Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America

5. Protect Ya Neck: Global Incarceration, Islam, and the Black Radical Imagination

169 In May 2001, a hip-hop benefit concert was held in Watts, California, for Jamil Al-Amin (formerly known as H. Rap Brown), who had recently been arrested and charged with killing a police officer in Georgia. Using hip-hop as a vehicle, artists such as Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Jurassic 5, Dilated Peoples, and Zion I, along with numerous others, sought to raise awareness about the man formerly known as “Rap” for his powerful ability to captivate audiences with his fiery political rhetoric as a member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party during the mid- to late 1960s. As arguably the most charismatic figure within the Black Power era of the mid- to late 1960s, H. Rap Brown was a lightning rod for controversy during that time, picking up the baton where Malcolm X had left off as he dissected U.S. racism and militarism with a biting wit and a sharp tongue that often landed him in trouble with the authorities. Brown ultimately converted to Islam in the early 1970s, and despite the support from the hip-hop community and other activists in 2001, Al-Amin was put on trial in 2002 amid the hysteria of 9/11, in which he was framed as a “homegrown terrorist,” convicted of murder, and sentenced to life 5 protect ya neck Global Incarceration, Islam, and the Black Radical Imagination I ain’t never been nowhere near Angola, Louisiana Down in St. Charles Parish Where the sun won’t go alone But injustice is not confined to Angola, Louisiana It can walk in your living room As long as it’s around your home —Gil Scott-Heron, “Angola, Louisiana” in prison, only to get transferred to the federal Supermax prison in Colorado in 2007, a place that has been called the “domestic Guantánamo” and what 60 Minutes in October 2007 referred to as “a cleaner version of hell.” Jamil Al-Amin was a central figure in Black radical politics in the late 1960s whose gift of gab earned him the nickname “Rap,” so it was more than fitting that the hip-hop generation sought to raise awareness about Al-Amin’s case, seeing him and the history he represented as deeply connected to hip-hop’s own, and continue it. Many of the artists performing at the hip-hop benefit concert in Watts were Muslim rappers , including Mos Def, Jurassic 5, Masspyke, and others, and they tapped into a deep history in which Black art, Islam, and politics intertwined with Black creative impulses, from jazz through the Black Arts Movement to hip-hop. Al-Amin was seen as part of a longer history of Black Islam and its internationalist spirit, which Malcolm X had so powerfully crafted in the post–World War II era by connecting the struggles of Black liberation in the United States with those of decolonization in the Third World. The personal and political trajectory of Al-Amin, who was the last remaining link between SNCC, Black Power, and Black Islam, served as a microcosm for understanding the history of Black Islam and its penetrating relationship not only to internationalism and domestic antiracism but also to Black Islam’s current place within the post-9/11 climate. In many ways Al-Amin has become a symbol and icon of Black Islam, especially for incarcerated Black Muslims in the U.S. prison system , a group that since 9/11 has come under intensified surveillance as a potential fifth column of “radicalization” within the United States. For in seeking to silence and destroy the internationalist dimensions of Black Islam and its enduring critique of U.S. racism, militarism, and imperialism, the United States in the post-9/11 era has combined its current “War on Terror” rhetoric with the already existing “War on Crime” rhetoric that was used to silence and police Black communities in the post–Civil Rights era. As the threat of the “Black criminal” and the “Muslim terrorist” shaped U.S. national identity in the post–Civil Rights era, it was through the mass incarceration of Black bodies that the prison became the primary 170 | Protect Ya Neck site for the containment and silencing of Black political possibility. This massive prison architecture that radically redefined U.S. state building is now being exported abroad to the Muslim Third World in the...