54 Time November 8/November 15, 2021
expecting a response. But there I was,
in the summer of 2019, reading his
reply, sent from the U.S. Penitentiary in
Tucson, Ariz.
Peace be unto those who do Good,
Rembert. May The Creator Reward you for
your kind thoughts and words. Though this
part of our journey is defined by danger,
and the goal seems distant, no roads are
without endings...
Hope this is a happy day, with sunshine,
some quiet, and the feeling that you are
being thought of and wished happiness ...
because you are...
I am enclosing a piece from my book
I’m working on, called Holy-Cost ... give
it a critical reading, and let me know what
you think...
At this point in the letter, his note took
a more personal turn.
You still playing ball?
He signed the letter “Coach.” It
was the only thing I knew him by, as a
9-year-old, in 1996, staring up at his sin-
ewy 6 ft. 5 in. frame. The location was
Adams Park, in a gym on the southwest
side of Atlanta. Leaving my first prac-
tice with my new team, I sat in the car
and listened as my mother explained
that Coach Al-Amin was a trailblazer
of a Black man. I took that to heart and
could tell she was serious by the tone of
her voice, but my primary focus was (al-
ways) the two-part question of “Where
are we eating?” and “Do they have ba-
nana pudding?” Also, meeting an impor-
tant Black elder was part of growing up
in Black Atlanta—the trailblazers were
everywhere.
But there was something different
about Coach. For starters, this was an era
that seemed to measure the quality of a
male coach by how much he yelled; the
more, the better. Even at a young age, I’d
been bossed around by my fair share of
dads. But Coach Al-Amin existed as this
giant of a man, clothed in his traditional
Muslim threads, rarely speaking outside
of his inside voice. He never screamed
while we played, only talking to us like
little adults.
As can sometimes happen with some-
one you know intensely for a period in
childhood, I eventually forgot about
Coach. Life went on, and sports, once my
singular priority, became a hobby after I
started college.
A few years into the workforce and it’s
2012, the last year I really used Facebook.
A thing was happening on the platform,
where people would adopt long, multi-
word, scriptio continua middle-name
aliases. That’s when I first noticed Kairi
“Freemyfather” Al-Amin on my feed,
my former coach’s son. I was instantly
reminded of a man from my past.
I was in high school when Jamil
Al-Amin went to prison. Across town, so
was Kairi. We were rival point guards.
After seeing Kairi post about his
father, I looked up which facility he
was in and learned the answer was ADX
Florence in Colorado, also known as a
“supermax.” And while I couldn’t fully
remember the specifics of the crime or the
trial, I knew this to be the 23-hours-of-
solitary-confinement-a-day home for the
Unabomber, the Oklahoma City bomber
and a handful of al-Qaeda operatives.
I dove into the story of my coach’s life,
quickly reminded of what I did know and
floored by what I didn’t.
My mother didn’t raise me to simply
know Black history—I was groomed tostudy it, revere it and envision a world
in which I was part of a lineage. So why
was I told so little about Jamil Al-Amin, a
man crucial to understanding Black liber-
ation? And why, when I brought him up to
others, was I often met with blank stares?
Over the years, this is a man they
called Jamil Al-Amin, Imam and Rap.
A man who has a federal anti -riot act
named after him. A man who had a ver-
bal confrontation with President Lyndon
Baines Johnson in the White House. That
line from the Sugarhill Gang’s 1979 clas-
sic “Rapper’s Delight,” “I’m hemp, the
demp, the women’s pimp/ Women fight
for my delight”? It’s pulled from his
autobiography.
In his story, there’s a crescendo to
this question of guilt or innocence.
Did he or didn’t he? But after a full exam-
ination of his life, a more pressing ques-
tion emerges: What did Jamil Al-Amin do
to piss America off so much?Jamil abdullah al-amin was born
Hubert Gerold Brown in Baton Rouge,
La., in 1943. He was the youngest of three,
raised by Eddie, a laborer, and Thelma,
a maid and teacher. Brown looked up to
his brother Ed, two years his senior, who
was the first in the family to venture into
activism.
“I knew who I wanted to identify
with,” he wrote, about early affiliations
that would inform his politics, in his 1969
autobiography, Die Nigger Die! “It was the
bloods in my neighborhood, the guys who
hung out down on the corner. The Black
community, in other words.”
A significant portion of his memoir
is dedicated to outlining the nuanced
differences between whom he saw as
“Black” vs. “Negro.” Publishing the
book at age 25 under the name H. Rap
Brown, he spoke of himself as a Black
man who could not be controlled by
white or Black people. He was a young
man who needed things to make sense,
or he would not abide. And he saw Black
people who seemed to work on behalf
of white supremacy as more of a threat
to progress than white people were. “At
some point or another, the Black childHistory
It seemed like a fool’serrand to sendJamil Al-Amin a letter,