Thread by @s_decatur

Thread on Boston-born "Black Power" activist Hakim Jamal and his connections with Gail Benson - a British socialite and daughter of a Tory MP, and Trinidad-born gangster-activist “Michael X.” Spoilers: One dies in a hail of gunfire, one buried alive, and one at the end of a rope.

Jamal (born Alan Donaldson) grew up in the "vibrant" Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. There he had a passing acquaintance with a young man known as “Detroit Red,” who the world would later know as Malcolm X. Jamal would milk this connection for profit for the rest of his life.

Jamal helped establish the “US Organization” a deadly rival to the Black Panthers, soon targeted by the FBI for COINTELPRO. Not much encouragement was needed. The FBI’s plan was to get the two groups in the same location and “grant nature the opportunity to take her due course.”

Jamal tried to follow Malcolm-X's path to fame and power. But he soon discovered a more lucrative modus operandi – Guilting White celebrities into making large donations for his "Malcolm-X school." In Hollywood, he hit up the likes of Marlon Brando and Jane Fonda.

Jamal had an affair with actress Jean Seberg. She became an enthusiastic supporter of the Black Panthers and Black Power causes. Unfortunately for Seberg, she “came to the attention of those in authority:” The FBI ran a COINTELPRO on her that may have helped drive her to suicide.

Meanwhile, for Jamal, actually running a school proved to be more challenging than bullying celebrities for donations. Jamal’s Malcolm-X school had failed almost instantly and went bankrupt. It existed only in brochures used to solicit donations from gullible White liberals.

In London, Jamal’s found yet another easy liberal mark - publisher Diana Athill. At the time, she was 52 and he was 14 years her junior. She helped turn his ramblings into an “autobiography” and get it published. He slept with her and took her money.

Jamal began telling people that he was God; and apparently he believed it. Athill was troubled by this, and reporters were baffled. Jamal accepted Black Muslim theology that Whites were devils. From there he made the leap of faith – that he, Jamal, was divine.

In London, Jamal had acquired another useful lover: Gale Benson, a young socialite – daughter of a wealthy Tory MP. Apparently she believed Jamal’s claims of divinity. Gale got over being called a white devil, and became Jamal’s “Muslim wife” and virtual slave.

The irony of a Black Power activist having intimate relationships with White women - while posing as idolizer of Malcolm-X and as a devout Black Muslim - was not lost on Jamal’s estranged Black wife Dorothy, who was living in California with their five children.

Funded by a wealthy German radical. Jamal and Benson embarked on a few more hair-brained schemes in Guyana. After these flopped, they made the fateful decision to travel to Trinidad, where they would meet with another criminal charlatan larping as a revolutionary – Michael X.

Michael X (born Michael de Freitas) had immigrated to the UK in 1957, and began enriching London (and himself) by serving and as an enforcer for the notorious Notting Hill slumlord and pimp, Peter Rachman (another London-enriching foreigner).

After the cartoonishly villainous Rachman died of a heart attack, Michael de Freitas - the half-White Trinidadian, pimp and enforcer - found it profitable to reinvent himself as a U.S.-style Black Power activist. Preposterous though the “Michael X” act was, UK liberals ate it up.

With Michael’s London “Black Power” act - as with Jamal’s in LA, it was hard to find signs of socially-useful activity. Instead, there was a great deal of fundraising off wealthy liberals. John and Yoko were generous to him. The money was wasted.

Michael had transitioned his image from straight-up criminal to “activist” but he had not bothered to stop committing crime. He had to flee the UK in 1970, back to his native Trinidad. There he set up a phony “agricultural commune” and got back to work on scamming donors.

In Trinidad, the farce soon turned to tragedy. Michael and Hakim formed an unlikely mutual admiration society, and each fed the other’s delusions. They had big plans, and Gale Benson was not part of them. In fact, she had become an annoyance. Michael offered to get rid of her.

Benson sensed that the game was over, and she badly wanted to get out of Trinidad. But it was too late. Why they decided to murder her is not entirely clear. But Michal’s Obeah occultism seems to have played a major role – Benson was to be some sort of “blood sacrifice.”

On January 2, 1972, Benson was hacked with machetes and buried alive by her Black Liberation comrades as she begged “What have I done to deserve this?”

Things at the commune fell apart quickly after Benson’s murder. Michael killed another member of the entourage. The rented house was burned to the ground. Arson was unwise. Soon the police were on the scene digging up bodies, and Michael was on the run into the jungle of Guyana.

Meanwhile Jamal, after all his adventures from LA to London to Trinidad, was back on the mean streets of Roxbury, feigning surprise when Benson’s body was discovered. He had enjoyed quite a ride, and it was about to come to an end.

Either Jamal, or his roommate Kidigo - who had helped murder Benson in Trinidad – had managed to get on the wrong side of the “De Mau Mau” gang.

The De Mau Maus were of a differently branch of the Black Power family tree. They were Vietnam veterans; and they were not into fundraising, celebrity parties, or autobiographies. They drove to Jamal’s building packing “handguns, carbines, and a rifle.”

Jamal was riddled with bullets and died instantly.

Michael-X was eventually dragged back to Trinidad, tried and hanged. Activists and celebrities supported him all the way to the gallows.

If there is any lessons to be learned from this bloody train-wreck of a story, it's how much of the “civil rights movement” – from its earliest days - was just a sleazy criminal racket, and that the Whites who support and mythologized it were often fools, or worse.
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