Freeway Phantom - Presenting Radical: Episode 1, Fire

Episode Date: December 5, 2023

Hi, Freeway Phantom fans! Tenderfoot TV, iHeartPodcasts, and Campside Media bring you a new true crime series called Radical. Hosted by journalist Mosi Secret, Radical tells the story of Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin and asks the question, was Al-Amin truly guilty? Check out the first episode.   Episode Description: Two sheriff's deputies are hit during a shootout near a mosque, and the lead suspect is Imam Jamil Al-Amin. Journalist Mosi Secret begins investigating the shooting, and he encounters a vexing question.   Listen to Radical on the iHeartRadio app, or wherever you get your podcasts! And follow on social media @RadicalPodSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, I'm Daniel Tosh, host of new podcast called Tosh Show. I'll be interviewing people that I find interesting, so not celebrities. And certainly not comedians. We'll be covering topics like religion, travel, sports, gambling. But mostly, it will be about being a working mother. If you're looking for a podcast that will educate and inspire, or one that will really make you think, this isn't the one for you. Listen to Tosh Show in the i I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast,

or wherever you get your podcasts. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the greatest murder mystery in American history. That's Rob Breiner, Rob called me, so would Ed O'Brien and asked me what I knew about this crime. Well, ask who had the motive to assassinate a sitting president? Then we'll pull the curtain back on the cover-up.

The American people need to know the truth. Listen to Who Killed JFK on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On March 16, 2000, two sheriff's deputies were shot in Atlanta. A Muslim leader and former Black Power activist was convicted. But the evidence was shaky, and the whole truth didn't come out during the trial. My name is Mosey Secret, and when I started investigating this case in my hometown, I uncovered

a dark truth about America. From Tinder for TV, Camside Media, and I Heart Podcasts, Radical is available now. Listen to the new podcast, Radical, for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 iHeart Radio or their employees. This podcast also contains subject matter, which may not be suitable for everyone. Listening to discretion is advised. Subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus. For more information check out TenderfootPlus.com. Enjoy the episode.

Camp site media. The Atlanta Georgia was once a commercial crossroads of the Confederacy. Then, decades after the Civil War, in the middle of the 20th century, it became something dramatically different. The seat of the country's black political leadership. That was at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. The city's business elite called Atlanta the city too busy to hate. There are other nicknames too. The black mecca, the city in a forest, the ATL.

My name is Mosy Secret and and for me, the land is my hometown. It's where I grew up. Within the city, there's a neighborhood called the West End that was once a rich white enclave, with bungalows, Victorian homes, and a leafy tree canopy. In the 50s and 60s, after desegregation, white people took flight to the suburbs like in so many other American cities, and black people moved in. Institutional neglect, urban decay, and the crack epidemic followed. That was the west end in the 80s when I was growing up in Atlanta. Pretty rough. But it was also around that time that black people, African-American Muslims in particular,

began to create a thriving religious community in the West End. It turned the neighborhood into something radically different from the rest of Atlanta, unique even in the country. It was self-led and to a large extent self-policed, but it was not removed from the city in the country's problems. There was tension and there were clashes. Then, on the 9th of March 16th 2000, it all came to a deadly explosive head.

That confrontation is what this story is about. It happened around West Den Park, the namesake park in the neighborhood. Across a small street south of the park, there's a one-story wooden building. It looks like a house, but people in the community have used it as their mosque since the late 70s. I like to use the Arabic word for mosque, masjid. On March 16th 2000, around 8 pm, the Adan, the Muslim call to prayer, was broadcast throughout the West End. Those bungalows and Victorians, African-American Muslims lived in them now. The neighborhood was like a little Muslim village.

And at the call to prayer that night, like always, men wearing thobs and kufis walked from their homes to the masjid. They took off their shoes and got ready for prayer in the front room. Shouldered to shoulder, toe to toe. That time, Muslims pray, or makes a lot, lined up facing the city of Mecca as they recite verses from the Quran. A 17-year-old kid, just a few years younger than me at the time, joined the prayer. And after Salat that night, when most of the men walked home, Abdul-Sahmat Jihad stuck

around for a math lesson. We're going on a fraction and I think also we've dealing with a trigonometry or algebra something like that, and I was having problems real bad. The streets in the neighborhood are small. It's quiet, especially at night. The match was normally a great place for a duosamat to focus on algebra. You didn't hear nobody's saying anything, you didn't hear nobody's speaking anything. It was just completely silence

and then all of a sudden, gun fire. So, not really me, I don't know what's going on. I'm sitting down doing math and they, I just know the teacher jumped on top of me and you know, say, get down because it sounded so close. I've just seen my end of the tutor late still on the floor. All I knew was it was scary you know it was it was scary to hear I didn't know what was going on.

I was just saying oh god I thought somebody honestly when they hired a student I thought somebody was doing the drive on the master trying to shoot up on the master. While I was in I thought thought he'd jump on me. I was just a guy. Don't let me get shot in the head or get shot by a scrape bullet. I thought somebody was doing the drive by. That's why he jumped on top of him. They weren't hit, and it wasn't a drive by.

But with shots still ripping through the air, someone dragged a douce of mat into a closet and told them, no matter what, stay put. And then after that, the gunshots continued and continued and continued and continued. It was like almost like an overkill, like it was a war zone out there. Who would shoot that many?

No one, I mean, no one would do that. When the gunfire finally stopped, a douce-samat crept out of the closet. Through a window, he saw the street was flooded with cops. And then, a few moments later, he heard his father calling for him. They lived right next to the masjid. So he hurried home. So you spent the rest of the night looking out the window, huh? Well, yeah, basically, yeah, you're looking out the window and then my dad put me to sleep. He said, hey, you gotta go to school in the morning.

Yeah, you're looking out the window and then my dad put me to sleep. He said, hey, you gotta go to school in the morning. The responding officers found the aftermath of a shootout. There were dozens of shell casing strewn about and two black men lying on the ground. They were bleeding, one in the street, and another in the grass next to the masjid. The men were uniform deputies from the Fulton County Sheriff's Office, the county that includes most of Atlanta. Someone had shot the cops. The sheriff's deputies were there to arrest a man named

Jamil Abdullah Alamin, on some relatively small charges. He lived right across the street from the masjid. In fact, he was the imam, its leader, and that effect the leader of the whole neighborhood. When investigators arrived at the crime scene, a maimed email, as he was known in the neighborhood, was nowhere to be found. It wasn't a leap for the investigators to suspect he shot the deputies, and that's the story that's still in the public record about what happened that night, March 16th 2000. I was a way at college when it happened. Then I began working as a journalist.

I've been doing that for more than 20 years now. And by some strange twist of fate, this story about a maimed jameel in the shootout, it found me. A maim jameel was convicted of the shooting after a tense, high profile trial. Some of the evidence against him was shaky, and a prosecutor was accused of misconduct. A maim jameel insisted he was innocent, and his family and supporters, they're still making that case. In the last year or so, I've learned that the story in the public record, it's not complete. There's much more to a maimed email, and more to what happened that night.

More than law enforcement has cared to acknowledge, and more than Muslims in Atlanta have cared to acknowledge, and more than Muslims in Atlanta had cared to acknowledge. Somehow, when I started asking questions, the timing was right for a new narrative to emerge. The maimed meal was not an ordinary man, or even an ordinary a maim. He was legendary, the stuff of myth, the kind of person people tell stories about. Some of those stories, people need them to find the courage to face their own lives.

Some of those stories, people fear, fear their danger and their violence. But all of the stories, regardless of their basis in fact, tend to grow. Over the course of his life, a mammoth meal became more and more of a hero, even as he became more and more of a villain. And even the tallest of those tales had a way of becoming real, as people lived with them, acted on them. Sorting through this tangle I've just described, bringing this story to you, it required me to come to grips with how I let stories take shape in my own mind, and just how I'm willing

to pass them on. This one I'm going to tell you, and the way I'm going to tell it, it's one I want to pass on. From Camside Media, TinderfootTV, and I Heart Podcasts, this is Radical. I'm Mocey Secret. Episode 1. Fire. A man, Jamil Elamin, story begins in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he was born into a black family in 1943. He was the third and final child of a man off fighting in the Second World War, and a

woman who worked two jobs, as a teacher at the local orphanage and as a maid. The parents named their youngest, Hubert Gerald Brown. As a kid, he was drawn to the young bloods on the corner, the bad mother-fuckers who made a profession of hanging out all day, playing the dozens. The one who excelled at sports like he did. These were the guys who stood firmest against the establishment, Brown thought, against Jim Crow. They didn't give a shit about white values.

The kid could talk trash with the best of them, and they took the calling him rap, a moniker that stuck as he rose to public life. Most of the folks I spoke with, who knew a man to me before he became Muslim, they called him rap, H. Rap Brown, so that's what I'll do too. Rap bristled at Jim Crow's efforts to control his movements, to limit the idea of what he could be, and he bucked the system in the brashest way possible at every opportunity. In his first book, a memoir called, Die Nigger Die, not my favorite book title, rap wrote that he once went to a Boy Scout circus.

It was segregated, but nobody was going to warn Rat and Brown that he couldn't go see what the white boys were up to. He walked over there and heard a white boy holler out, Nigger, you have been sentenced to death, and the boy started shooting him with a BB gun. The next year, Rapp brought his own BB gun to the circus. Rapp grew up to be a tall man, distinguished by his height, six foot five.

He was thin, lanky, with dangling arms and long fingers. But he moved smoothly through the world, almost gliding as he walked. His own kind of swagger. He was light-skinned, a complexion that black folks used to call red, similar to Malcolm X. He grew a short afro in a mustache, for a lot of denim, sometimes a leather jacket. In the 60s, rap followed his brother to Howard University in DC and got involved in organized activism. He read thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois in France, Phenomen, and Frederick Douglass for the

first time, and eventually became a part of the student nonviolent coordinating committee. That's the SNCC or SNCC. It was the most prominent student group of the movement. While rap was a part of SNCC, he grew close to a fellow fire brand named Willie Ricks or Mucasa Dada as he's known these days. Mucasa, 80 years old now, hasn't lost much of his fire. Rap was always around. And you would have encountered him personally. You met him and hung out with him. I met him hung out with him, smoked a day, we used to smoke a year, and whatever, and

parted and whatever, and we fought together. And Rap was a fighter and a warrior, and he was in many, many battles the Bales in Saturday, Snick. The organization was working in the Black Belt, a mostly rural swath of counties across the South that got its name from the Black fertile soil there, and the Black people who lived on the land since the end of their enslavement. But despite their demographics, these mostly poor,

majority Black counties were still controlled by white people. So Snick sent in organizers. Mucasa was one of them, and so was rap. The first thing organized have to do is find a place to eat, find a place to sleep, and also find local leadership. If not there, you have to create it. Lounds County, Alabama, where both the rap and bukasa worked, was the center of the struggle. Many black folks there lived in wood shacks out on the flat, grassy plains, sometimes near pine and oak forests.

The outnumbered white people, four to one, but few of any of the more than 5,000 eligible black voters in Lowns County were registered to vote. Landowners evicted Black people who tried to register, and nightriders fired shots into the homes of local leaders. While Snick was organizing in Lowns County, a sheriff's deputy killed a volunteer working closely with the organization. In the 1960s, at least 20 civil rights activists were killed.

A conservative estimate that doesn't include the hundreds of people who were injured and threatened. Snick is widely remembered for nonviolence. Of course, it did have the word nonviolent in its name. But as I have learned more about the organization, that's really only part of the story. Mucasa puts it pretty simply. We use nothing violent as a tactic, but Dr. King uses it as a real life and whatever, and we say if we're doing it in front of the other white man, hit us in front of a camera,

but if he hit us in the camera, then we're gonna fuck him up. If they fall us around the corner, we're gonna fuck him up. Mucasa isn't speaking for everyone. Other SNCC organizers may have seen it differently, but Mucasa and Rapp, they were prepared to defend themselves with violence if necessary. And this was in line with many of the locals they were working with.

Black people living in the Black Belt and Lounge County kept shotguns next to their front doors or handguns next to their beds, and some sneak activists carried guns with them. Yeah, we should go out and beg your ass and practice shooting and all that kind of all the time. But did you ever have to fire your weapon in the confrontation? Absolutely. About to ever.

Yeah, we'd rather not have to street and white folk jump behind us and throw our shooting within our dance tour shooting back. Rap had carried a gun for years. Got his first one at 14 after I run in with some White boys. He stole it from a sporting goods store. Rap wrote in his autobiography, give me a gun before you even give me somebody to work with.

A gun won't fail you. People will. Who cost us a bit once, when rap was organizing in Alabama, some of the black folks who would register to vote were kicked off their land. So they set up a tent city, and then white people attacked.

And the white folks come by and turns the shoot in the tents. So rap, you should fire them back up. Some white men got shot over there. Rap they hear, yeah we shot them. Rap gained a reputation within SNCC and across the black belt for fearlessness and for his speeches that encouraged and inspired people to stand up for themselves. A year after SNCC started working in Lowns County and Ernest, the local leaders organized their own political party, the Lowns County Freedom Organization.

They made a black Panther their symbol, inspiring activists in California who would later found the black Panther Party. In 1966, despite intimidation, 1600 people in Lowns County voted for the new party. They wanted to take down the sheriff, given the violence against black people, and elect their own candidate. But no one on the party ticked it one. It was this same year that Snick began peeling away more publicly from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Israeli and cry of freedom now.

Snick's new rally in Cry was Black Power. The next year, in 1967, rap became Snicks Chairman and was named an honorary officer of the Black Panther Party. Now rap wasn't just traveling around the Black Boat, he was chairman traveling around the nation. At speeches and press conferences like this one, he shocked many Americans black and white. Violence is a part of America's culture. It is as American as cherry pie. We will use that violence to read ourselves of oppression if necessary.

In his speeches, Rat Bowley explained the mindset he thought was necessary for real change in the country, where racism was a part of the bedrock. We did not make the laws in this country. We are neither morally nor legally confined to those laws. Those laws that keep them up keep us down. You got to begin to understand that. It was a revolution, and the object was not for black people to simply replace white people at the top of the heap. Rapid as comrades wanted to toss out the systems the country ran on, capitalism and all. They saw a grand conflict between black people and the government controlled by white people,

a government that used police and law enforcement like a domestic military force to maintain control. I'm going to end in the Swahili saying, it's this La Sima to Sinda, Bila Shaka, Bila Shaka, which means we shall conquer without a doubt, Black Power. Woo! Mucosa was rap's right-hand man. I was assigned to travel rap wherever he would go, and then we started traveling, and as we traveled throughout different areas, everywhere we go, the cities would be on fire, or catch you on fire right after we leave. He would go out in the bell fields and go out there with them folks doing five bombs and fighting and burning and whatever and he would

always ready to go do that and whenever he talk he go with him and when the rebellion started to wrap you on the footland. In 1967 there were at least 75 uprisings, or rebellions, and cities across the country. From San Francisco to Cincinnati to New York, black people took to the streets. Even Dr. King and his organization feel repbrown so much that even if he was nowhere around, that was going to be somebody in the crowd that say, Black Power! And Thor Brick, Thor Brick and the police didn't discriminate. They just went in there and saw it being them all.

As part of Cointail Pro, the FBI's program aimed at preventing the rise of a so-called Black Messiah, the Bureau used dirty tricks to disrupt SNCC, and other Black Power groups. Agents began surveilling a rap, and apparently targeted him with trumped up or entirely fabricated criminal charges. The conflict seemed to reach a climax when a car bomb exploded, killing two SNCC activists. They were conflicting theories about what happened,

but it looked like the bomb was meant to assassinate rap. He went into hiding. like the bomb was meant to assassinate rap. He went into hiding. Police departments, the United States government, and their agents, they hated rap riled all the way to Diff. In 1971, after more than a year underground, rap was arrested in New York City. I won't get into the particulars of that arrest now. Just know that he got popped on an armed robbery charge. He and some friends were sticking up

a lounge to help further their activities in the movement, a caper that ended in a shootout with cops. Rap, 28 years old, went to jail, Rikers Island, and eventually landed at Attica Prison. Tough places to say the least. But it's hard to imagine rap living much longer if he hadn't stepped back from the front lines. Death was certainly something he prepared for

and maybe even welcomed. In that autobiography, it was published two years before rap was locked up. He wrote, America, if it takes my death to organize the world, I'm not sure if it's a real world, I'm not sure if it's a real world, In that autobiography, it was published two years before rap was locked up. He wrote, to revolt against you, and to organize your God to revolt against you, and to organize your poor to revolt against you, and to organize your country to revolt against you, and to

organize mankind to rejoice in your destruction and ruin. Then here is my life. But within weeks, maybe months of his arrest, that seemed to change. He converted to Islam, a transformation was underway. Someone even say the creation of a new man. Jamil, beautiful, Abdullah, servant of God, Alamin, the trustworthy. My own conversion to Islam happened in the fifth grade. We'd been Baptist and Pentecostal, and then my father found new faith. And he wanted all of us, my mom and two younger siblings, to follow suit.

My parents put me out of public school and sent me to a Muslim private school. I got so bent out of shape by the change that, during my second week of the new school, I got super sick and had to stay home. When I felt better, my parents finally let me go back to public school and join my old friends. In time, I accepted Islam for a good while anyway. I made my salats and fasted for Ramadan. But I always occupied this weird in-between spot, not fitting in all the way with the Muslim

kids and feeling different from my non-Muslim friends. And inside or outside or in both worlds, and observer. When I went to college, I studied comparative religion, trying on other beliefs. I realized pretty young that what we believe, the way we structure our world and the stories we tell ourselves, all of that can be totally changed with the flip of a switch. Part of why I pursued writing when I graduated college and why I'm so drawn to complex stories like this is because I sense the power stories have over our lives. What are myths but stories we believe in

with cosmic stakes? A man in Jameel's conversion, his flip of that switch, was obviously pivotal in his life. But what kind of man did it make him? Rap, the man who was throwing fire bombs in the streets, who people believed escaped an assassination attempt by the federal government. I could imagine him shooting sheriff's deputies coming into his neighborhood to arrest him. But a maim jameel, all these years later, that was much less clear. Converting to Islam, it was something I shared with a maimjmil, something my family shared

with them, and something that connected us to lots of other African-Americans. We believed anywhere from 20 to 30% of the African slaves were either Muslim or exposed Islam in West Africa. This is a maim pleam in El Amin, maybe the most prominent elder in Atlanta's African-American Muslim community, and a peer of a man, Jamil. A man, Plyman, believes that through our ancestors, black people have a deep and innate connection to Islam, like it's somewhere in our DNA. And when rap became Muslim in jail, he was joining something ever tradition, because the

history of African-American Islam is linked to incarceration. And to the nation of Islam, the black nationalist organization founded in the 1930s. The nation did a lot of ministry in prisons. Its message that the white man was a devil, resonated with black people living under the yoke of oppression. Malcolm extrawned the nation when he was in prison, resonated with black people living under the yoke of oppression. Malcolm extrawned the nation when he was in prison, and after he got out, eventually became its spokesperson. But like many others, he left the organization for Sunni Islam, which is more closely based on the Quran. The vast majority of the world's Muslims are Sunni.

And as new sects of Sunni Islam developed in the United States, they also recruited in prisons. When people in prison they have to have to think, you know, really that's Malcolm, he came to Islam by being in prison and just studying and reading and trying to come with some solutions. So that's been a tradition in our community and where gangs are really dominant in prisons and many folks see the salvation as being a Muslim. And so they get the protection of the brotherhood or even the sisterhood. And it's also a great productive way of spending your time. Organizing your time, organizing your days.

Yeah. Yeah. It was a SUNY movement called Dar Ull Islam that reached rap. Dar Ull was based at a masjid in the beverage stifles in neighborhood of Brooklyn, not far from where I live now, actually. Dar Ull used a sinment to minister to inmates of the notorious Rikers Island Jail,

where rap was being held. And those men met rap at a moment when he was trying to make sense of what was happening in him and around him. Rap said the fact that Malcolm X converted to Islam made him take it more seriously. The men from Darul organized Friday Juma services at Rikers, and rap attended. In 1971, he took the Shahada, the oath to become Muslim. When he got out of prison in 1976 a man of Jameel made the pilgrimage to Mecca and completed the Hodge. He moved to Atlanta and not longer after he arrived he founded the West

and Community Massage. A man Clemen was a leader at another massage at across town. I had the role of keeping a relationship with Imam Jamil. I always found him very, very Islamic, but always very polite and wonderful hospitality and just really very decent person. How much of what he was doing in the West stand did you see as a continuation of who he had been before or was it a departure? Yeah, no, he made a complete change.

She made a complete change, but I see it as the prophet at a high-deaf. My question reminded the man, Stephen of a hadith, a teaching from the prophet Muhammad. Yes, I came up, but a follower asked a prophet a question. We all have genes. The gene that is really the identity that birthed the devil is this fiery nature, the passionate nature that is willing to reject God. And the Prophet said, yes, we all have genes even myself, but I've made my gene a Muslim.

So there's Muhammad the prophet saying that he's made his gene a Muslim. So I see Jameel the same way that he had this fiery nature of H. Raab Brown and he didn't just give it up and let it go, he just made it a Muslim. So he got the advantages of having that passionate firey part, but it was always under control then. And he was, he was made a total conversion. If a mamm-jameel had made a total conversion, if his gen, his devil, his fire was always under control, it was hard to see him shooting two sheriff's deputies. But if he ever let the fire of rap Brown loose, I thought I might find the embers burning

in the West End. The community of Imamjimil founded and led. Rap's vision, that at least, seems to have made its mark on the new Muslim village. So much of what the community aspired to be and often became, a place of their own where black people could govern themselves, where they could thrive and feel safe to So much of what the community aspired to be and often became, a place of their own where black people could govern themselves, where they could thrive and feel safe to raise their children. That echoed the black nationalist ideal.

But that kind of utopia didn't just materialize. There were too many obstacles. It took work, faith, passion. Had a maimed meal ever leaned on his old demons too? I spent some time around the western mashted when I was a kid. Maybe popping in with my father to make prayer a few times. But mostly I would have seen a MGMU let the ee, the Islamic holy days, when Muslims from all over the city would gather to pray.

A MGMU always stood out there, among thousands, because he carried this sword, like a cemetery, and he towered over everyone. He's six foot five. Imagining that as a kid. And I did go to this week-long military-style boot camp wanted a maimed jamele used to organize in the north George Mountains. I must have been 12 or 13 and I could not have been more out of my element. I don't know how to put this politely, but a lot of the other boys were drawn to life in the streets, and that was the last thing I was interested in. Later I would learn that some of them were already in the streets, shooting, robbing. There was something different about the Muslim boys from the West End.

Most often I would see them on sports teams. I've do some ad jihad. The kid who was in the match at the night of the shootout. We were on the track team together. He reminded me about his mother, sister Jamila, who always came to our meets. He told me that she would be a great person to talk with about what it was like living in the West End while a man Jamil was leading the community. Hi, how you doing? Yes, now your face looks familiar.

Wow. Now I remember you. I am, yes. Sister Jameela grew up at Atlanta and went to Clark Atlantic University. It's one of the historically black colleges that border the West End. When she was still in college, Jemilla took the Shahada from my maim Jamil. We went into the masjid and he asked me, you know, what forcing me to become Muslim was a no, you know. So he told me to, you know, to testify that there's no God but a law.

And I became Muslim. I felt free. I felt so happy. And he became more like a uncle, father figure for me, because I was 18. And I was, you know, he had a corner store at that time. So I would go into the store and talk to him. And I felt like, okay, this is my new family, you know. A mammoth meal ran that corner store, Jimi LeMenshan, just across the street from the masjid, and across another street from Weston Park. During the day, a mammoth meal might

play basketball with kids from the neighborhood. Everyone says he could really ball. He talked to people who came into the store, or chill outside, maybe sitting at a picnic table, greeting neighbors as they walk by, offering them counsel. And the maimed meal led the daily prayers in the masjid and delivered sermons during the Friday Juma services. A member of the masjid shared some recordings of his sermons with us.

How do we increase our remembrance of Allah? It is through the establishment of Salat, through the prayer and the maintaining of the prayer, and the punctuality in coming to prayer. The message he was giving to the faithful, attened prayer as much as you can, take care of your families and care for others in the masjid. You have to begin to practice your prayer now in congregation because this is afforded to you. But when the repression comes, it might be a situation where you might, as in many different countries,

you have to move around and move your places of congregational prayer. But right now, you don't have to do that. But that might be the case. A man and a man tried to create something like a village in the West End. The masjid hosted festivals and barbecues. Jamil started a summer camp for elementary school kids and hired teenagers as counselors. It was all centered around the masjid and around the daily prayers, five times each day. Jumila remembers that part of the community most fondly.

It was a beautiful thing to see the brothers go to prayer. You know, by a darn call, you see the brothers walk into the Masjid, brothers come out of the house, you know, it was a beautiful thing. A mammoth meal also assigned a group of men to do arm security patrols of the neighborhood to establish a perimeter to keep out the drug dealing and the prostitution. The 80s and 90s, this was the height of the crack of anemic. In the community, the masjid, they were right in the thick of it, near some of the busiest drug corners on the west side. Addicted people used to roam the streets like zombies if he people told me.

But west in park, a public park remember, became known as holy land. You better not tread on that land if you have no business being there. There were consequences. The rules for members of the community were strict too. The women were long dresses and hijab, men wore thugs and kufis. Women were supposed to get permission from their husband before leaving the house. But for Jamilat at least, that's not how it worked in practice. She was close enough to a maim Jamil to have some sway. The sisters used to come to me and say, go ask him out on Jamil.

Can we do session session? That's all okay. So like I said, that uncle father figure and he was almost often all the time. He said, yes, yes, go ahead. A man Jamil was in control and he could monitor what was happening near the mass grid and his corner store and on the streets and in the houses that surrounded the park. I asked the man claiming about the amount of authority in

Mam Jamil seemed to have over the West End. Mam Jamil took it literally that in that community now, I'm not saying internationally all over the world or whatever, but in his community he was the representative of Prof. Mohammed Pratt, a speech field funding. And so he expected the same kind of respect from his community as they would give to the profit.

And then it became an issue when somebody was ignoring that leadership or going against that leadership. Over time, a maimed jameal gained a reputation in Atlanta for, quote, cleaning up the West End. From the outside at least, it appeared that he had secured his peace without violence. It was family oriented. You know, everyone was close and it was really close. I'm sorry. Oh, yeah. It was family. Everyone loved each other.

Everyone cared. The social hood with very strong. And no matter what happened, we was there for one another. You know, we was there for one another. I'm sorry. Yeah, you're moved. I'm sorry. Yeah.

Yeah. Now, I'm hearing what Sister Jamila is saying about the beauty and peace of the community. And I'm hearing what Sister Jamila is saying about the beauty and peace of the community. And I'm hearing what a man pleading in saying about rap making his fiery nature, his gin, his devil, a Muslim. It seems like somewhere that a man Jamila would have thrown away if he shot those sheriff's deputies, his own little paradise, that he controlled. Why would he do that? It just doesn't make sense.

I must be missing something. Either a maim jameal's transformation from H.R.A.R.P. Brown wasn't as complete as some would have us believe, or the Weston was never really that peaceful. Or something had thrown him off kilter. Or was it just that he wasn't involved in the shooting as he's been saying for decades now? There's gotta be more to it. Maybe I just needed to talk to more people who lived in the West End. So I went to a guy named Balao Suni Ali. He knew both the maim Jamil and H. Rap Brown. In the 60s, Bilal was a member

of the Black Panther Party in New York City. And that's where he first met Rap. He was talking to the talk that I wanted to hear about, you know, us controlling our neighborhood, you know, community, self-determination. I mean, that's what Black Power is. Black people control the economics and the politics of an area where we live.

For Balaul and rap, part of creating that community meant securing it themselves. They trained their comrades on how to handle guns, and they did target practice. It was empowering to grow up as a class where you're persecuted, and now you're taking the power within your hands to defend yourself. So, you know, that this level of persecution is not going to continue. You know, it's not going to be my children are not going

to grow up like this. In the 80s, Balaal moved to the West End and he joined the Masjid. Balaal told me there were at least two things rap didn't like and a maimed jameal didn't like. Drugs and cops. Both came into black communities from the outside and tore them apart. And many of the people who moved into the West End to join the Masjid, from black working class neighborhoods in Detroit, New York, and Philadelphia, they had experienced that. On the 9th of March 16th 2000, Bala was in the neighborhood, at his house. He heard the gunfire near the Masjid, and when he learned two deputies were shot, the way he sees it The blame shouldn't fall in the shooter or anyone in the community. It should fall in the deputies

That's a sign that they was coming in and they was wrong Because most of the time they're coming in they're wrong If they get stopped for doing wrong They deserve what happened to them The idea that a maimed-jamil might shoot at police, it seemed in line with what Belal knew of the man. But in this case, he didn't think that a mamm-jamil was the one who did it, because he said he didn't do it.

I knew that what they were saying, he was capable of, but when I heard him say he didn't do that, I believed he didn't do it. Just like when he said anything else didn't do that, I believed he didn't do it. Just like when he said anything else any other time, I believed he ain't never lied to me. So, the way Balaal saw it, a man with a meal was capable of shooting the deputies, but he didn't do it. What a contradiction. That left me with a lot more questions. But I did realize the two biggest questions I had been thinking about, what actually happened the night of the shootout, and who was the Mammu Jamil really? Those questions were totally entangled.

As for Belou's other contention, that a Mammu Jamil was wrongfully convicted, lots of people believed that. Thousands, tens of thousands maybe. When I was younger, I did a big investigation that helped free an innocent man from prison, and the reporting mostly consisted of listening to the folks who never stopped believing and tracking down their leads. A maimed Jamil's case would be much bigger, with tentacles reaching into shadowy parts of the federal government. You can spend a lifetime tracking down those kinds of leads. But that long after I began working on this project, I read a document that made the reporting seem a little more realistic. It was a letter that I don't think was ever meant to go public.

The letter came to me from my producer, Johnny Kaufman, who first started looking into a maimjamil's case. I'd met Johnny through a friend of a friend, a connection after a random dinner party. He was looking for a reporter and host to work with on a podcast he was imagining. The four-page letter was among the reams of Court documents connected to a MAMGMEO's case. Its author, Andrew Young, civil rights leader and confidant to Martin Luther King Jr. Young was with King when King was assassinated. He would become an ambassador to the United Nations and the mayor of Atlanta.

Young sent his letter to the Fulton County District Attorney in Atlanta, the office that prosecuted a Mammajameel. It stated made 26th, 2020. That's almost two decades after his conviction. On his own letter, Young wrote, quote, I believe the only reason he was convicted was because of the egregious misconduct of both law enforcement and the individual prosecutor who handled Mr. Alamed's trial. Young was asserting without equivocation that handled Mr. Alameen's trial. Young was asserting without equivocation that a man's meal was innocent, that he was wrongfully convicted.

Mr. Alameen, Andrew Young wrote, has, Outstanding Character. You have the power to now write in a historic wrong. This should be done not only for the sake of Mr. Alameen, but indeed for the sake of our entire nation, an all-man kind who yearn for justice. Strong words, right? I felt wary when I first started working on this project. The community of African-American Muslims in Atlanta is small. Some folks from the West end their family friends.

Why should they go poking around old pains if the man is already locked up? Retouritis true crime stories are not really my thing, but youngs let her give me a reason to keep digging. There were plenty more people to talk to, and I was ready to start investigating the details of the shootout to determine if a maimed gemel was responsible for what happened that night. Radical is a production of Camside Media, Tinderfoot TV, and I Heart Podcasts. Radical was reported and written by Johnny Kaufman and me, Mostly Secret.

Johnny Kaufman is our senior producer, Shiba Joseph is our associate producer. Editing by Eric Benson, Johnny Kaufman, Emily Martinez, and Matt Scher. Fact checking by Sophie Hurwitz, Kaylin Lynch, and Layla Dose. Original music by Kyle Murdock, and by Ray Murray of Organized Noise. Sound designing mixing by Kevin Seaman. Recording by Ewan Lyre Trimuwen and Shiba Joseph. Campside Media's operations team is Doug Slaywan, Ashley Warren, Alia Papers, Destiny Dingo, and Sabina Mera. The executive producers at Campside Media are Josh Dean, Vanessa Aguigoriatus, Adam Hough, and Matt Shere.

For Tinder Foot TV, executive producers are Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay. The executive producers at I Heart Podcasts are Matt, Frederick, and Alex Williams, with additional support from Trevor Young. Hi, I'm Daniel Tosh, host of a new podcast called Tosh Show. I'll be interviewing people that I find interesting, so not celebrities. And certainly not comedians. We'll be covering topics like religion, travel, sports, gambling, but mostly it will be about being a working mother.

If you're looking for a podcast that will educate and inspire, or one that will really make you think, this isn't the one for you. Mr. Tosh Show in the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the greatest murder mystery in American history. That's Rob Breiner. Rob called me, so would Edo Brein,

and asked me what I knew about this crime. Well, ask who had the motive to assassinate a sitting president. Then we'll pull the curtain back on the cover-up. The American people need to know the truth. Listen to Who Killed JFK on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. On March 16, 2000, two sheriff's deputies were shot in Atlanta. A Muslim leader and former Black Power activist was convicted.

But the evidence was shaky and the whole truth didn't come out during the trial. My name is Mosey Secret and when I started investigating this case in my hometown, I uncovered a dark truth about America. From Tinder for TV, Camside Media, and I Heart Podcasts, Radical is available now. Listen to the new podcast Radical, for free on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.