August 19, 1995|By Carl Schoettler | Carl Schoettler,Sun Staff Writer
Atlanta -- The 51-year-old Muslim leader who used to be known as H. Rap Brown drives toward the basket against this weedy kid, dribbles behind his back and through his legs and scores with a little jumper that leaves the faithful laughing.
"Look at the imam making all them 1960s moves," a guy on the sidelines yells. "Somebody call 911."
Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin looks long, lean and loose in this half-court pickup game against neighborhood guys a third of his age. But beneath his Islamic skullcap his hair is gray and cropped.
He had a black, bushy "Afro" when he was making his moves in the '60s as Rap Brown, a fiery champion of Black Power who was indicted in Maryland for inciting a 1967 riot that left Cambridge in flames.
Almost three decades later, he's the revered imam, a spiritual leader of the second largest community of traditional Muslims in the United States. He's a valued leader in his West End neighborhood. And he's charged with shooting a young man in this park where he's playing basketball -- a young man who now claims the police pressured him into identifying the imam as his assailant.
With its echoes of the '60s, the controversy has thrust the name H. Rap Brown back into the spotlight, back into the public consciousness.
Since his arrest, Imam Jamil has been vigorously denying any connection with the shooting of 22-year-old William Miles, who was hit in the right leg with a bullet as he was walking through West End Park about midnight July 26.
The imam's been on talk radio, on television and at rallies, giving interviews at his tiny grocery store at the edge of West End Park. He remains the shrewd, powerful and convincing speaker Cambridge remembers from the Sixties, the man who earned an entry in Bartlett's familiar quotations with his catchphrase "Violence is as American as cherry pie."
The imam is convinced that his reputation from that time dogs him now. And that, says Jamil Al-Amin, explains why he was arrested near his home Aug. 7 by a squad of officers that included Atlanta policemen and agents of the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
"My feeling concerning myself," he says "is that the federal government has never been comfortable with the fact that I just did five years [in prison] and, after coming out, I really never did apologize."
The Atlanta police insist Imam Jamil was not targeted, and they stand by his arrest. Officers would "never pressure anyone to make any statement that is not true," a police spokesman says.
An FBI spokesman says its agents were along for Imam Jamil's arrest only because the local policeman assigned to the case is a member of the bureau's Joint Counterterrorism Task Force. The task force's primary mission here is to make sure Atlanta, the site of the 1996 Summer Olympic Games, does not become a target for terrorists.
Imam Jamil was charged with aggravated assault in the shooting of Mr. Miles and two weapons charges. The arresting officers say he had a .45 semi-automatic pistol when they stopped his car in front of his home.
But the case against him is unraveling.
Earlier this week Mr. Miles told the Atlanta Constitution he was urged to identify the imam by an Atlanta police officer. And yesterday Mr. Miles appeared before 200 worshipers at Imam Jamil's Community Mosque, according to Kenneth Rasheed, a Muslim lawyer-educator.
He took a declaration of faith as a Muslim and said again he could not identify Jamil Al-Amin as the person who shot him.
Imam Jamil believes he has been under surveillance virtually since he settled in Atlanta some 20 years ago.
"They've made [Islamic] fundamentalism synonymous with terrorism," he says. "The same thing they did with 'black.' They made it synonymous with militancy and radicalism in the '60s. The message is the same."
As H. Rap Brown he was famous as a scornful, angry advocate of direct action. He served five years in New York prisons before and after being convicted of the stickup of a craps game at a Harlem bar. In the ferocious shootout that ensued, Brown and a policeman were shot.
In his 1993 book "Revolution by the Book," the imam, who seems to have a certain talent for self-justification, says the bar was "targeted for its exploitation of the community."
He came to Atlanta soon after his parole in 1976. Felony charges of riot and arson filed after the Cambridge fires were reduced to misdemeanors, and he never served any time in Maryland.
"Cambridge?" he says. "I wasn't in Cambridge long enough to have feelings about Cambridge as a place.
"It was [in] another place I spoke. I spoke at many different places. But I think a kind of racism that was exemplified in Cambridge was typical of America -- a violent kind of, a venomous kind of, racism.
"It's still American," he says. "For African-Americans, America hasn't meant anything positive. What can you say? Good old slavery. Good old segregation. Good old Jim Crow."
He snorts a sardonic laugh.
"I went there. I spoke there. I got shot. I left," he says.
