You're not an African because you're born in Africa. You're an African because Africa is born in you. It's in your genes ... your DNA ...your entire biological make up. Whether you like it or not, that's the way it is. However, if you were to embrace this truth with open arms....my, my, my ...what a wonderful thing."

Marimba Ani

Ex-radical held in 1971 killing of cop

By STEVE VISSER
Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writer

greene

hilton

Greene

Hilton

Nobody was expected to pay for the killing of Atlanta policeman James Richard Greene.

The 26-year-old engaged officer had parked his patrol wagon about 1:30 a.m. at a darkened gas station to eat a ham biscuit. A security guard found him some 20 minutes later still clutching his napkin.

On Friday, a Fulton County grand jury deliberated just about one minute before indicting Freddie Hilton for murder in the 30-year-old case.

It wasn't that the killing was a mystery. Police had the names of two suspects within a year -- self-styled revolutionaries of the Black Liberation Army reportedly out to prove their worth by killing a cop. One was killed the next year in a gunbattle with New York police. The other was the now-49-year-old Hilton, who, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has learned, was brought in June from Rikers Island in New York to the Fulton County Jail.

Related:
Whatever happened to the big names from the radical era?

"The timing was just right for this to happen now," said Jim Rose, an Atlanta detective who crisscrossed the country for 18 months investigating the case. "The police back then thought they had enough to indict, but I think if you had asked them if they had enough to prosecute, they would have said no."

If Hilton goes to trial, he'll be the latest in a string of failed '70s revolutionaries to face a courtroom for pursuing politics through murder.

The Black Liberation Army was a disciplined but loose-knit cluster of cells claiming to fight racial oppression by killing cops. The small but heavily armed group began operating around 1970, was smashed in shootouts and sputtered out in the early 1980s with the imprisonment of its top remaining members.

"They left the Black Panthers because the Panthers weren't violent enough," said Rose, 49, who had wanted to investigate the Greene murder for years. "But I didn't get into all that BLA stuff. From the very beginning, the only thing I was interested in was the murder of Jimmy Greene."

Civil rights and Vietnam War protests produced major changes in America. Southern blacks won freer exercise of constitutional rights, and a student movement became a force in ending a war. But it also was a time when a handful of frustrated radicals took up guns and bombs to try to overthrow the system or speed reform.

It was also a time when some police forces were racist, the FBI used illegal covert means to undermine dissidents and National Guardsmen fired on demonstrators.

"Violence feels like the common currency," said Todd Gitlin, a New York University professor and an expert on the radical era. "The arguments against violence were strong, and most of the people in the movement bought them. But that is reason, in the head. The glands said, 'Somebody has to hurt for this. Somebody has to suffer.' "

Hilton's participation in political violence appears to have ended with that era. After finishing a prison stint for bank robbery, he had disappeared into a new religion, Islam, a new name and a new-found legitimacy. As Kamau Sadiki, he worked for the telephone company in New York for 18 years and stayed out of trouble. A Fulton indictment for bank robbery lapsed. District Attorney Lewis Slaton said he didn't have enough evidence to prosecute Hilton for murder.

Hilton's lawyer suspects that the evidence isn't any better today.

"My client swears he didn't do it," said Akil Secret, an Atlanta attorney. "Thirty years to bring an indictment? My guess is the case must have been very weak or it would have been brought before that. I think the state is guessing."

School for guerrillas|

On Nov. 3, 1971, police were perplexed by the killing at the intersection of Memorial Drive and Boulevard. There didn't seem to be any motive.

Then police learned a band of a dozen or so Black Liberation Army members had fled New York for a farmhouse on Fayetteville Road in DeKalb County to train in urban guerrilla tactics. They practiced shooting, map reading and first aid and planned precision bank robberies, complete with diagrams. The members were suspected in the killings of several police officers. One of their signatures was to take the badges as trophies.

DEATH OF A POLICEMAN:
A 30-YEAR TIMELINE

August 1971: Freddie Hilton and a 12-member squad of the Black Liberation Army set up house on Fayetteville Road in DeKalb County as a safe haven from New York.

Nov. 3, 1971: Atlanta patrolman James Richard Greene is killed. A week later police, investigating the bank robbery, raid the group's house and arrest eight people, but not Hilton.

Dec. 11-12, 1971: The Black Liberation Army members escape from the DeKalb County Jail on a weekend.

May 1972: Greene's service revolver and holster are found in a lake in southwest Atlanta. The serial number had been filed off the gun.

September 1972: Samuel Cooper is recaptured in Miami. He identifies two men, one of them Hilton, as the gunmen who killed Greene.

Oct. 2, 1972: District Attorney Lewis Slaton says he doesn't have sufficient evidence to indict in the slaying of Greene.

Dec. 12, 1974: Hilton is convicted of robbing a savings and loan in Queens and sentenced to five years.

Feb. 2, 2001: New York detectives, investigating an unrelated case, discover Hilton is the key suspect in the killing of Greene. Atlanta Police Detective Jim Rose starts investigating the case.

July 12, 2002: A Fulton County grand jury indicts Hilton for murder.


Greene's badge and gun were missing. A week later DeKalb police raided the house and arrested eight people.

The next month, all eight escaped from the DeKalb jail by jimmying the doors and sliding out on a rope of sheets. Within 10 months, police had recaptured one -- Samuel Cooper. He told them Hilton and Twyman Meyers, 22, had killed the officer to prove themselves after their leader berated them for doing "stupid things."

After the shooting, Cooper told police, Hilton and Meyers came back to the house and tossed Greene's badge and revolver on a table, shouting, "We did it, we did it." Another housemate played with the pistol, saying, "The pigs in Atlanta sure have nice guns."

In September 1972, Atlanta police Lt. Louis Graham announced that Hilton and Meyers would be indicted for Greene's murder. But within a week, Fulton DA Slaton said Cooper's statement wouldn't suffice for the murder indictment.

"I knew we had a good case, but the DA wouldn't go for it," said Graham, who retired as Fulton County police chief and is now chief deputy for the DeKalb County Sheriff's Department. "That always bothered me.

Meyers died in a gunbattle in the Bronx with police the next year.

District Attorney Paul Howard, who sought the new indictment, says the case against Hilton is more solid now. Rose and M.C. Cox, a retired Atlanta policeman who works as an investigator for Howard and has a reputation for finding hard-to-find people, have rounded up at least seven people who are willing to testify.

Rose said some are former Black Liberation Army members who heard Hilton brag about the shooting. "Some of them are truly remorseful about it," he said. "But I don't think they would have been as willing to testify back then."

He said some have become mainstream professionals. "It's a lot harder to find somebody on the run, and I think that was a problem the police had back then," the detective said. "I was able to find everybody but one person. Virtually all of them had tried to straighten their lives out and were no longer in hiding."

There are other witnesses who saw Hilton pull the trigger and reach in and grab Greene's badge, Rose said. A woman who was headed to a bootlegger's shot house said she spoke to the gunmen. She saw Hilton walk up to Greene, ostensibly to ask directions, and then open fire, with Meyers shooting from the passenger side. A couple driving to work at Krispy Kreme were stopped at the intersection and saw the shooting. They told police Hilton and Meyers strode across the street and up Boulevard along the wall of historic Oakland Cemetery.

The witnesses had all scattered over the next three decades. "Jim Rose finds an eyewitness in Florida and he does a photo array and the witness picks out Freddie Hilton," said Chris Karolkowski, a New York police detective who helped in the case. "It was amazing. All the pieces fell into place."

FBI assists probe

Both New York and federal law officers spent the early 1970s trying to nail Hilton for attacks on police and bank robberies with limited success. In 1973, he was acquitted of a Bronx heist. In 1974, he was acquitted of attempted murder in the wounding of two patrolmen. He was convicted of robbing a savings and loan in Queens in New York and sentenced to five years.

During those days he achieved notoriety for fathering the daughter of JoAnne Chesimard -- called the force behind the Black Liberation Army -- in a jail cell where they were sequestered for disrupting their Bronx bank robbery trial. After her acquittal, Chesimard was later convicted of murdering a New Jersey trooper. She escaped from prison and lives in Cuba. She changed her name to Assata Shakur and is one of the nation's most wanted fugitives.

After Hilton's arrest in 1972, Graham suspected the FBI had blocked his indictment in Greene's murder because it wanted to try Hilton for federal crimes in New York. But Rose said the federal agents cooperated fully this time, opening agency files to him and even helping him land a helicopter so he could skip around New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Any FBI involvement -- coupled with the 30-year delay in bringing the case -- makes former radicals suspicious there are hidden motives behind Hilton's prosecution.

"The best we can tell is that this is a way of pressuring Assata," said Kathleen Cleaver, a former Black Panther who now is a visiting professor at Emory Law School. "The FBI told [Hilton] they were going to have him arrested and he was going to die in jail."

It was a complaint by a 12-year-old girl that sparked Hilton's arrest. Karolkowski and fellow New York police detective James Moss arrested Hilton on a charge of molestation. That charge was later dropped, but not before detectives learned Hilton once had soldiered for the Black Liberation Army.

That was enough for them to dig into his past. The Black Liberation Army was blamed for killing a number of NYPD officers in the 1970s, and the cops wanted his help in solving a 1970s slaying of two patrolmen. Hilton was little help on that case, but the detectives learned from a FBI file that he was the chief suspect in an Atlanta police killing.

"There is a legacy of violence that attaches to an individual like Mr. Hilton," said Tom Niery, a New York police detective in the major cases squad whose voice wells with anger when he talks about the Black Liberation Army cases he worked in the 1970s. "There are a lot of people who ambushed police officers still walking round today. We're looking for justice, wherever justice can be had."

Karolkowski called Atlanta police in January 2001 and was referred to Rose, who has a reputation for solving cold cases. Rose was already eyeing the Greene case when he learned Hilton was in jail.

"All of these guys were influenced by the times," said Karolkowski, 31, who had to spend three days in the library to get up to speed on the now obscure group. "As they got older, some continued in a life of crime and other realized that wasn't the way to go and lived decent lives. Unfortunately a lot of them, like Hilton, have crimes hanging over their heads."

Unlike the Black Panthers, another group that picked up the gun, the Black Liberation Army didn't set up breakfast programs or health clinics, although many of its members were ex-Panthers. It tapped into a growing view among some African-Americans that violence was needed to ensure equal rights even if tilted toward anarchy.

"By 1971, you have the growth of violent black nationalism," said Gitlin, the NYU professor. "And you have the virtual collapse of the Black Panthers, who had been a channel for would-be revolutionaries. But the Panthers were still a political organization which had a political program. I don't think the Black Liberation Army had anything other than a gun."

'Going back in history'

The members saw themselves as freedom fighters "expropriating" funds from capitalist banks to overthrow a racist system, said Akinyele Umoja, a professor at Georgia State University who has interviewed Black Liberation Army members.

Police portray them as maniac back-shooters.

"They were assassins, and there was no rhyme or reason," said Niery, who noted some of the group's police killings involved black officers. "Nobody ever articulated a motive like this cop beat someone."

Niery said he's still trying to solve the murder of New York Officer Robert Bolden, a 45-year-old black Navy vet. In 1971, he was killed during a pub robbery in a Brooklyn neighborhood where Niery said the Black Liberation Army operated.

Black Liberation Army cadres would have viewed black officers as traitors because they had joined the enemy they saw as an occupying army, said Umoja. He did not condone the killing but said he believed the group's violence was the natural outgrowth of racial repression, including the FBI's campaign to destroy the Black Panthers and black nationalist groups.

"Many attacks on police were considered retaliation for attacks on Black Panthers, police shootings in the community and other forms of police brutality," he said. "It was a more hostile situation in America at that time."

Rose remembers that time. He was 18 and living in rural New York state when Greene was killed in Atlanta, and he remembers the attacks on police in his home state.

"Investigating this case was like going back in history," Rose said. "One thing that impressed me was that nothing in this country got solved by violence. Killing cops didn't change anything. All the progress that was made was through nonviolence."