58 Time November 8/November 15, 2021
in 1968. Olympians Tommie Smith and
John Carlos, the runners who famously
raised Black Power fists at the 1968 medal
ceremony, studied his words.
“Back in the ’60s, and football play-
ers in particular, if they weren’t getting
what they wanted with management, they
would come to him,” Karima says. “He
would go and just stand there, and they
would end up getting what they wanted.”
By the mid-’90s, Al-Amin’s status as
an international leader had only grown.
But that revolutionary tag, while inspir-
ing to some, was a threat to many, es-
pecially those who never let him out of
their sights, even after decades out of the
spotlight.
From 1992 to 1997, the FBI closely
surveilled Al-Amin, generating 44,000
documents.
“He’s a Muslim. He’s a former mili-
tant. He doesn’t fit in with the good Ne-
groes that are trying to work within the
system,” says former Black Panther chair-
woman Elaine Brown, who is writing a
book on Al-Amin.
“H. Rap Brown is a damn pariah.”
On Aug. 7, 1995, Al-Amin was arrested
in Atlanta. Through a joint mission of the
FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Fire-
arms and Explosives, and local police, he
was charged with felony aggravated as-
sault for shooting a man outside his gro-
cery store. The victim initially labeled
Al-Amin as the shooter. Weeks later, he
reversed his claim, claiming that the po-
lice and federal agents had pressured him
to say it was Al-Amin, even though he told
them, “I said I didn’t see who did it.” The
charges were dropped.
On May 31, 1999, Al-Amin was pulled
over in a north Atlanta suburb, on the
grounds of driving a car the police claimed
was stolen. He said he’d bought it earlier
in the month. Eventually, he and his car
were searched, and the officer found
a badge. When questioned if he was a
police officer, Al-Amin said he was, in the
same city where the car was registered:
White Hall, Ala.
On March 16, 2000, sheriff ’s deputies
Aldranon English and Ricky Kinchen
arrived at Al-Amin’s grocery store. They
were there to serve a warrant regarding
his failure to appear in court for the 1999
charges of impersonating an officer,
receiving stolen property and having no
proof of insurance. When the officers
got out of the car, a man appeared next
to a black Mercedes, and gunfire was
exchanged. Both English and Kinchen
were hit multiple times, with English
surviving and Kinchen dying the next day.
In the days that followed, English
said that the assailant was shot, which a
trail of blood at the scene seemed to con-
firm. He also said, after seeing a photo
lineup of suspects, that the man was
Al-Amin.
A hunt for Al-Amin began. He was an
FBI most- wanted fugitive, again. Four
days later, he was captured in White
Hall. In the town’s woods, the police
retrieved a rifle that was a part of the
shoot-out with deputies English and
Kinchen, as well as a bullet-hole-filled
black Mercedes.
When Al-Amin was apprehended, the
police saw that he had not been shot. And
when they tested the trail of blood out-
side the grocery store in the West End,
it wasn’t either of the deputies’. And it
wasn’t Al-Amin’s.
Covering the case in the Atlanta-based
publication Creative Loafing in 2002,
Mara Shalhoup wrote, “English swore
that his assailant had gray eyes; Al-Amin’s
are clearly brown” and “the guns that
were found near Al-Amin when he was
captured in Alabama—guns later linked
to the shooting—did not bear Al-Amin’s
fingerprints.”
“He’s this rare case where there’s such
compelling evidence against him,” says
Shalhoup, now an editor at ProPublica,
citing English’s statement that Al-Amin
was the assailant. “And such compelling
evidence to suggest he didn’t do it.”
Jury selection for the trial of Al-Amin
was scheduled for Sept. 12, 2001. Pushed
back four months by the 9/11 attacks,
the trial—of a visible face of Islam, lo-
cally, nationally and internationally—
began on Jan. 7, 2002. After a trial that
concluded in two months, on March 9,
the majority- Black jury came back with
a guilty verdict, on 13 counts, including
felony murder and possession of a firearm
by a convicted felon. His sentence was life
without parole. His first stop was the state
prison in Reidsville, Ga.
When Al-Amin arrived, Muslim in-
mates, both in his prison and through-
out the state, wanted him to lead them,
to be their imam. But he experiencedfrequent stints in solitary confinement,
and in 2007 he was transferred to the
super max facility in Colorado, where he
spent the next seven years, followed by a
stint in a North Carolina prison medical
facility and his current location, a federal
prison in Arizona.
Throughout his incarceration, there
have been appeals, protests, petitions,
calls for retrial and a videotaped con-
fession by a man currently in a Florida
prison. In 2020 the U.S. Supreme Court
declined to take his case. During his trial,
he was under a gag order, and since he’s
been incarcerated, he has been extremely
limited in his ability to speak to the pub-
lic. His 2014 diagnosis with myeloma
aided in his transfer out of the supermax,
but since then the illnesses have only got-
ten worse. He spent two years without his
sight, needing inmates to read his med-
ical bottles, simply because the prisons
wouldn’t schedule him to have cataract
surgery. On Aug. 18, 2021—three daysHistory