Iya Fulani Sunni-Ali
Biography
Iya Fulani Sunni-Ali, born Cynthia Boston in New Rochelle, New York in 1948, was a singer, educator, and Minister of Information of the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika. She took the citizens oath of the PGRNA under her father, Alajo Adegbalola, who served as the PGRNAs Minister of Defense in 1970 and First Vice-President from 1971 to 1972. From the late 1960s she sang professionally and toured the world for four years with the South African singer Miriam Makeba; she also worked in security for Stokely Carmichael during the same period.
On October 27, 1981 — one week after the failed Brinks armored-car robbery in Nyack, New York that killed two police officers and a Brinks guard — she was arrested at the home of fellow PGRNA citizen Jerry Gaines in Gallman, Mississippi, in a predawn raid by more than 200 federal, state, and local law enforcement agents, with tanks and helicopters. She and Gaines were arrested in front of fourteen children. Federal prosecutors initially charged her in connection with the Brinks robbery, but a New Orleans car mechanic confirmed her alibi that she had been in Louisiana on the day of the robbery and the substantive charges were dropped. The same day, she was served with a federal grand jury subpoena demanding she testify about the Brinks investigation. She refused. She was jailed for civil contempt at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City and held there for approximately eighteen months until her release on October 19, 1983. Her silence — preserved at substantial personal cost — was treated by the Black liberation movement as one of the most disciplined examples of grand-jury resistance of the post-COINTELPRO era. She died on July 17, 2016.
Fulani Sunni-Ali (born Cynthia Boston in New Rochelle, New York, in 1948; died July 17, 2016) was a leading member of the Republic of New Afrika, the Black-nationalist organization that called for an independent Black republic in the Deep South. In the dragnet that followed the October 20, 1981 Brink's armored-car robbery in Rockland County, New York — carried out by members of the Black Liberation Army and the Weather Underground — federal authorities named her a suspect. On October 27, 1981, more than 200 law-enforcement officers, backed by helicopters and two Army tanks, raided her Mississippi farmhouse and arrested her along with Jerry Gaines and fourteen children.
After a witness established that she had been in New Orleans at the time of the robbery, the government dropped the robbery charge — and on the same day served her with a grand-jury subpoena. Sunni-Ali refused to testify, treating silence as resistance to what supporters called a political inquisition against the Black-liberation movement, and was jailed for civil contempt. She was released about a year and a half later, on October 19, 1983, from the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York. Represented by William Kunstler, she remained an organizer until her death in 2016.
