FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS AND P.O.W.S:
A Personal Account By Dr. Muhammad Ahmad
The FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (known as COINTELPRO) against Black Nationalist “hate” groups in the late 1960s, of which I was a target, was one of the most recent manifestations of the U.S. government’s counterinsurgency plans, which have existed since the end of the Civil War. All groups have been targeted at one time or another, particularly black “radical” organizations.
The government targeted Callie House from the 1890s until 1913, incarcerating her and harassing other leaders of the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association, an organization that provided direct aid to ex-slaves and lobbied Congress for bounties and pensions for them.
This same government infiltrated and subverted the efforts of the African Blood Brotherhood, which had engaged in armed struggle against the racists in the Tulsa, Oklahoma massacre, and against white racist mobs during the Red Summer of 1919.
This same government spied on the members of the NAACP and at the same time pitted them against Marcus Garvey, who they incarcerated and exiled and, in addition, subverted his organization, the UNIA.
This same government then framed, incarcerated and killed Noble Drew Ali in order to subvert the Moorish Science Temple.
This same government targeted the Socialist Workers’ Party, the American Communist Party and incarcerated Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam.
This same government targeted Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois and tens of thousands of others in the McCarthy era.
In the early 1960s, this government targeted Robert F. Williams of the NAACP and murdered Malcolm X. By the end of the decade it murdered Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and over 30 members of the Black Panther Party and subverted the SCLC.
In the 1970s this government incarcerated Angela Davis, Jamil Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown) and the Republic of New Africa (RNA eleven). It subverted the RNA and framed Mumia Abu Jamal. It murdered George Jackson, Field Marshall of the Black Panther Party, as well as over 40 brothers at Attica. We must not forget that this government murdered men, women and children of the MOVE organization right here in Philadelphia.
This same government entrapped SNCC workers, here in Philadelphia, a year before it targeted me for entrapment with the Queens, NY case, for the alleged assassination plot of Negro leaders Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young. This case was designed to smash the East Coast section of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) in New York and Philadelphia.
In addition to myself, two other members of RAM’s national central committee were entrapped. One brother still doesn’t want to be identified. The other brother was Glanton Dowdell from Detroit, who was framed for trying to counterfeit a million dollars. He died in exile in Sweden. At least 30 members of RAM and the Black Guard were incarcerated here in Philadelphia in 1967. Some say that we were in a war of organizational self-defense against Rizzo. The members that did make bail were immediately re-incarcerated to keep them off the streets.
In the summer of 1967 an ordinance was issued saying that three or more black men seen talking on a street corner constituted a riot and they could be arrested under “preventive detention.” In my case, I was arrested, re-arrested and rearrested, then extradited to New York where I served nine months, after doing a month at Holmesburg penitentiary here. Ten charges were filed against me in Philadelphia, and another ten charges in New York. The FBI went to bail bondsmen and persuaded them not to issue me bail; they said that the bail would be forfeited as soon as I got out, because they would immediately re-arrest me. I was in a legal trap.
After Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, the government began proceedings to free us, first H. Rap Brown, and then myself. Members of RAM, as well as the Black Guard told me that the FBI had approached them while I was in prison. They told them that I was being freed to entrap most of the leadership of RAM and others. They were told to stay away from me. Our organization was infiltrated and subverted from both the inside and out.
During the ten months that I was incarcerated, my family was torn apart on all sides. My aunt, Ms. Jean Miller, a firm supporter of mine who owned a beauty shop, died of smoke inhalation from a fire in her house. My first cousin, Ms. Jenny Peale, also a firm supported of our liberation efforts, passed away. My uncles who were closest to me had to go into hiding and had to move several times and it would be years before I would see them again. My wife was tired of our house constantly being raided. It was raided even while I was in prison, so my personal relationship was in jeopardy when I got out.
I am the only son of an only son. My father, Max Stanford, Sr. did everything he could to get me out of legal entrapment, to no avail. From offers to sell out for a million dollars, to the Mafia offering me a franchise to sell drugs in African American communities on the entire East Coast (they approached me in Kew Gardens jail in Queens, NY) from internal shootouts in the Black Guards over money, to our apartment being raided again, I decided to go underground, where I remained for four years.
When I was underground, my father, who was trying to raise money for me to get to Africa, took ill and was murdered in the hospital. He talked to my grandfather before he died and told him what happened. I was captured in September 1972 in San Diego, California at the Congress of African People’s (CAP) national conference. Under the order of a negro FBI agent I was jumped by four prison guards and beaten unconscious by as many as ten prison guards. After a month’s incarceration, and after being held incommunicado for a week, I was released pending extradition to New York.
I went to San Francisco and, with the help of Dr. Nathan Hare and Robert Chrisman of The Black Scholar Magazine, built the Muhammad Ahmad Defense Committee (MADC). After my extradition hearing in San Diego I was re-incarcerated and held in the Nazi-controlled San Diego City Jail for a month, then sent to New York, where I was locked down for another six months.
After defeating the City of Philadelphia legally (all charges were dropped), I was able to negotiate a settlement in New York, which took about a year. My charges in New York were consolidated into bail jumping which I pleaded guilty to, and received three years’ probation. Here’s how we were able to do it.
During the four years that I was underground, brothers and sisters brought me books, documents, etc. to analyze. One was a 1969 U.S. government document on various groups. It contained charts and pictures along with excerpts from organizational documents and leaflets. As I studied it, I realized that J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI had targeted me during a closed session of Congress in 1966, before I had a single case pending against me. This was a violation of my civil rights, Section 1983 of the 1964 Civil Rights Law. It states that if there is a suspected conspiracy by government officials to violate a citizen’s civil rights, that citizen has a right to take those government officials to court and to cross examine them.
I kept this document with me as I traveled around, and in 1973 I gave it to William Kunstler, Esq. who was part of my constitutional legal team. Kunstler called me to his office and said that I had them dead to right; they had violated my constitutional rights. At the same time, he added, it was their system and their law, and they weren’t going to let me win because my case would be another Miranda case. He said it would set a precedence for all political prisoners to be released and told me that they would give me an offer that I couldn’t refuse and suggested that I take it. My suit against the government officials was dismissed.
In the interim, a white prison worker, Marian Rapoport sacrificed both her job and safety by befriending me while I was at Riker’s Island. She defied an illegal order from her supervisor, to stay away from me, and soon became a liaison with the MADC. She assisted communication with my supporters on the outside so that prison authorities could not keep me in the traditional mode of isolation that is reserved for all political prisoners. Although her activities on my behalf were always legal, including bringing in material on my case for inmates to read, Marian was deemed a security risk and barred from her job at Riker’s for two months. The day she was allowed back to work, she was jumped and beaten, a warning clearly carried out by the prison authorities. Marian wrote an account of the incident and, through the encouragement of the MADC, it was published in Worker’s World.
Both situations, the clause in the 1964 Civil Rights Law which would have let me sue the government for the deprivation of my civil rights, as well as the case of a human service worker beaten for identifying with the legal rights of a political prisoner—were threatening to the U.S. government and therefore to my advantage. The end result was that my charges were reduced to a Class D felony for bail jumping, and I received three years’ probation.
I decided to go back to school at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. By that time my personal life was a wreck. A low-intensity campaign by the Feds and the Zionists has been waged against me ever since, which has kept my family divided and confused.
There are political prisoners both inside and outside of the wall. As far as this racist, capitalist system is concerned, once a political prisoner, always a political prisoner. Inside, everything is done to break the will of resistance. All political prisoners behind the walls need to be supported. Our brothers and sisters are being tortured. They are purposely denied adequate medical care and are often given life-threatening diseases while inside. On the outside, all efforts are made to re-entrap them, and if this is not possible, they are kept in a state of poverty to make it difficult, near impossible, for them to organize again. All political prisoners’ families are harassed in one way or another.
The effect of this is that many of our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren grow up with little knowledge of what we have done, or the sacrifices we made in order to help liberate our people. Often they don’t identify with our efforts and there becomes a social and generational divide. Because we couldn’t provide economically for our children and loved ones, they don’t want anything to do with continuing the struggle. This social and political divide of politically conscious families is a contradiction that must be resolved and can only be overcome by those of us who are still struggling to mobilize around the issues that people are most concerned with and build institutions that will re-educate our families and our communities. We must build a united front for total liberation, from cradle to grave, from generation to generation, until we win!
As Salaam Alaikum
Muhammad Ahmad
5/27/06
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