Hakim Ali, a giant among our movement family elders, passed away last week. Incarcerated for 40 years until 2003, he was part of the Revolutionary Action Movement in the 1960s and a key leader in the Black Liberation Movement in Philadelphia. He co-led Fight For Lifers and Reconstruction Inc.—two organizations from which the modern abolitionist movement in Pennsylvania emerged. He was also one of around a dozen organizers outside of prison who founded the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration which continued the pivotal work started by Fight for Lifers in the 1990s. Only illness and age slowed him down in his tireless fight to win dignity and freedom for incarcerated people and for oppressed communities in American society. 

In a moving ensemble theatrical performance from 2017, Hakim tells how the legacy of slavery, racism, and violence in his family history became embedded in his own life. In the 1950s, at the age of 15, Hakim was savagely beaten and nearly killed by two police officers for being out after curfew. He was headed home and just three blocks from his house when it happened; he’d committed no crime. That experience and the ones his father had shared of his family in the Jim Crow South filled him with the rage and loathing that then propelled his violent acts. A gifted storyteller, in just ten minutes Hakim conveys the texture of his childhood, the dark forces that transformed him in adolescence, and the innate power and wisdom from which he wrested the righteous man he became.

He talks about that transformation in this 2015 piece, Making Time: Religion & Black Prison Organizing, by Laura McTighe, which explores his role in leading efforts to get Maryland to recognize Islam as a religion within the state prison system. He speaks to the way the state misuses religion and faith leaders to squash progressive movements inside jails and prisons. “It was their way of quelling any kind of what they would call ‘subversive’ activities that would go against the orderly running of the jail.” But he also knew the powerful role Sunni Islam played in his awakening and turn towards serving his community, so he worked to establish its existence inside prison walls. 

“There ain’t no doubt in my mind what religion, belief, spiritually should do for people who are incarcerated – not necessarily what it is doing and the way that religious institutions are set up inside these prisons, but what it should do. Even if people are not staunch believers in any religious perspective… there still should be some measure of spirituality in people’s lives, so that they can make whatever kind of change would be emotionally beneficial for them… so that they can think clearly about whatever next steps they need to take in their life.”

Through his work Hakim became known to those on the outside pushing to end prison construction and support alternatives to incarceration. His ideas helped create a diversion program for first-time offenders, which led to Hakim becoming perhaps the first and last incarcerated person, at least in Baltimore, ever allowed to attend meetings with community groups outside of the prison. He was taken there in handcuffs, which they removed just before he would enter the room. 

Hakim was an extremely principled and grounded leader. He helped to maintain and advance so much in the era before the juvenile lifers came home after the Miller v. Alabama 2012 Supreme Court ruling granting them the right to parole hearings. This was also the critical era before the movement catalyzed state officials to start granting some commutations again. 

His accomplishments came despite the nearly lifelong injustice he faced in the carceral system. As McTighe wrote, “I have come to know Hakim as a poet, an educator, a revolutionary, a father, and a confidant. He rarely talks about how he survived the hell of the local, state, and federal prisons that held him captive, and I know better than to ask. Those silences in his life story have been built up because of too many small abuses to count, because of great and incomprehensible ones.” He considered his survival miraculous; the two cops from his childhood, the officers who once shot at him in his cell when he was in solitary, and forty years of incarceration didn’t kill him. 

The entire movement is indebted to Hakim’s many years of leadership and rely on his spirit as the fight that filled his later years continues: ending the needless horror of death by incarceration in PA. It was a torture he could barely fathom let alone countenance. At a movement meeting in 2016, he remarked that though he was incarcerated for decades and had been home 13 years, some of the men he walked the yard with were still in the penitentiary.

Hakim died a free man, but bound to the movement to free them all.

Rest in power.