The Colored Line? No problem. The problem is the "color line." The colored line is the solution.

WEB DuBois predicted that the major problem in America in the twentieth century would be the "color line." He had fought against lynching in the first quarter of the century. And he saw a slow, complex and difficult process by which racism in America might abate. I am not aware that Dr. DuBois ever discussed the "colored line."

Today you cannot go into a masjid (i.e. "mosque") in a black community and find only black worshippers. Not the case in the sixties. Then a prayer line consisted almost exclusively of blacks. It was a "colored line."

Colored line members understood better than Dr. DuBois what he had predicted. He was a Harvard trained sociologist and an internationally recognized human rights activist. They had been Black Panthers, Blackstone Rangers, hustlers, whores, drug addicts. Niggers.

They knew that nothing debilitated blacks more than hatred of whites. It lethargized, niggerized. 

The 60's advent of black "orthodox" (Sunni and Shia) Muslims in the major cities in America was an advent from the consuming heat of hating whites. It had been an anger and hatred that sickened. Slavery. Native American genocide. Lynching. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. South Africa. Korea. Patrice Lumumba. Viet Nam. The Civil Rights Movement. The Peace Movement. "We love everybody." (You can say that again.) Sickening.

The Qur'an brought healing, clarity, peace, purpose and resolve. At very least, colored line worshippers entered into a détente with anger and hatred. Now after forty years of Islamic development they despise anger and hatred more than they ever despised white people or white America. They give thanks for being niggers no more.

I first saw Jamil Al-Amin up close in 1969. He was H. Rapp Brown making a speech as the guest of the Black Student Union at a large midwestern university. Later I read his book Die Nigger Die. I knew he was headed for troubles.
 
Brown's speech and writing shocked. But the information was old news. And his revealing it was not of particular concern to the FBI. Something else caused his troubles.

In the tradition of Frederick Douglass, he boldly took a United States president to task in writing. The target of Douglass of course was Lincoln. H. Rapp Brown took on Lyndon Johnson. But Douglass was a mature and wise diplomat. Brown was young and angry. He wrote in Die Nigger Die that President Lyndon Johnson was an "ugly m----- f-----."

Douglass knew Lincoln's ugly thoughts about blacks. And clearly Lincoln was homely. Douglass was a wordsmith who could have cleverly attached "ugly" to Abraham Lincoln. Such might have benefited post-Emancipation blacks. Had they trusted Lincoln less, they might have been prepared for betrayal by an earlier "ugly" Johnson, Lincoln's successor, Andrew.

Douglass never made that attachment. His legacy is that of a master statesman. But as of this writing my beloved brother, Jamil Al-Amin, is serving a life-without parole prison term for a crime he clearly did not commit.

The last time I saw Jamil Al-Amin was in the early eighties. He stopped at Masjid At-Taqwa in the heart of the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. After Friday Prayer he did a three-minute promotion of a speech he was to make that night.

In that three minutes you could see he was no longer H. Rapp Brown. He was Jamil Al-Amin who never could think, much less put in writing, that the president of the United States was an "ugly m----- f-----." But it was in writing.

"The moving finger writes…" Allahu khairul maakireen. Allah is the Best of Planners. Today's colored line in just about any masjid in any black community in America is a prayer line of many colors, including American whites.

I know Brother Jamil depends on Allah. I pray that his current residence is temporary. But where he resides he joins a "colored line." The colored line is America's hope against racism and ugly MF's.

March 2003