
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Speaker 5: Looting and shooting by both police and rooftop snipers, and three Negroes were killed.
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Speaker 4: And still the.
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Speaker 6: Sirens whine and the victims come in.
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Speaker 7: The fire has been raging for more than thirty.
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Speaker 2: Minutes for then.
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Speaker 1: This is where the riot in the city hospital WCBSTV news in Newark.
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Speaker 3: 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 the Voting Rights Act, but that hadn't really eased the tension. America was still in distress.
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Speaker 4: We will not tolerate lawlessness. We will not endure violence.
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Speaker 3: This is Johnson speaking at a press conference about the uprisings.
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Speaker 4: 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.
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Speaker 3: 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, 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. 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.
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Speaker 7: 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 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 you know, he goes crazy.
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Speaker 3: 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 black section of town for at least an hour, if not longer.
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Speaker 2: The head of the fire companies said his men.
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Speaker 3: Didn't feel safe enough to go into the neighborhood, even though other white people had gone in that night.
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Speaker 7: 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.
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Speaker 3: Finally, the state attorney General got involved, and he convinced the fire company to extinguish the fire.
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Speaker 7: 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.
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Speaker 3: 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 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, 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 took to stop him. FBI agents visited Rap's lawyer.
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Speaker 2: Afterward. The lawyer called Rap.
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Speaker 3: 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.
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Speaker 4: My fellow Americans, we have endured a week such as no nation should live through a time of violence and tragedy.
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Speaker 3: Three days after Cambridge, President Johnson delivered a televised address. It was like he was speaking directly to Rap.
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Speaker 4: 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 of hate.
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Speaker 3: 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 nationalist hate groups.
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Speaker 7: 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.
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Speaker 3: Expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize.
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Speaker 2: Those were the goals Hoover and.
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Speaker 3: 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 was trying to secretly create conflict between Rap and other.
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Speaker 2: Black power leaders.
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Speaker 3: 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 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.
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Speaker 2: The charges weren't based on any evidence.
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Speaker 3: 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.
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Speaker 2: You could do that kind of.
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Speaker 3: 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. 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 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. And then in nineteen seventy, the night before Rap was set to face trial in Maryland for those fake arson charges and explosion.
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Speaker 7: 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.
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Speaker 3: 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 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, 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 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 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.
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Speaker 2: It was decades after the.
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Speaker 3: 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. 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.
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Speaker 5: 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.
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Speaker 3: 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 was at the scene of the shootout or if they were somehow involved.
00:28:09
Speaker 5: 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.
00:28:20
Speaker 3: 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.
00:28:27
Speaker 2: In federal law enforcement, the.
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Speaker 3: 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 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, a white guy who had lots of experience with death penalty cases, and Tony Akxom, who's black.
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Speaker 2: He had a.
00:29:26
Speaker 3: Reputation for representing civil rights leaders and politicians.
00:29:30
Speaker 2: Here's Axom.
00:29:32
Speaker 9: 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.
00:29:52
Speaker 3: 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.
00:30:06
Speaker 9: 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.
00:30:20
Speaker 2: And if Michael Warren were not a lawyer.
00:30:22
Speaker 8: 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.
00:30:33
Speaker 4: Mix to it.
00:30:36
Speaker 3: 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.
00:30:53
Speaker 9: 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.
00:31:13
Speaker 3: 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. 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.
00:32:02
Speaker 9: 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 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.
00:32:44
Speaker 5: 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 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.
00:33:24
Speaker 3: 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. 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 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 wasn't required to turn anything over. So Martin kept pushing the prosecution to help.
00:34:39
Speaker 5: I was saying, listen, you can't get it, they'll give it to you, you know, But they refused to do that.
00:34:47
Speaker 3: The informant piece, you had a sense that there was one there. Why why did you think that?
00:34:53
Speaker 5: 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.
00:35:11
Speaker 3: 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.
00:35:22
Speaker 5: 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.
00:35:41
Speaker 3: I see, I see, well in either case that there was some type of exculpatory aspect to Yeah.
00:35:48
Speaker 5: Yeah, they may know stuff we don't know.
00:35:51
Speaker 3: 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 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 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.
00:36:49
Speaker 2: Martin also learned that on March.
00:36:50
Speaker 3: 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.
00:37:14
Speaker 5: 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.
00:37:33
Speaker 3: 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.
00:37:46
Speaker 2: Thousand and one.
00:37:50
Speaker 3: More on the next episode of Radical. Radical is a 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, 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.
00:38:58
Speaker 2: The executive producers at.
00:38:59
Speaker 3: Campside Media are Josh Dean, Vanessa, Gregoriatis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Cher. For Tenderfoot TV, executive producers are.
00:39:09
Speaker 2: Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay.
00:39:12
Speaker 3: The Executive producers at iHeart Podcasts are Matt Frederick and Alex Williams, with additional support from Trevor Young.
Speaker 1: 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.
00:00:17
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00:00:21
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00:00:37
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00:00:42
Speaker 4: Gamsite Media.
00:00:47
Speaker 3: 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. 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.
00:01:27
Speaker 2: The governmental conspiracy. Man, this is a governmental conspiracy.
00:01:30
Speaker 5: Weren't involved in news.
00:01:33
Speaker 3: 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.
00:01:57
Speaker 6: 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.
00:02:04
Speaker 4: It was just a.
00:02:05
Speaker 6: 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.
00:02:26
Speaker 3: 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. 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. Who's to say that in that moment something wasn't radiating off of him, something that we don't really have words.
00:03:19
Speaker 2: For, but evil.
00:03:23
Speaker 3: 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.
00:03:44
Speaker 2: In Alabama.
00:03:45
Speaker 3: 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, and a mam Jamil's trip back was something of a climax.
00:04:10
Speaker 6: 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.
00:04:20
Speaker 3: Instead, a mam Jamil was taken in a helicopter. James said he was quiet on the trip, no supervillain vibes.
00:04:29
Speaker 6: 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.
00:04:41
Speaker 3: 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 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. This is Radical, I'm Mostly Secret, Episode three, Messiah. If 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 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.
00:06:28
Speaker 2: They needed to see.
00:06:30
Speaker 3: 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.
00:06:51
Speaker 7: 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.
00:07:07
Speaker 3: 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 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.
00:07:42
Speaker 7: 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.
00:07:55
Speaker 3: 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.
00:08:04
Speaker 7: 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.
00:08:13
Speaker 3: 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.
00:08:24
Speaker 7: 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.
00:08:43
Speaker 3: And in nineteen sixty seven, the National States Rights Party held a white power.
00:08:47
Speaker 2: Rally in Cambridge.
00:08:49
Speaker 3: 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.
00:09:02
Speaker 2: About a week later, rap would come to town.
00:09:05
Speaker 3: He was chairman of SNAK at the time, the Student on Violent Coordinating Committee and some activists in Cambridge invited him to come speak.
00:09:14
Speaker 7: 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 activists out.
00:09:38
Speaker 3: 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. 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.
00:10:16
Speaker 4: Animals, Monkeys are animal.
00:10:23
Speaker 3: 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.
00:10:40
Speaker 2: We're going to carry you.
00:10:41
Speaker 7: And the only thing I have to respects first.
00:10:44
Speaker 5: The.
00:10:46
Speaker 2: Man is moving to kill you. He said.
00:10:49
Speaker 3: 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 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 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.
00:11:53
Speaker 8: Because that's what he about to do to you, believe me, unlike he would do to you.
00:11:56
Speaker 6: But do it to him first.
00:12:01
Speaker 3: Rap said, don't try to love the honky to death.
00:12:04
Speaker 2: Shoot him to death before he shoots you.
00:12:07
Speaker 3: He also spoke about what was happening in Cambridge. Nearby there was a dilapidated school, a symbol of unequal education in the city.
00:12:16
Speaker 2: Rap said it should have been burned all.
00:12:17
Speaker 3: 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. 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.
00:12:53
Speaker 7: 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.
00:13:01
Speaker 2: Up for years.
00:13:02
Speaker 7: 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.
00:13:15
Speaker 3: 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.
00:13:34
Speaker 7: Brown scared for his life, maybe rightfully so.
00:13:37
Speaker 2: Rap wasn't there for long though There's.
00:13:39
Speaker 7: 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.
00:13:49
Speaker 2: Many of the people who heard Raps speak, they.
00:13:51
Speaker 3: 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 that Rapp spoke in Cambridge, Maryland, there were more than one hundred and fifty uprisings of black people and cities around the country.
00:14:41
Speaker 2: And one hundred places Detroit is a fired.
00:14:44
Speaker 7: One hundred square blocks are now under sea.
00:14:46
Speaker 5: Looting and shooting by both police and rooftop snipers, and three Negroes were killed.
00:14:52
Speaker 4: And still the.
00:14:52
Speaker 6: Sirens whine and the victims come in.
00:14:55
Speaker 7: The fire has been raging for more than thirty.
00:14:57
Speaker 2: Minutes for then.
00:14:58
Speaker 1: This is where the riot in the city hospital WCBSTV news in Newark.
00:15:05
Speaker 3: 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 the Voting Rights Act, but that hadn't really eased the tension. America was still in distress.
00:15:33
Speaker 4: We will not tolerate lawlessness. We will not endure violence.
00:15:39
Speaker 3: This is Johnson speaking at a press conference about the uprisings.
00:15:43
Speaker 4: 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.
00:16:01
Speaker 3: 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, 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. 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.
00:17:05
Speaker 7: 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 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 you know, he goes crazy.
00:17:54
Speaker 3: 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 black section of town for at least an hour, if not longer.
00:18:20
Speaker 2: The head of the fire companies said his men.
00:18:21
Speaker 3: Didn't feel safe enough to go into the neighborhood, even though other white people had gone in that night.
00:18:26
Speaker 7: 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.
00:18:47
Speaker 3: Finally, the state attorney General got involved, and he convinced the fire company to extinguish the fire.
00:18:54
Speaker 7: 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.
00:19:04
Speaker 3: 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 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, 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 took to stop him. FBI agents visited Rap's lawyer.
00:20:17
Speaker 2: Afterward. The lawyer called Rap.
00:20:19
Speaker 3: 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.
00:20:37
Speaker 4: My fellow Americans, we have endured a week such as no nation should live through a time of violence and tragedy.
00:20:49
Speaker 3: Three days after Cambridge, President Johnson delivered a televised address. It was like he was speaking directly to Rap.
00:20:57
Speaker 4: 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 of hate.
00:21:25
Speaker 3: 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 nationalist hate groups.
00:21:48
Speaker 7: 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.
00:22:09
Speaker 3: Expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize.
00:22:14
Speaker 2: Those were the goals Hoover and.
00:22:16
Speaker 3: 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 was trying to secretly create conflict between Rap and other.
00:22:39
Speaker 2: Black power leaders.
00:22:41
Speaker 3: 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 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.
00:23:23
Speaker 2: The charges weren't based on any evidence.
00:23:26
Speaker 3: 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.
00:23:36
Speaker 2: You could do that kind of.
00:23:37
Speaker 3: 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. 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 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. And then in nineteen seventy, the night before Rap was set to face trial in Maryland for those fake arson charges and explosion.
00:24:51
Speaker 7: 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.
00:25:08
Speaker 3: 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 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, 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 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 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.
00:26:51
Speaker 2: It was decades after the.
00:26:53
Speaker 3: 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. 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.
00:27:30
Speaker 5: 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.
00:27:42
Speaker 3: 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 was at the scene of the shootout or if they were somehow involved.
00:28:09
Speaker 5: 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.
00:28:20
Speaker 3: 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.
00:28:27
Speaker 2: In federal law enforcement, the.
00:28:33
Speaker 3: 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 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, a white guy who had lots of experience with death penalty cases, and Tony Akxom, who's black.
00:29:26
Speaker 2: He had a.
00:29:26
Speaker 3: Reputation for representing civil rights leaders and politicians.
00:29:30
Speaker 2: Here's Axom.
00:29:32
Speaker 9: 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.
00:29:52
Speaker 3: 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.
00:30:06
Speaker 9: 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.
00:30:20
Speaker 2: And if Michael Warren were not a lawyer.
00:30:22
Speaker 8: 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.
00:30:33
Speaker 4: Mix to it.
00:30:36
Speaker 3: 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.
00:30:53
Speaker 9: 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.
00:31:13
Speaker 3: 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. 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.
00:32:02
Speaker 9: 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 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.
00:32:44
Speaker 5: 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 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.
00:33:24
Speaker 3: 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. 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 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 wasn't required to turn anything over. So Martin kept pushing the prosecution to help.
00:34:39
Speaker 5: I was saying, listen, you can't get it, they'll give it to you, you know, But they refused to do that.
00:34:47
Speaker 3: The informant piece, you had a sense that there was one there. Why why did you think that?
00:34:53
Speaker 5: 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.
00:35:11
Speaker 3: 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.
00:35:22
Speaker 5: 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.
00:35:41
Speaker 3: I see, I see, well in either case that there was some type of exculpatory aspect to Yeah.
00:35:48
Speaker 5: Yeah, they may know stuff we don't know.
00:35:51
Speaker 3: 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 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 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.
00:36:49
Speaker 2: Martin also learned that on March.
00:36:50
Speaker 3: 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.
00:37:14
Speaker 5: 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.
00:37:33
Speaker 3: 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.
00:37:46
Speaker 2: Thousand and one.
00:37:50
Speaker 3: More on the next episode of Radical. Radical is a 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, 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.
00:38:58
Speaker 2: The executive producers at.
00:38:59
Speaker 3: Campside Media are Josh Dean, Vanessa, Gregoriatis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Cher. For Tenderfoot TV, executive producers are.
00:39:09
Speaker 2: Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay.
00:39:12
Speaker 3: The Executive producers at iHeart Podcasts are Matt Frederick and Alex Williams, with additional support from Trevor Young.
