Dhoruba al-Mujahid bin Wahad (born 1944), born Richard Earl Moore, was a Black Panther Party leader and co-founder of the Black Liberation Army.
Biography[]
Richard Earl Moore was born in 1944, and he was sent to prison in 1962 and converted to Islam and renamed himself "Dhoruba al-Mujahid bin Wahad" after hearing of Malcolm X's assassination in 1965. Wahad was active in the Black Panther Party from his release in 1967 to 1970, when he and other extreme black nationalists left the BPP to form the Black Liberation Army. On 19 March 1971, he was responsible for wounding two NYPD officers in a drive-by shooting, killed two more NYPD officers outside a Harlem housing project two days later, and he was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 1973. He spent 19 years in prison, during which time Assata Shakur became the leader of the BLA. In December 1975, he sued the FBI after learning about its COINTELPRO operations, forcing them to release more than 300,000 pages of documents related to COINTELPRO. In 1995, the government paid Wahad $400,000 as a settlement, and, in 2000, he was paid an additional $490,000 in damages. He later moved to Accra, Ghana, where he organized on pan-Africanism and the prison system. On 19 August 2015, he and an associate were assaulted by members of the New Black Panther Party in Atlanta after he criticized the NBPP about appropriating the old BPP's name and its rhetoric.