Muhammad Ahmad

Muhammad Ahmad (born Maxwell Curtis Stanford Jr. on 31 July 1941), also known as Max Stanford, is an American civil rights activist. He was a cofounder and the national chairman of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), a Marxist–Leninist, organisation active from 1962 to 1968. He is the author of We Will Return in the Whirlwind: Black Radical Organizations 1960-1975 (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 2007), with an introduction by John Bracey Jr. As of 2024, he is working with Dylan Davis, PhD candidate in politics at the University of California Santa Cruz, on an updated edition.

Political activism Early life Max Stanford was born on 31 July 1941 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. He described his family as "very political" and attributes the development of his political consciousness to his father. By 1962, the group came into contact with Donald Freeman, a school teacher from Cleveland, Ohio. With the guidance of Freeman, and black nationalist The group initially called themselves the Reform Action Movement (RAM) because they felt the term "revolutionary" would cause panic among the college's administration. and Stanford was even referred to as "the most dangerous man in America", by J. Edgar Hoover. In 1966, Stanford was arrested in New York, along with 15 other RAM members, accused of conspiring to assassinate NAACP leader Roy Wilkins and the Urban League's Whitney Young.

He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Massachusetts and a Master of Arts from Atlanta University in 1986. He completed his Ph.D. in Union Institute and University in 1992.

On 5 January 2021, a GoFundMe campaign was launched for donations towards paying for medical bills, a stair lift for his home, a book to be authored with the assistance of John Bracey Jr., and "securing and transforming his 6,000-plus volume book collectionwhich specializes in rare and classical books on Black history, socialism and world civilizationinto a publicly accessible library." It stated that Stanford "has been hospitalized numerous times over the last several years after suffering a stroke and experiencing kidney malfunctions which have repeatedly resulted in severe water retention known as edema. In addition, Doc suffers from gout, arthritis and high blood pressure."

Written works Basic Tenets of Revolutionary Black Nationalism (1977) History of RAM – Revolutionary Action Movement (1979) A Case Study of an Urban Revolutionary Movement in Western Capitalist Society (1986)