Jamil Al-Amin

And of course, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passing in the wake of the murders in Mississippi Summer.

Some of the folks here at NCBL were either present in Mississippi Summer in Mississippi or have defended those who struggled with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, including my brother Malley Davis, who was part of the legal defense team for Baba al-Jamil, formerly H. Rap Brown, Bilal al-Jamil.

So at any rate, this pushback against this progress, which came out of the self-determining spaces of African people, the Black church, the HBCUs and so forth, Women's Political Council, as I said, in Montgomery, that pushback from the white nationalists trying to save their society, looking at African people as something they should look at us as, which is what? A civilizational threat to their way of life.

We are a threat to any way of life that oppresses other people, my little friends, scurrying little friends.

Yeah.

Talking about they used to call him Rap Brown and-

They did

... and obviously, if you guys don't know who Rap, H. Rap Brown was-

Yeah

...

Yeah, yeah.

Yo, just all the, you know, H. Rap Brown, I like him.

I could go on.

But look, um, yo, it's still good.

You've known all the players, many of them well.

Uh, Martin, Malcolm Was there a debate going on within the community? We know about Stokely Carmichael, and Rap Brown, and the Black Panthers, who came a little bit later.

Uh, was there great debate, uh, during the '60s within the Black community about non-violence, about what's the right way to go, and some saying, "Yes, I hear Martin," others saying, "No, I hear Malcolm"?

Mm-hmm.

We sat in there, and I saw another imam, and I was furious about it, but I had to understand that Allah was teaching me something in that moment, or God, whatever you call him.

I saw that other imam talking about Jamil al-Amin in a respectful way, but he was putting his hands on his head.

It was an Arab, and I got angry.

But that was just a body.

Jamil al-Amin was gone.

You know who I never heard on the phone with those people that I talked to while I was on the phone with Jameel Alamein? You, you, you.

I was on two phone calls with Assata Shakur in her lifetime.

Threats of domestic violence became commonplace.

A lot of people in the bourgeoisie tell me they don't like Rap Brown when he says, "I'm gonna burn the country down." But every time Rap Brown says, "I'm gonna burn the country down," they get a poverty program.

Chaos merchants looked to reset the American power structure, and they used the uncertainty after JFK's assassination to pressure new social programs that astronomically increased the size and power of the US government.

President Johnson described this new effort.

They utilized sometimes knowingly and sometimes unknowingly in terms of what the local police knew.

They utilized the local police and they utilized the prosecutors, both federal and state prosecutors, local prosecutors, to not only disrupt and destroy organizations such as leaders such as Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, and others, Fred Hampton, H. Rap Brown, Martin Luther King.

They were all targeted by this COINTELPRO program.

Not only were they targeted, the FBI was working in cooperation with and in conspiracy with local police departments, with local prosecutors, in order to implement their COINTELPRO program and its objectives, which included disruption and destroying organizations and their leadership, starting with the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, dealing with Dr.

And so, you know, this is just a disease, and it can't really be explained the way.

America is a very violent place, or as Rap Brown pointed out many, many years ago, the that, you know, violence is as American as cherry pie.

Maybe it is.

But look, the youngster, he knew he was killing the president.