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Al-Amin's supporters instantly joined in the chorus and screamed that he was targeted because he was a black man fighting the system. They angrily note that his clean-guy image as Muslim spiritual leader didn't matter to Atlanta police and government agents. Nor did his community do-goodism in fighting against drugs and prostitution. Al-Amin supporters say that from the time he landed in the city in 1976, authorities did everything they could to shove him back in a prison cell.

That some police and even government officials may still be angry at Al-Amin for his violent past and his present community-organizing efforts would not surprise me. As minister of justice of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s, Al-Amin repeatedly called on blacks to kill the police and to burn down America's cities.

I remember the evening in 1968 when I and a small knot of black journalists stood near the podium at the Los Angeles Sports Arena at a Black Panther fund-raiser. Al-Amin sat in the middle of the stage garbed in a shiny, black-leather jacket, a black beret cocked at an angle on his head. He was flanked by a small army of black-leather jacketed bodyguards and assorted hangers-on.

His speech to the crowd was defiant, brash, laced with profanities, exhorting blacks to kill and die for the revolution. As I soaked in his performance with a mixture of awe and fascination, I wondered whether he really believed this fantasy vision of violent revolution that he was selling the crowd.

The warning flares soared higher the more I heard him speak during the next few months. Al-Amin, at times, seemed to take special delight in picking words that had maximum shock value on crowds. Even the title of his book, "Die Nigger Die," was calculated for hyper shock effect. It was long on attacks on those moderate black leaders Al-Amin branded "Negro sellouts" and "Uncle Toms." Yet it was totally devoid of any strategy or program for black political and economic empowerment.

Al-Amin's militant posturing and bold threats to destroy the "white establishment," "the white man," "white devil" or "white oppressor" made FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover even more determined to get rid of the Panthers and Al-Amin.

With the tacit support of President Nixon and then-Attorney General John Mitchell, Hoover launched a full-blown, patently illegal blitz against the Panthers. Their campaign included hundreds of informants, police agents and provocateurs, poison-pen letters, mail covers, wire taps, murderous threats and carefully orchestrated police raids.

By the mid-1970s the Panthers were finished. Most had become sorry casualties of police bullets or their own bullets. Or else they had degenerated into dope dealing, hustling and extortion, or drifted away, afflicted with terminal disillusionment with the failed promises of the black movement. Some managed to swap their black jackets and berets for Brooks Brothers suits and slide neatly into posts at universities and corporations and in elected offices.

The free clinics, free breakfast program, legal aid and voter registration devised by early Panther organizers were gone. So were the business development programs and community organizing campaigns to combat police abuse. Programs that had given so much hope to so many were badly faded memories.

But these bygone Panther activities weren't faded memories for Al-Amin. He remained the consummate 1960s true believer in community activism.

He also remained trapped by his tough-guy image. He seemed destined to be a casualty of his own fantasy vision of violent revolution, incapable of making the transition from radical mouthpiece to effective community organizer and leader. There were repeated brushes with the law that ended in a bungled robbery attempt and a shootout with New York police. This landed him in prison for five years.

Al-Amin reversed his downhill slide in 1976 when he embraced Islam, rechristened himself with a Muslim name, did his mea culpas for his past and made his peace with America. He took his new role as spiritual leader seriously. Yet his 1995 arrest for assault and possession of illegal weapons, though the charges were dropped, sent up another warning flare that many believed he was still prone to act out the violent rhetoric of the 1960s that had caused him and so many other blacks such terrible grief and pain.

While it's silly to reflexively join the lynch Al-Amin parade, it's just as silly to declare that Al-Amin is the victim of a government conspiracy before all the facts are known.

Still, the truth and the irony are that despite the years Al-Amin spent railing against the white racist cops, the victims of the Atlanta violence weren't white racist cops -- they were young black officers. If Al-Amin indeed was the triggerman, it will be yet another pathetic example of how men like Al-Amin sometimes make victims of the same people they once claimed they would kill and die for.
salon.com | March 25, 2000

© 2000 Pacific News Service

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