In the Name of the Father - Page 5

Meanwhile, protest organizers gather at the building’s entrance. They mean to deliver a report from a recent panel discussion on worker’s rights. Ajabu was on that panel, which is why he is among the messengers. But as he tries to enter the revolving door, he finds that it is stuck. Peering through the glass, he can see a woman holding a to-go cup of coffee stopping the door from within.

“What are you doing?” Ajabu asks.

“You can’t come in,” she replies.

“And who are you?”

“Security.”

Quickly, Ajabu steps to the swinging door immediately to his right. As he enters, the woman tries to block him, her left arm striking him in the chest. Noticeably perturbed but still controlling his temper, Ajabu continues, only to be met with the woman’s hand and the cup of coffee, a shot of which splashes on the shoulder of the reverend’s suit.

“I cannot believe this. This is a public building,” he exclaims melodramatically. “I’ve been assaulted.”

At this, both Ajabu and the people at the front desk call the police. Statements are taken. The lobby is slowly emptied.

But outside, Ajabu joins the frenzied protestors, hushes them, and from the steps of the building, he launches into a theatrical sermon.

“Someone has unfairly lost their job and this woman is standing up for greed,” he yells. “We have to stand strong. We cannot back up. It is time to stand with the least of these. It is what God would have us do.”

After shedding his father’s name, Ajabu soon rejected his religion. To him, Christianity was thrust upon slaves to pacify them. He converted to Islam but soon found that some of the Middle Easterners would not stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the blacks in prayer.

Politics became Ajabu’s religion. He enrolled in Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis and got involved in the Black Student Union, advocating for multicultural awareness. He traveled around the country setting up student organizations at other schools. He was finding his voice as an activist.

While at school, Ajabu met a teacher and fellow black nationalist named Jane Hart. In 1973, they had a son, Kofi.

However, Ajabu still drank and gambled. He was now dealing marijuana, which he had been exposed to in Vietnam. In 1973, he was imprisoned after trying to buy $10,000 worth of weed coming into Texas from Mexico. During the next 30 months in federal prisons in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Michigan, Ajabu’s activism took a radical turn. The 25-year-old inmate immersed himself in black history and the ideas of leaders like Malcolm X, the ethos of equality “by any means necessary,” which he passed on to his fellow inmates. Once, in the Oklahoma prison, he was accused of inciting a riot.

Upon his release, Ajabu returned to his family in Indianapolis. A daughter, Nzinga, was born in 1976. Meanwhile, Ajabu went back to IUPUI, got an associate’s degree in applied engineering technology, and took a job as a relay technician with PSI Energy.

But Ajabu stayed political. In 1988 he ran for the Washington Township School Board and lost. He considered getting involved with the NAACP, but as with Christianity, he found the organization too passive. Then in 1990, he saw a flyer for a Call to Arms Summit in Milwaukee for a new Black Panther Militia. The Panthers’ stance of equal opportunity at any price and their strong rhetoric appealed to Ajabu. He rounded up about 30 people and headed to Wisconsin. When he returned, he gathered 4,000 local signatures in support of the Panthers, and in 1991, Ajabu was installed as commander of the Indianapolis branch.

In 1993, when a black family was harassed out of a mostly white neighborhood along White River with gasoline-drenched crosses in their yard, Ajabu and the armed Panthers marched through the streets. They protested when the Ku Klux Klan held a rally on the statehouse steps. They spoke out when two whites murdered a random Indianapolis black man in retaliation for another shooting.