From the South and beyond, we mourn the passing of Black Revolutionary and Islamic faith leader, Imam Jamil Abdullah al-Amin, who transitioned in federal prison custody on November 23, 2025 at the age of 82.
Al-Amin's political journey began at age 15, when he organized a student walkout at Southern High School in Baton Rouge in solidarity with Civil Rights organizing efforts at Southern University. In the summers of 1962 and 1963, he began organizing with the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), an affiliate of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); the following summer, he volunteered during the Mississippi Freedom Summer. He continued to organize with SNCC in the South, becoming a key organizer in the 1966 Greene County Alabama Freedom Vote campaign.
Al-Amin succeeded Kwame Ture (fmr. Stokely Carmichael)—a close friend and Pan-African revolutionary—as SNCC Chairman, serving from May 1967 to June 1968. Their successive tenures as chairmen radicalized SNCC, previously a nonviolent organization under Chairman John Lewis, prompting its renaming as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and pushing both SNCC and the larger Black Liberation movement to endorse militant Black Power politics that favored self-defense as an essential means towards gaining political power. In the afterlife of the Civil Rights Movement's crescendo—specifically the 1964 Freedom Summer Campaign marked by Fannie Lou Hamer's DNC speech, the shortcomings of the larger Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party campaign and legal rights-oriented organizing strategy, and the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner—the movement entered a period of political crisis in which the prior nonviolent tactics fell short in terms of intervening the scale of mob terror and state violence still wielded against Black communities and their allies. It was in this climate that Brown and Carmichael met the insurgency of the late sixties and its urban riots with a more "by any and all means necessary" approach to Black political struggle.
In alignment with the Black Power turn, SNCC formed a short-lived strategic alliance and attempted merger with the Black Panther Party. Al-Amin later served as the Black Panther Party's Minister of Justice, raising his national profile as a Black Power movement leader.
In 1969, he published his seminal text, the political memoir Die N*gger Die! His militant oration and endorsement of organizing strategies sought to merge the southern Black freedom struggle with the anti-poverty and racism movements coalescing in northern urban centers. Al-Amin's politic affirmed the 1960s urban race rebellions as legitimate tactics for freedom struggle, which made him a police target subject to surveillance by the FBI's COINTELPRO program.
After taking his shahada in the Rikers Island jail, and serving a five year sentence in Attica prison from 1971-76, al-Amin relocated to Atlanta, becoming a respected Imam and community leader in the West End. On March 14, 2002, he was wrongfully convicted of shooting two sheriffs, killing one and injuring another. Despite evidence that the charges were bogus—including an admission of guilt from Otis Jackson—and the Imam was indeed innocent, he served a life sentence for the March 2000 incident, positioning him among the longest held political prisoners in the U.S.
Imam Jamil al-Amin died due to the medical neglect characteristic of the violence of the American carceral system. Despite the Free Jamil al-Amin campaign's efforts to mobilize the masses against his continued imprisonment on false charges, and to boost demands that the incarcerated elder have access to the care required, the continued captivity and negligence resulted in his death.
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Remembering Imam Jamil al-Amin
https://scalawagmagazine.org/2025/12/remembering-imam-jamil-al-amin/cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/13717
Al-Amin's political journey began at age 15, when he organized a student walkout at Southern High School in Baton Rouge in solidarity with Civil Rights organizing efforts at Southern University. In the summers of 1962 and 1963, he began organizing with the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), an affiliate of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); the following summer, he volunteered during the Mississippi Freedom Summer. He continued to organize with SNCC in the South, becoming a key organizer in the 1966 Greene County Alabama Freedom Vote campaign.