Cover Story: As American as cherry pie

Al-Amin’s journey from militant activist to West End imam traces the country’s struggles over racism, anger, violence and civil rights

The dogs picked up the trail and started running. They were looking for him, had already caught his scent. Through the swamp and thicket the bloodhound and the three beagles pressed their noses to the ground and ran. They were getting closer.

He was running, and he was as used to it as the dogs. The chase, for all of them, was instinct. He’d often been hunted — since 1966, at least. And the dogs, or whoever was following him, always sensed how to track down the hunted.

Many of his pursuers over the years — the FBI and a president included — could boast of having caught him. But none could claim to have stopped him for good. Not after the riot in Cambridge, Md., when the elementary school burned down and the authorities pinned the riot on him. Not after the federal firearms charge in Louisiana, when they said he broke a law that he said he didn’t know existed. Not after the shootout in a New York bar, in which he claims the government exaggerated his involvement. And not now, after a cop lay dead in Atlanta and he, the suspect, was laying low in White Hall, Ala. Or trying to.

He was running just south of the railroad tracks, along Big Swamp Creek toward the Baptist church. He had just crossed the paved road, which runs between a dusty general store and a two-room brick building marked “City Hall.” That’s pretty much the bulk of White Hall. It’s so sparse there’s scarcely a phrase to describe it. Flat. Partly wooded. Boxed in by a swamp, a weed-torn graveyard, a mammoth dam and state Highway 80.

He’s running through it, and it wasn’t so different than it was when he first laid eyes on it 34 years earlier.

He was running then, too.

Like most of Alabama in the 1960s, White Hall was ripe for progress. The bus boycott turned Montgomery upside down. The Freedom March spun Selma 180 degrees. And student activists flooded into the small towns in between, urging rural blacks to exercise a right they had long been denied: to vote.

Among the influx was 23-year-old Hubert Gerold Brown. Brown, the son of an oil company worker and an orphanage teacher, started college in 1960 at Southern University, in his native Baton Rouge, La. But he tired of comparing Southern to its all-white and better-kept neighbor, Louisiana State University. “I could see that big fine school with modern buildings and it was for whites,” Brown would write in his 1969 autobiography. “Then there was Southern University, which was about to fall in and that was for the niggers. ... [T]he message that the white man was trying to get across was obvious. Nigger, you ain’t shit. Die Nigger Die!”

Not the most subtle wordsmith. But Brown’s radicalism would help rather than hinder his goals. At least for a while.

It was a radicalism hardly fanatical when you consider where he grew up and when. “We’re fighting for our survival and for this we are called criminals, outlaws and murderers,” he wrote in a letter to fellow civil rights activists after he was jailed for inciting the Cambridge riot. “Who are the real criminals? Who stole us from Africa? Who has been stealing our labor for the past 400 years to build this country?”

Since he was a teenager, friends had called him “Rap” for his ability to express his views, rooted in intellect and exuding street appeal. But he didn’t find much of an audience at Southern, where he thought his fellow students were too complacent.

His talents were welcome elsewhere.

He moved to Washington, D.C., where his older brother Ed was attending Howard University. He found himself so much in the element he sought that he was speechless. “We were working with the people, organizing, going to meetings,” he writes of his first years in D.C. “I was still just listening. ... I hadn’t been accustomed to talking out in public.” That would change. Not only were students willing to speak out against the injustices against blacks; they were willing to act. He was ready to join them.

In 1966, H. Rap Brown enlisted with the Movement. He joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”). Unlike the average student-run organization, especially one with so stolid a title, SNCC brought about real change.

SNCC grew out of the nonviolent wing of the Movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. Originally, they were a conciliatory bunch. Among the early leaders were Julian Bond, who went on to become chairman of the NAACP, and John Lewis, who now represents Atlanta in Congress. Lewis suffered beatings and risked his life protesting racism and segregation. But neither he nor Bond argued that brute force was an option.

Why do some people faced with violent opposition respond with violence while others respond with pacifistic resolve? Why do some people hold onto their anger while others move past it?

Brown and eventual SNCC Chairman Stokely Carmichael spoke loudly and carried big guns.

In 1966, Carmichael sent new SNCC member Brown to Alabama. The assignment: to assist in registering black voters. Brown struck some of the Alabamans as a man of few words. “He didn’t talk much,” recalls Gwen Patton, who met Brown when she was a 20-year-old English student at the Tuskegee Institute near Montgomery. “He only talked when spoken to. He could wax eloquent if called upon, but most of the time he was a listener.”

But beneath Brown’s placid surface bubbled an inferno. The man of few words was taking notes on how to stage a revolution. It would require, contrary to SNCC’s non-violent status, bloodshed. And Brown, despite his cool compassion, was ready to fight. When called upon, he knew how to talk the talk that could rally a crowd. But he was more than a town crier. He would talk, and then he would act. His rhetoric and tactics were diverging from SNCC’s founding theories.

“Nonviolence might have been tactically correct at one time in order to get some sympathy for the Movement, but for me as an individual, it just never worked,” Brown writes in the autobiography, Die Nigger Die! “And I didn’t try to convince myself that it would work.”

It would be unjust to judge Brown solely on writings he published at age 26. But similarities between Die Nigger Die! and his 1993 collection of sermons Revolution by the Book, written after a conversion to Islam and 20 years of living in near obscurity, show a resolve that has never wavered. Call him H. Rap Brown, militant civil rights leader. Call him Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, reformed radical who found a new name and a new religion. Just don’t think for a second that his mission, either as Brown or Al-Amin, involved anything less than inciting a revolution.

His conversion to Islam did mark a fundamental shift in his thinking. His devotion to the religion is a model that fellow Muslims emulate. The religion, however, did not make him a new person. And never did he renounce violence as a method by which to fight those whom he feels oppress his people and stand in the revolution’s way.

In 1966, Brown’s job was to urge black voters to register in Greene County, Alabama. It was the Old South and the Deep South, where whites had used intimidation to keep blacks from voting for the better part of a century. “Up in Greene County, we used to starve like dogs,” Brown writes. He stayed in a house without running water, the walls and floors lined with newspapers for insulation. But Alabama did provide important training of the years to come. Brown, who went door-to-door encouraging blacks to register and vote, learned how to make people listen.

But neighboring Lowndes County, and more specifically White Hall, left the deepest mark on Brown. In White Hall, a tiny sharecroppers’ enclave where no home had an indoor toilet, Brown met Mathew Jackson, “the baddest man in Alabama.”

“In Alabama there was one man who earned the respect of all the [SNCC] staff,” Brown wrote. “Strong individuals are not uncommon in the struggle. This man, however, became an image that inspired in us a new dimension of Black Peoplehood.”

Jackson put his life on the line to further the advancement of blacks, Brown observed. Jackson found shelter and food for the SNCC members, even though he had 10 of his own children to feed. Three of his sons — James, Leon and Johnnie — joined SNCC themselves.

In the years to come, Brown would pay frequent visits to Mathew Jackson and, later, his son Johnnie. The SNCC members, Jackson and other Lowndes County residents started likening themselves to black panthers. They printed up stickers of the animal and fastened them to their shirts as an emblem of solidarity — and an unwillingness to back away from the polls in Lowndes County.

“We set up defense positions there for election night, ‘cause we knew that the honkies were preparing some shit,” Brown wrote. “They were pretty pissed off, not only about the niggers being on the ballot, but niggers voting. So everybody was armed.”

For Brown, it wasn’t a mindless call to arms. He began to think about self-defense and violence at an early age. In Die Nigger Die!, he writes that he first recognized racism as a threat at 8, when a white cop pulled over his father for no reason and yelled at him humiliatingly in front of the family. A few years later, Brown ripped his Cub Scout uniform and was walking home to get it patched when a cop yelled at him to get off the street with those ripped pants. “I began to recognize then the value of being violent.”

Before he was a teenager, he carried a BB gun. By the time he reached young adulthood, he traded the BB for a rifle.

After the 1966 Alabama election, SNCC Chairman Carmichael asked Brown to take over the voting registration movement for the entire state. By that time, SNCC’s members were at odds with each other. Carmichael began to frighten the federal government with increasingly intense speeches on college campuses. The more moderate wing wanted him out, partly because of his flamboyant stage presence and his failure to consult with SNCC members before speaking for them. In one speech, he popularized the until-then underground term: “Black Power.” For that and other reasons, he came to be called Stokely “Starmichael.”

Brown was elected to replace Carmichael. But, rather than temper Carmichael’s pitch, he ran with it. And that’s when the crackdown on SNCC shifted into fifth gear.

“By the time Rap came along, the government had in place basically every repressive measure one could imagine,” says Omali Yeshitela, a former SNCC member and the current chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party in St. Petersburg, Fla. “Rap caught everything. He caught the stuff that [the government] missed Stokely for. Rap ran into just a virtual buzzsaw of federal and local government attacks, frame-ups, what have you, because they were terrified that the civil rights movement was no longer being contained by moderates and that this split mobilized millions of young African people.”

Brown didn’t exactly keep his head low. The wave of his arrests crested in 1967, when he was charged with inciting a riot in Cambridge, Md. He yelled to a crowd of hundreds from atop a parked car: “If Cambridge doesn’t come down, burn it down ... Get yourselves some guns. This town is ready to explode.” After the speech, a crowd of hundreds torched an empty and decrepit all-black elementary school. The same year, riding the crest of Cambridge, Brown spoke at a demonstration near the White House, where he told a crowd, “If you’re going to loot, loot yourself a guns store.”

Detroit was next on the circuit. There, he told a gathering: “Violence is as American as cherry pie. ... This country has delivered an ultimatum to black people. America says to blacks, ‘You either fight to live, or you will live to die.’ I say to America, ‘Freedom or death.’”

The following year, he racked up a charge for carrying a firearm across state lines while under indictment. He tried to board a flight to New York carrying a shotgun; he said he’d handed it to the stewardess for safekeeping. After his arrest, he claimed the government set him up. The courts never served him notice of his indictment, and the feds were just waiting for him to visibly travel with a gun, he writes in Die Nigger Die!

“By that time, being so hounded, being so persecuted, he had all kinds of factors that gave rise to that posture,” recalls Patton, who claims that the government retaliated against her, too, for her involvement in the Movement. “You need to look at the human condition, and I think it’s quite natural and human and sane to talk about self-preservation. And many of us had been hounded — and Rap especially — to that point where he was concerned about the very essence of living.”

The government was keeping close tabs. In response to the Cambridge incident, the Congress passed the “H. Rap Brown law,” which made it a federal offense to cross state lines with the intent to incite a riot. Within a decade, the law was declared unconstitutional for restricting free speech.

Brown also earned a place on a list of targets originated by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Through the Counter Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO, FBI agents instructed local police to arrest anyone on the list, including SNCC leaders, “on every possible charge until they could no longer make bail,” according to the book, COINTELPRO: The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom.

According to documents filed in a 1975 court case alleging a government conspiracy, the FBI employed black journalists to undermine Movement leaders and even forged a letter to former SNCC Chairman Carmichael claiming his wife was having an affair, in an attempt to drive a wedge between powerful black allegiances within the Movement.

Further evidence of a government dead-set against Brown came in 1975, when the firearm conviction was overturned after a prosecutor came forward and testified that he overheard the judge hearing the case say he was “going to get that nigger.”

In Die Nigger Die!” Brown rationalizes his proclivity for rifles, given the standard his country set for him: “America doesn’t rule the world with love. It rules with guns, tanks, missiles, bombs, the Army, Air Force, Navy and the Marines. When america [sic] fights a nonviolent war, I’ll become nonviolent.”

“People want to say that I preach with violence,” he continues. “I preach a response to violence. Meet violence with violence.”

By 1968, Brown’s transition from voting rights activist to militant provocateur was complete. SNCC joined forces with the Black Panthers, who gleaned the name from SNCC members who had traveled to California wearing the panther stickers printed in White Hall. Chairman Brown was given a rather ominous title: Minister of Justice.

Two years later, he changed SNCC’s name, but not its abbreviation. No longer was it the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. It became the Student National Coordinating Committee. “Nonviolent” no longer fit.

In reality, SNCC already had been drawn and quartered, with the Panthers pulling on one limb and pacifist factions tugging at another. It was clear which side Brown was on. By May, he had failed to appear at two different court cases. The FBI put Brown on its Ten Most Wanted list, where he remained for a year-and-a-half.

Police found him at the Red Carpet Lounge in New York City in 1971. The bar had been robbed, and police fingered Brown (Brown said he had nothing to do with the robbery). A shootout ensued, and a bullet pierced Brown’s stomach. After he recovered, he was jailed for the robbery and the gunfight. He was tried, convicted and sentenced to five to 15 years.

In 1976, he walked out of prison sporting a beard and wearing a knit skullcap. He was no longer H. Rap Brown. He was Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin. He had converted Islam.

The transition was natural one. “It is easier to change the face of the mountain than the interior of the mountain,” says Al-Amin’s brother, Ed Brown. The religion, like the Movement, provides a platform for his views and engenders a “kinship with the dispossessed,” according to Ed Brown.

“I think that there are some things which are basically the same,” Brown says about his brother. “They just manifest themselves differently. As H. Rap Brown, he was a person who was very courageous about taking a stand. That is the case with Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin.”

The problem with Al-Amin’s place in the Movement was that once SNCC fractured, he had no firm ground. Ed Brown says his brother was a member of the Black Panthers for less than a year. In Islam he found a “focus and an anchor,” Brown says.

Al-Amin’s writings, which turn markedly more cryptic after he converted, state essentially that Islam fulfilled him in ways the Movement didn’t.

“The revolution of the ’60s, in part, was based on a sense that something was unnatural in the society. ... They rebelled against the unnatural way human beings were being treated,” Al-Amin writes in his 1993 collection of sermons, Revolution by the Book. “But, the revolution was defused because it was not based on a Divine program.”

Al-Amin’s first journey as a free Muslim was to Saudi Arabia, to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. He then settled in a crime-crawling neighborhood in Atlanta: West End. Drawn there by a tight-knit, struggling group of Muslims, he opened a small general store on Oak Street, facing the park. He quietly adopted his old mission, in a new place and under a different cloak.

“Allah says that fighting is prescribed for you,” he writes. “Fight tyranny and oppression, for tyranny and oppression are worse than slaughter, so fight them wherever you may find them.”

It was 1976, and West End was in need of a revolution.

Today, West End Park is lined by manicured yards and white-trimmed bungalows painted lemon yellow, teal and taupe. Boys shoot hoops on a covered basketball court, and women in bright headscarves gather on the lawn across the street. All signs point toward prosperity.

It was a different scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Those gathered in the park were not there for play but to sell services and wares: sex and, later, crack rock.

Within a decade the drugs and prostitutes began to disappear. Al-Amin’s followers like to credit him with the street sweeping, but no one can say for sure that he was creating the resurgence of West End. He did join the local mosque and become its prayer leader. Muslim families from Boston, Philadelphia and New York relo-cated to West End to be closer to the mosque and its charismatic imam.

“I had learned a little bit about Islam and was looking for a prototype,” says Clarence Rasheed, who met Al-Amin while visiting Atlanta from Virginia. Rasheed eventually moved to White Hall to help plan a massive Islamic complex that Al-Amin envisioned. “In Al-Amin, I saw a community that seemed to be the one I wanted to be in.”

West End somehow morphed from chaos to apparent harmony. Nadim Ali visited West End from his native Philadelphia in 1979, partly because H. Rap Brown had been a hero in Ali’s teenage years. Once he saw the man in the flesh and felt the “natural aura of leadership” Al-Amin extended to followers of Islam, Ali decided to leave Philadelphia and his solid Muslim roots to join the struggle to establish a community in Atlanta. Ali recalls how he, Al-Amin and other Muslims patrolled the streets at night on foot and in their cars, somehow making clear to the drug dealers and prostitutes that their lifestyle was no longer welcome.

“We developed West End at the height of the crack epidemic, enforced the park’s curfew to keep out the bad elements,” says Ali, now heading the West End mosque in Al-Amin’s absence. “We cleaned it up by having a visible presence of [Muslim] men in this neighborhood.”

The presence began with a handful of families and grew to about 100. At times, however, the actions of at least a few Muslims have been questioned.

Two of Al-Amin’s inner circle of Muslim followers, Ricardo Minor and Shaheed Abdur Rahman, were arrested and jailed for the 1990 murder of James Ferrell, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in 2000. Minor was convicted of murder, while Rahman pleaded guilty to aggravated assault. Rahman told authorities that Al-Amin ordered the killing, the article states.

In 1994, two Muslims who owned the shop adjoining Al-Amin’s were arrested for running guns to a New York Muslim group accused of gang activity. One of the men, Amin Abdur Karim, was convicted the following year of shipping almost 1,000 guns to an illegal broker. Both Karim and Jibri Abdur Rahman were found to have kept improper records on gun sales. Both were imprisoned.

That same year, trouble — hovering so near to Al-Amin — got closer. He was arrested for shooting a man in the leg as the man walked across Oak Street toward Al-Amin’s store. The man later said police pressured him into naming Al-Amin as the shooter, and the charges were dropped. The police alleged that William Miles had been pressured not by them but by Muslims protecting Al-Amin.

Some things had changed by the 1990s. When he grew up, before the Movement, most blacks in the South couldn’t vote and law enforcement was almost entirely white. Now, Atlanta’s leading politicians and many of its police were black.

But other things hadn’t changed. The FBI still was keeping vigil over its old nemesis. The feds and Atlanta police had been eyeing Al-Amin from 1992 to 1997, looking for a connection to at least 14 West End homicides, the AJC reported. The FBI also amassed a 40,000-page file on the imam.

“I realize I’m under constant observation,” he told the newspaper in 1993.

Mention of the FBI file exasperates Ed Brown.

“If there was one iota of evidence in all the allegations, he’d be in jail,” Brown says of his brother. “Part of what he’s been faced with has been all kinds of misrepresentations. ... I don’t know how it would be humanly possible to do all the things he allegedly did.”

Regardless of his guilt, Al-Amin raised enough suspicion to keep the government interested long after his activist days. Was law enforcement chasing a man who’d been identified as a potential threat to public safety? Or was it creating a self-fulfilling prophecy by hounding him to the point that he’s right about his own paranoia?

Given the government’s track record of trampling the rights of people like H. Rap Brown, did the government continue to do so long after he became Jamil Al-Amin? On the other hand, did Al-Amin hold tight to the conviction that violence should be met with violence? Is it possible to read any radicalism in excerpts from his more recent book? “If we look at the historical acts of the Prophet and his companions,” Al-Amin writes, “we see a clear blueprint for changing a society, for bringing about revolutionary change even under the most difficult conditions.” Did he adopt a Rap-esque militant approach in West End, an approach not unlike a backcountry sheriff who takes the law into his own hands, an approach “as American as cherry pie”?

“The Prophet [Mohammed] ... pointed out that the strong man is not he who is a good wrestler, but he who can control his anger,” Al-Amin writes. “Everybody can fight but everybody can’t win, and ... the discipline that is required, that is necessary, to succeed.”

After years of apparently harnessing his anger, could the knot have loosened?

On March 16, 2000, two deputies in a marked car slowed to a stop in front of Al-Amin’s store. The warrant they held named Al-Amin’s crimes as driving a stolen vehicle, impersonating a police officer and failing to appear in court. At the bottom it read: “Aggravated assault, possibly armed,” presumably in reference to the 1995 William Miles shooting or the 1971 shootout in New York.

A year earlier, Cobb County police had pulled Al-Amin over near I-285. According to Cobb police, the officer told Al-Amin that his green Ford Explorer was listed as stolen. Al-Amin said he’d bought it just weeks earlier. When Al-Amin opened his wallet to show the officer his license, the officer glimpsed what looked like a badge. He asked if Al-Amin was a police officer. He said he was, in White Hall, Ala., where the Explorer was registered.

The cop called White Hall to check Al-Amin’s status, he could find no trace of him. The badge was given to him by his friend Johnnie Jackson, the mayor of White Hall and son of the old SNCC cohort H. Rap Brown had called “the baddest man in Alabama.” The badge actually made Al-Amin an honorary police officer, giving him authority to participate in ceremonies and celebrations but not to arrest anyone or carry a weapon.

Al-Amin was arrested and booked into the Cobb jail.

In January, Al-Amin did not appear to answer the Cobb County charges. So Fulton County, acting on behalf of Cobb, went to his store to haul him in.

Deputies Aldranon English and Ricky Kinchen pulled in front of Oak Street general store and noted the tag number of a car parked out front. It was not listed in Al-Amin’s name. English and Kinchen knocked on the front door. No answer. They got back in the car, circled the neighborhood and returned. A black Mercedes had pulled up, and a man was standing next to it, according to English. The deputies told the man to put his hands in the air. The man said OK. Within seconds, the man lifted a rifle and started shooting.

English and Kinchen shot back. English says either he or Kinchen hit the man. Then a slug tore through English’s bulletproof vest and lodged in his right side. He was shot in the leg, too. And twice in the arm. He collapsed in the vacant lot next to the general store. Kinchen fell in the middle of the street. One bullet had hit his leg. Another penetrated his vest, too. A .223 bullet spins like a pinwheel once it strikes its target. This one devastated Kinchen.

In a 911 tape of the shooting obtained by the AJC, witnesses claim the shooter, who was wounded, jumped into a black Cadillac and drove off. Investigators also found a trail of blood leading from the scene toward a nearby house.

Kinchen died at Grady Memorial Hospital the next day, without ever regaining consciousness. English, laid up in a hospital bed, surveyed a photo lineup of suspects. He picked out one: Al-Amin.

One hundred and fifty federal agents and local police infiltrated White Hall in the days after the shooting. It was a different White Hall from the one H. Rap Brown got to know in the 1960s. Thanks surely in part to his own activism, most of the folks in city and county government are now black — even Sheriff Willie Vaughner. But in other ways White Hall was pretty much the same — a poverty-stricken corner of the Deep South.

The agents had been going door to door, knocking, looking for their man. They were closing in.

The agents approached a shed behind a house where a black Cadillac, possibly linked to the shooting, was parked. The agents followed the Cadillac which pulled away from the house, then circled back and caught up with the man who appeared to have come out of the shed. The man shot at them with a .223-caliber rifle. The agents shot back and the man ran. The sheriff’s department brought in the dogs.

Sheriff Vaughner sent his deputies to stake out positions ahead of the dogs and told them to stay put. Less than an hour after the chase began, deputy John Williams noticed a tall, slender man walking slowly down Pine Street toward the church “trying not to look suspicious,” according to the sheriff. Williams, who’s called “Big John,” started running. It didn’t take much for him to tackle Al-Amin.

The dogs ran out of the woods a few minutes later. Along the way, they found something. A .223 Rutger rifle. It was the gun that had fired at least some of the bullets in West End. Days later, something else turned up in the woods around White Hall: a black Mercedes. A black Mercedes with bullet holes.

Damning evidence. But there was still a hitch: that trail of blood back in West End. It wasn’t English’s. It wasn’t Kinchen’s. And it wasn’t Al-Amin’s. Al-Amin was unscathed.

Clarence Rasheed and Sahib Abdul Salaam Jr. quickly point to the blood when asked about Al-Amin’s alleged involvement in the shooting. But Rasheed and Salaam are less apt to speak directly about it, since the FBI detained them the night Al-Amin was caught.

“It was a lot of excitement for sure,” says Rasheed, sitting on the floor of the trailer and makeshift mosque, down a dirt path in White Hall. “We’re not to say we were arrested. I was just detained. For 20 hours. And just as easily as I was detained I was released.”

Rasheed, his wife, Salaam, a relative of Salaam’s and two children were driving the black Cadillac away from the shed when FBI agents stopped them. Rasheed says nobody asked him any questions regarding Al-Amin’s whereabouts in the days before his capture. He says he hasn’t heard from the FBI since the agents released him.

There was speculation that Rasheed, Salaam and possibly other Muslims who live in White Hall might be charged with harboring Al-Amin. Rasheed doesn’t bristle when reporters ask him if he knew where Al-Amin was while the feds were looking for him. He laughs in a goodhearted sort of way. “I need a lawyer for those kind of questions.”

Rasheed and Salaam had come to White Hall to help plan and someday build a $47 million Islamic complex, with a school and Muslim-owned businesses, conceived by them and Al-Amin.

“As the imam, he identified White Hall as a place to develop a community because the residents and elected officials invited us there,” says Bilal Sunni-Ali, who lives in West End. “It is ripe for struggle, and it had opened its arms to SNCC. It’s familiar with the struggle for self-definition, as a community.”

Al-Amin paid frequent visits to White Hall, as do throngs of West End Muslims. While a reporter visited Rasheed and Salaam, a vanload of Muslims from Atlanta stopped in to pray. The journey, according to Nadim Ali, West End mosque spokesman, even has a name: hijrah. It denotes an abandonment of “those things that corrupt” in favor of a more pastoral and pure spiritual experience “away from the contamination of the city,” Ali says.

Al-Amin “never abandoned us,” Salaam says. “He always made sure we had food. He never forgot about us down here.”

When asked why Al-Amin fled Atlanta to White Hall, where he could be traced, Patton, the former activist who now manages an archive of civil rights clippings in Montgomery, says, “It was natural.

“He came back to his roots. And perhaps it might have put some of his friends in jeopardy. But when Rap came, his friends were there. ... If Rap had knocked on my door, I would have let him in. It’s just that simple.”

With jury selection in the trial under way, testimony could began as soon as February. Superstar attorneys Bruce Harvey and Jack Martin likely will use the blood trail as one of the key pieces of evidence to support a theory that another party was responsible. But they also face the challenge of keeping Al-Amin’s past as under wraps as possible — and of mellowing any jury stereotypes of Muslims in this post-Sept. 11 age.

Al-Amin has professed his innocence, but Fulton County Superior Court Judge Stephanie Manis has warned him not to talk to the press about his case. If he does, he’ll be found in contempt. Manis’ warning came shortly after Jan. 6, when these words of Al-Amin, in his last known interview with the media, were printed in The New York Times: “At some point, they had to make something happen to justify all the investigations and all the money they’ve spent. ...They are trying to crush Islam before it realizes its own worth and strength.”

mara.shalhoup@creativeloafing.com??