Biography
Watani Tyehimba is a longtime activist of the New Afrikan Independence Movement and a founding member of the New Afrikan People's Organization and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. A former United Parcel Service mechanic and father of three, he was jailed on August 21, 1986 for civil contempt after he refused to provide a photograph, fingerprints and handwriting samples to a federal grand jury investigating the Black liberation movement — part of the long inquiry into the October 1981 Brink's expropriation, in which prosecutors alleged he had helped harbor Mutulu Shakur and Cheri Dalton (Nehanda Abiodun). Held as a grand-jury resister rather than on any criminal conviction, he was released from federal custody on October 7, 1987
