The Jacka: In Search of Allah on the Mic

Editor’s note: This story is part of That’s My Word, KQED’s year-long exploration of Bay Area hip-hop history.

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t was a characteristic East Oakland scene: On the night of Feb. 2, 2015, a group of friends sat in their car on 94th Avenue and MacArthur Boulevard in East Oakland, taking turns rapping. Another group, including Dominick Newton, stood on the sidewalk, watching the fun go down. As the vibes continued, all was good.

Suddenly, around 8:15 p.m, a car slid by spitting bullets at the parked car. Newton was hit in the head. A neighbor tried to slow the bleeding with a towel until medics arrived, but Newton, known in Islamic circles as Shaheed Akbar, died at Eden Medical Center a few hours later.

If you really knew the gangsta rap scene well, you knew Newton as The Jacka. Hailing from Pittsburg, California, Jacka was respected around the world for his violently visual lyrics laced with positive Islamic undertones. The murder of the 37-year-old rapper shook the Bay Area rap world to its core, and his killers have never been caught.

Very few murders of rappers are ever solved. The shootings of Tupac Shakur, Mac Dre and The Jacka, along with the death of Zion I’s Zumbi under suspicious circumstances at Alta Bates Medical Center, remain conspicuously unsolved or ignored by local police departments. For many, this can feel like deliberate psychological warfare on Black America; piles upon piles of cold cases leave grieving families and fans hollow from the pain inside.

Often, a rapper’s murder becomes their identity, eclipsing their artistry. In death, most rappers’ music fades under the algorithms as new artists and sounds try to claw their way to the top. Many die with no legacy.

But The Jacka was different. His legacy in rap shines bright as the light from the East. Why is that so? The most common answer, for most who knew him well, is Islam.

A Black crescent over The Bay

To those outside of hip-hop, Islam’s influence on the art form might seem unlikely. But if you know that the seeds of hip-hop were sown in Black American ghettos, and understand their history, it makes perfect sense.

The religion of Islam arrived in America within the hearts of Muslims trapped in the hulls of ships during the transatlantic slave trade. Some of them were legitimate royalty, and intellectually miles above those who kidnapped, tortured and sold their people. Centuries of this brutal treatment, along with Jim Crow, redlining and other racist policies, created the degraded living environment of the 1970s American ghetto.

Rap music arose in these hoods like a divine phoenix from of the ashes of the civil rights era, during which the United States government demolished radical Black Power movements (and their white allies). As rap music got its baby legs, the crack epidemic and an unprecedented wave of gang violence spread across the country.

Those in Black neighborhoods lucky enough to avoid being murdered usually did some time in jail. Poet Sonia Sanchez once remarked that, for Black men, prison was the first time they were able to be still and think. Copies of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad’s Message to the Blackman in America circulated, and the 5% Nation of Gods and Earths grew in American prisons.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, African American Sunni Muslims and followers of the Nation of Islam helped the hood thrive with new dignity, negotiating truces among warring gangs and creating entrepreneurial businesses. Among the gang violence and crack epidemic of the era, the Muslim message of self-reliance and living a clean lifestyle held an understandable appeal.

Parallel with the rise of hip-hop, Islam gave young Black people an understanding of their history before slavery. It highlighted Black achievements in math, science, art and literature that weren’t taught in the racially bigoted American education system. While both Black and Islamic societies were often framed in America’s schools as savage, rap became the pathway by which many Black kids learned about Black and Muslim history and culture.

The impact on hip-hop was immeasurable.

“In the 1980s, the rising despair, unemployment rates, violence and cases of police brutality fomented conditions that made the Black nationalist message of self-determination, racial pride and self-defense more attractive,” says Dr. Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar, author of Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap. “Malcolm X, the former spokesman for the Nation of Islam, was sampled by everyone from Public Enemy to Ice Cube. Simultaneously, the current head of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, was ascending in popularity among the hip-hop generation.”

Zaheed, a.k.a. Big Za from Richmond, was one of the early young Muslims to convert in that late-’80s, early-’90s era.

“Rap had consciousness to it and it had substance to it,” Za recalls. He names Boogie Down Productions, Public Enemy, Brand Nubian and Big Daddy Kane as long-distance teachers to millions of Black youth. The influence of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X and Oakland’s Black Panthers pulsed in their veins.

Big Za swung on a deadly pendulum between the cocaine-powdered street corners and a love for the Qu’ran. He was not alone: In 1991, the West Coast success of Ice Cube’s Death Certificate and Da Lench Mob’s Guerillas in The Mist brought an intoxicating balance of Black Panther militance with Islamic spiritual conviction.

Meanwhile, albums arrived from Bay Area rappers like Paris with The Devil Made Me Do It, Askari X with Ward of the State and the Ansārs with Righteous Black Guerillas, keeping the streets aflame with militant anti-war, anti-police abuse lyrics.

To government officials, church leaders and white America at large, these fearless, militant Black men in rap were cause for full-blown alarm. Black Islam-infused rap lyrics were feeding the minds and hearts of millions of young Black men and women.

Young aspiring rapper Dominick Newton was one of them.

Straight outta Pittsburg

Newton was born in Phoenix, Arizona to young teenage parents before moving to Richmond. Family life was hard, and in the late ’80s, along with many other Black families, Newton moved to Pittsburg. Despite being new to town, he quickly got along with pretty much everyone.

Jacka’s former manager PK was just 15 when he met Newton through a mutual friend known as Tron, sometime around 1994. PK and Tron both went to De La Salle High School in Concord. Jacka cut hair on the side for cash, and PK and Tron would often be at Jacka’s place to get a fade or to just hang out.

PK can still recall his first impression of Newton. “He was a cool dude. You wanted to be around him. He made people feel good about themselves just being around him,” he says. After attending USC and moving back to the Bay Area, PK reconnected with Newton, who asked PK to be his manager. Their partnership would last until Jacka’s death.

But before he was known as The Jacka, Newton recorded with his friend FedX at the Pittsburg home of then-undiscovered producer RobLo. “They had a song out back then called ‘Million Dollar Dream,’ under the group name Fatal Mentality,” PK says.

Through RobLo, Newton met Husalah, an aspiring rapper who played first-chair trumpet in high school. His grandfather had introduced him to the beauty of jazz, but he grew to love rap more. Huslah was raised in Pittsburg on “the project side of town,” and connected with Newton at RobLo’s house, which was central for many teen boys in the ‘hood at that time.

Husalah says of meeting Jacka, “He was one of the coolest dudes. He didn’t have to act tough or act hard. He hung with all the tough guys and all the square guys. We were learning how to rhyme, and how to make intricate rhyme patterns. Our styles were all over the place.”

Husalah recounts how drug dealing permeated their circle. The schools and the streets had them “indoctrinated with self-hate. It was hard to find anybody who had knowledge of self at all. There were people that all they knew was crack cocaine. Almost everyone you knew had a physical vice. Aunties, uncles, parents, neighbors. Crack cocaine was everywhere.”

Music and searching for a higher power through Islam became pathways out for both of them.
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Thugs in the masjid

Before long, Jacka, Husalah, his cousin Rydah J. Clyde, AP-9 and FedX came together to create the group Mob Figaz. Their music quickly took over the streets with RobLo’s hypnotic mix of Bay Area basslines, hard drums and emotionally shifting samples. Sacramento gangsta rapper C-Bo was impressed by their lyricism and authenticity, and agreed to put out their debut album. C-Bo’s Mob Figaz moved more than 100,000 units with almost zero support from local radio. The streets, however, validated their sound and their flow.

Not long after, Jacka got caught for some robberies in the East Bay. At that point, he had already studied the Nation of Islam theology under Oakland’s Dr. Yusuf Bey. While locked up, though, Jacka was exposed to the Orthodox practice of Sunni Islam, and his mind and music began to expand.

According to Big Za, after serving time in Santa Rita Jail, Newton took Shahada, the Islamic testimony that affirms one’s faith. Big Za and his friend Shak had taken Shahada in 1991; Shak was involved in a murder case in 1995 and met Newton in Santa Rita. Behind the cold steel and cement walls of the jail, Shak taught Jacka how to pray and gave him his Islamic foundation. Not long after, Jacka took on the Islamic name Shaheed Akbar.

Listen to a playlist of songs by the Jacka influenced by Islam, curated by his former manager PK:

Obviously there is a clash between how young men like Jacka know they should be living and the backdrop of soul-scorching poverty, addiction and miseducation. Unfortunately, few support systems exist for new converts stuck between the Detroit Red lifestyle of a young Malcolm X and the cultivation of a higher self. For converts like Big Za, Jacka and millions of others, the Shahada does not always mean an immediate 180-degree turn from the life they’ve been living.

Also, like Tupac, Jacka had respect from East Coast rappers with real street credibility. His relationships with Cormega, Freeway, Beanie Sigel and many others were truly unique.

As PK points out, it helped that Freeway and Beanie Sigel were also Sunni Muslim. “But I think it was because he was a real rapper, an MC with skills,” he adds. When they came out to California, they got firsthand proof that what Jacka rapped about was authentic. “Whether it’s the sideshows, the guns, the drugs — all that stuff is really happening out here. Then they were like ‘OK, this dude is real.’”

That magnitude of respect from the East Coast was rare for a Bay Area rapper. “Other than Pac, I never saw anybody get love like that,” PK recounts.

Deeper than rap

As Jacka’s star rose, instead of staying in the streets or partying 24/7, he could often be seen in Richmond’s Masjid An-Noor on Cutting Boulevard. Filled with books and ruby-red rugs, the mosque provided Jacka with solace in searching for Allah.

He could just as easily be over at Masjid Al-Islam on 82nd and MacArthur in Oakland — or anywhere he could continue his search for knowledge and a higher understanding of Islamic philosophy. Kevin, a.k.a. K9, his former assistant manager, says that “Islam spoke to more of the realities that he was seeing. He got interested and read the Qu’ran in jail, and went back to it often.”

K9 recalls a day in 2008, when Jacka brought him to Rumi Bookstore in Fremont, owned by respected teacher Feraidoon Mojadedi. Jacka bought up a series of lectures from Zaytuna College Founder Hamza Yusuf. One of the books recommended to him was called Purification of the Heart, a Mauritanian sacred text from 1844 CE about the spiritual diseases of the heart (greed, anger, jealousy) and their cures.

After studying the text deeply in 2009, Jacka released a song with the same title. A rap song with Islamic themes — the streets went nuts for it.

When asked how such an unlikely situation could unfold, Mojadedi says that Jacka “was with the right people, in the right place, with the right intention.”

Those intentions took The Jacka across the planet, something most kids from the Bay can only dream of.

Writing without a pen

Philadelphia rapper Freeway met Jacka in 2001 while on tour with Jay-Z in Oakland. Once they connected, they never stopped working together, be it in the studio or learning about their faith. They traveled across Africa together in 2012, and went on a lecture tour in the UK in 2014 on the topic of Islam and hip-hop.

“I realized that they [Bay Area rappers like Jacka] were just like me,” Freeway says today. “They were living just like me. They were Muslim, but they were on the West Coast.”

In the studio, Freeway says, Jacka was a force of nature.

“He mastered writing [songs] without a pen. He would write in his phone. But by the time he got to What Happened to the World, he said, ‘Yeah Free, I mastered writing [whole songs] without a pen.’” Jacka was keeping whole songs complete, in his head, with no paper and no phone.

While on tour together, Freeway says he saw Jacka literally give people the shirt off his back: “He would get an outfit for the tour. Then when he got off stage he would give the hoodie away. When he died it affected me more than with some people I grew up with. That’s how much our hearts connected.”

Freeway was not alone in that feeling. Bay Area rap fans and Muslims across the planet are still mourning Dominick Newton, a.k.a. the Jacka, a.k.a. Shaheed Akbar. However, his impact on the streets — and in the hearts of young Muslims — will remain through his music for decades to come.

Adisa Banjoko is an author and curator of hip-hop history. In 2015, he delivered a lecture on The Jacka and Malcolm X at the Malcolm X 50 Conference at Lehigh University.

This story has been updated to reflect that Newton was born in Phoenix, Ariz., and not Richmond, Calif. as originally stated.