Jalil Muntaqim

Jalil Abdul Muntaqim, formerly Anthony Bottom, was born on October 18, 1951, in Oakland, California, and spent his early years in San Francisco. As a young person he joined NAACP youth organizing during the civil rights movement, and in high school he became a leading member of the Black Student Union, often touring in speak-outs. The assassination of Dr. King pushed him toward a conviction that a more militant response to racism and injustice was necessary. He looked to the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense for leadership and was recruited by school friends who had already become Panthers. He later became part of the Black Liberation Army.

He was arrested at 19, two months shy of his twentieth birthday, along with Albert Nuh Washington, after a midnight shoot-out with San Francisco police. He was a high school graduate working as a social worker at the time. He then spent decades in prison, among the longest held political prisoners in the world, and was released in 2020 after 49 years. He became a father and a grandfather while inside, worked as an educator of other prisoners, filed numerous lawsuits on behalf of prisoners, and says he was repeatedly punished for organizing and advocacy through physical abuse, formal discipline and many transfers. After years of being denied the chance to attend college, he earned a BS in Psychology and a BA in Sociology in 1994.

Prison was where he did much of his organizing and writing. While in San Quentin in 1976 he launched the National Prisoners Campaign to Petition the United Nations to recognize that political prisoners exist in the United States. Progressives across the country joined, and the petition was submitted in Geneva. It led Lennox Hinds and the National Conference of Black Lawyers to have the UN International Commission of Jurists tour U.S. prisons and speak with specific political prisoners, and the Commission reported that political prisoners did exist in the United States. He is also credited with launching Arm the Spirit, described as the first revolutionary prison newspaper. In 1997 he initiated the Jericho Movement, which demands amnesty for U.S. political prisoners on the basis of international law. More than 6,000 supporters gathered for the Jericho '98 march in Washington, DC and the Bay Area. He is described as the last living co-founder of the National Jericho Movement.

His writings, collected in We Are Our Own Liberators: Selected Prison Writings (second edition, 2010), span nearly forty years and contribute to the Black Liberation and New Afrikan independence movements. In them he argues that the ideology of a free democratic society will be exposed as a big lie, and that the country will find itself at war with itself as civil and human rights, including First and Fourth Amendment protections, are eroded. In a 2025 oral history recorded in Rochester, New York, he described his own evolution to revolutionary nationalism and his message since release: decolonize one's thinking, embrace New Afrikan heritage and identity, and build a People's Senate and other alternative forms of governance. His method joins coalition-building, international law, education, litigation and institution-building to a view of the struggle as a long war that changes form without ending.