By Stephen Oduntan
Contributing Writer
SOUTH LOS ANGELES — Just off Stocker Street, where manicured lawns brush against a boundless blue sky, a quiet two-story stucco building settles into the block.
It’s easy to miss. But inside a modest ground-floor apartment, the last living member of the Watts Prophets keeps watch over half a century of Black cultural memory.
The space hums with history: a bed draped in red, black, green, and gold yarn; a framed Ernest Watson print of Haitian revolutionaries mid-uprising; prayer books stacked beside poetry; a cane resting near the window.
Afternoon light filters through the blinds, landing on plaques, hats, and handwritten pages — small evidence of a large life. Outside, a lawnmower drones — cutting through the quiet like an unwanted guest. In the corner, Amde Hamilton leans back in his chair, ready to speak.
“What does Watts mean to you today?” he is asked.
He reaches beside the bed, lifts a slim book of poems and begins to read aloud. The words come slow and deliberate — part offering, part warning, all survival. This is how he communicates: sometimes in conversation, more often in verse.
He co-founded the Watts Prophets in the late 1960s, fusing jazz, spoken word, and righteous fury. Their sound rose from the ashes of post-riot Watts and helped shape what would become hip-hop — before the world had a name for it. Despite his contributions, his name rarely appears in the history books.
“I’ve seen people take what we did and call it new,” Hamilton said. “They don’t mention us. But we laid the ground. With no blueprint.”
Even language, he says, is born of violence.
“I’m Creole,” he says softly. “I was raped into existence.” It’s not metaphor — it’s inheritance. “That’s how a lot of us got here. Violence. Forced bloodlines. And then they tell us we’re too militant? After Emmett Till? After everything they’ve done to us?”
He still remembers when resistance first took root. At 15, after seeing Till’s mutilated body in Jet magazine, he and a friend were discussing the murder in their school locker room.
A white classmate chimed in, saying they should have hung Till. The comment was so cold, so merciless, it lit a fuse. Minutes later, they attacked the boy.
“Hung him up in the showers. I went to juvie for that,” Hamilton said. A confession stripped of romance but full of clarity. “That was my first revolutionary act.”
His early poems refused to flatter.
“My fellow poets told me not to write poems criticizing Black folks,” he said. “But I wasn’t mad at Whitey — I was mad at us. For crossing each other out, talking about ‘brother this’ and ‘Whitey that.’”
For him, revolution had to begin at home.
The Watts Writers Workshop gave that revolution structure. But structure drew surveillance.
“The FBI burned it down,” he said. “It’s documented.”
COINTELPRO had already infiltrated Black communities across the country. The Watts Prophets were no exception.
“One word — ‘militant’ — that was all it took to destroy our careers,” Hamilton said. “We never got invited to the major universities — not even Black colleges. It was our own people who helped shut us out.”
He doesn’t mince words.
“The educated Black folks — some of them meant well,” he said. “But they came into our communities like gangbangers. Took the civil rights money. Took the spotlight. Left the grassroots starving.”
Hamilton draws a direct line from that betrayal to the homeless encampments lining L.A.’s sidewalks today.
“That’s us,” he says. “That’s who got left behind.”
In the 1970s, he turned toward the sacred. He joined the Ethiopian Orthodox Church — among the first African Americans to do so.
“I needed something ancient. Something untouched by the western lie,” he said.
That journey led him to Jamaica, where he shared poetry at Bob Marley’s studio. Marley stayed up all night reading his book and listening to his album.
“He said he wanted to record with the Watts Brothers,” Hamilton said. “But he got sick before we could.”
After Marley’s death, he was invited to speak at the funeral.
Back in Los Angeles, he helped care for Nina Simone during a mental health crisis — and eventually baptized her into the faith.
“She didn’t want to see a preacher,” he said. “But I wasn’t a preacher. I was a priest.”
She stayed in his care for two months. He’s shared stages with Marley and comforted Simone in crisis — but when he speaks of love, he talks about his wife.
“She passed away about nine years ago. I miss her dearly,” he said, his voice slowing. “She was a poet, too. We used to write together.”
For decades, she preserved his archives, typed his pages, helped shape the very legacy he now protects. Her presence, though invisible, fills the room.
At 85, Hamilton still writes. Still teaches. Still bears witness.
He’s lived long enough to see the cycles repeat — but also to see how people resist. Asked what the solution is for Black America, he doesn’t hesitate.
“We have to return to ourselves,” he said. “Our roots. Our real names. Our stories. No one’s coming to save us. We’ve got to organize. Feed each other. Love each other. That’s how we fight.”
Then, almost as if to show what that return looks like, he lifts the same book he opened earlier.
“You want to know what Watts means to me today?”
He doesn’t wait for an answer. He begins reading — steady, low. A poem about fire. About memory and rebirth. About what was taken and what refuses to die.
The room goes still.
Even the lawnmower outside falls silent.
Stephen Oduntan is a freelance reporter for Wave Newspapers.
