Johnny ‘Imani’ Harris

Johnny ‘Imani’ Harris was a desegregation activist who in 1970 was the first black person to move into an all-White neighborhood in Birmingham Alabama. Harris was harassed viciously by the local Klan who FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe testified were working closely with local police to prevent integration. On August 19, 1970 Harris was stopped by police and brought to the station where a relative of a police officer pointed him out and claimed he had raped her. Harris was instructed to confess to the crime or more charges would be brought against him and when he refused he was additionally charged with four robberies on nearby stores. Harris was at a bar on the other side of town when the crimes were supposed to have occurred and gave his public defender a list of witnesses who could provide an alibi for him but the public defender never called them as witnesses and throughout the trial, waived preliminary hearings, made no motions and provided no defense for the charges Harris was accused of. Eventually the lawyer told Harris that if he changed his plea to guilty on one offense the others would be dropped, then provided him false documents which he signed that instead plead guilty to every charge without a plea deal. Harris received a life sentence. In prison Harris organized a work stoppage to protest prison conditions which every inmate participated in and formed Inmates for Action (IFA) The strike ended with 300 prisoners being brutally beaten and transferred into segregated holding. On January 18, 1974 a group of guards who had recently killed another inmate entered into the segregation unit wearing blood covered uniforms and armed with bats and axes as they stated, “We ought to kill these revolutionary niggers, the way we killed Clanzy.” Two prisoners overpowered one of the guards and held him hostage with the sole demand of having local press, clergy, and politicians see the conditions of the prison. Rather than comply the warden ordered the guards to open fire on the inmates with live ammo. In the aftermath of the shooting one inmate and one of the guard hostages lie dead. The two prisoners who had overpowered the guard were both found dead within a month, one from what prison officials claimed was a suicide and the other had his skull caved in by ax-handles. Though Johnny Harris had no involvement in the hostage taking he was charged with the death of the guard solely for organizing the original protest through Inmates for Action (IFA) that led to his eventual killing. Harris was convicted and sentenced to death.

One of the Atmore-Holman prisoners tried after the January 1974 Alabama prison rebellion; The Black Panther Vol. 14 (1975) reports he was convicted by an all-white jury of killing a guard and sentenced to death, and that his lawyers appealed on grounds of jury discrimination and the cruelty of the death penalty.

Leader of the Atmore-Holman Brothers and co-founder of Inmates For Action (IFA). The Black Panther Vol. 19 no.3,10,11 (1979) reports he was sentenced to death on a framed charge of killing a guard during the Jan. 18, 1974 Atmore-Holman prison rebellion, and that a new motion cited an eyewitness placing him elsewhere.

Amnesty International launched Urgent Actions in January and February 1978 against his scheduled March 10, 1978 execution — which would have been only the second in the United States since 1967 — and sent British lawyer Brian Wrobel to Alabama, where he met Harris on death row in Holman Prison, his lawyers, and Governor Wallace's legal adviser (Amnesty International Report 1978). At a retrial in Baldwin County, an all-white jury convicted Harris again of first-degree murder on July 26, 1983. The September/October 1983 Southern Exposure report identifies Attorney General Charles Graddick as leading this prosecution; Bill Baxley had personally prosecuted the original 1975 trial. The article says the defense challenged the exclusion of Black jurors and the withholding of contradictory guard evidence.

The February 25, 1975 Mass Media report distinguishes Harris from the other Atmore-Holman defendants: it reports that his case, carrying possible death punishment, had received a change of venue. It describes restricted defense access to prisoners and witnesses, later restored by court order subject to advance notice. The reported trial setting and death exposure do not establish a completed verdict, execution or custody endpoint. Source: https://openarchives.umb.edu/digital/api/collection/p15774coll18/id/6664/download