REST IN POWER - IMAM JAMIL ABDULLAH AL-AMIN

Revolutionary Black Power advocate Imam Jamil Abdullah al Amin, who served as the Minister of Justice for the Black Panther Party, passed away on 23rd November 2025 after spending 23 years in a US jail.

Born on 4th October 1943, he first rose to prominence on the front lines of the civil rights struggle as a leader within the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. SNCC began as a non-violent civil rights organisation. Still, by the mid-1960s, it became one of the driving forces of the Black Power movement, and Al Amin played a central role in that political shift.

Known for his fearless oratory and uncompromising advocacy for Black liberation, Imam Jamil Abdullah al-Amin quickly became a target of the state. From the 1960s onwards, he was relentlessly monitored and harassed by COINTELPRO and the FBI, agencies with a long and bloody history of infiltrating organisations, sabotaging liberation movements and neutralising young Black activists who demanded political power, economic justice and community self-defence.

In 2000, he was arrested for the shooting of two Fulton County deputies, Ricky Kinchen and Aldranon English, outside his Atlanta grocery store. He was convicted in 2002, even though Otis Jackson, a federal inmate and Atlanta fugitive, repeatedly confessed under oath to committing the crime.

While incarcerated, Imam Jamil Abdullah al-Amin was denied adequate medical care and moved from facility to facility, leaving him far removed from family, with restricted access to his legal team, severe medical neglect that left him blind, and multiple violations of his constitutional rights during both his trial and imprisonment, according to the US Council of Muslim Organisations.

In this video, he reflects on one of the Black Power movement's failures of the 1960s. He argued that the movement too often tried to emulate the tactics and behaviours of its oppressors, rather than charting a new path rooted in revolutionary theory, discipline and a deep love for the people. For him, true revolution was always about offering the masses a fundamentally different and liberatory way forward.