Biography
Chicago man convicted with Henry Dee and sentenced to death (May 1972), then to two consecutive 220-to-440-year terms, in what supporters called a wrongful conviction; The Black Panther Vol. 14 no.2 (1975). Known as Yaki Yakubu, he became a New Afrikan liberation theorist.
Birth-year source conflict
The April 18, 2008 memorial by Nancy Kurshan and Steve Whitman explicitly gives James Sayles (Yaki Yakubu) a May 29, 1947 birth date and age 60 at his March 28, 2008 death. The current profile records May 29, 1948. The conflicting birth year is preserved here pending an original vital or prison record; the existing birth field is unchanged. His April 1, 2004 release is independently stated by this memorial and already recorded.
First-person chronology and separate earlier imprisonment
The autobiographical outline dated July 25, 2001, hosted on the James “Yaki” Sayles page, gives his birth as May 29, 1948, in Chicago. This supports the date already stored here, while the previously noted 1947 memorial-year conflict remains preserved rather than silently erased. The PDF’s 2011 file-creation metadata is not the date of his birth, arrest or release.
He recalls intermittent juvenile confinement during parts of 1962–1966, not one uninterrupted four-year stay. He separately reports an adult arrest in 1967 on armed-robbery and attempted-murder charges, recovery on Cook County Jail’s medical tier, imprisonment at Pontiac, and actual release in November 1968. He describes beginning organized political study and writing in Pontiac, producing the prison newsletter The Spark, and continuing organizing after release. No exact 1967 admission day, November release day, sentence length or completed numeric duration is supplied. The charges alone are not proof of the original conviction’s political motivation.
The outline separately dates his later murder-charge arrest to August 17, 1971, and arrival at Stateville to September 1972. Stateville arrival is not treated as his first physical custody or a new imprisonment after release; the existing 1971–2004 case and its endpoint remain unchanged. The earlier Pontiac release prevents joining the 1967 stay continuously to that later prosecution. Historical correspondence and political formation are source context, not new endpoints for other named people.
Biographical Outline — O.Y.Y. (July 25, 2001), original pages 1–4; James “Yaki” Sayles / Atiba Shana hosting page and direct BIO link.
Crossroad’s May–June 1997 prisoner directory identifies Atiba Shanna with the surname Sayles in parentheses and lists historical Illinois prisoner number C-01656 at Dixon. This supports the historical identifier for James Sayles; it supplies no initial admission, discharge or present location. The separate Atiba Fakih signature in an earlier pamphlet is not treated as a proved alias from this evidence.
