Max Stanford
The Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) was the only secular political organization that Malcolm X joined before his fateful trip to Mecca in 1964. Early in 1963, Malcolm took the young Philadelphia militant Max Stanford under his wing. During the last few years of Malcolm's life, few persons were as closely associated with him as was the young Max Stanford. Stanford was a student militant who had influenced both the National Student Youth movement and the Students for a Democratic Society in the early 1960s with a vision of radical black nationalism. Stanford fused the thought of Robert F. Williams on armed self defense with the philosophy of Malcolm X on black self-determination.
To these tenets, Stanford added a sophisticated Marxian revolutionary philosophy, which he derived from a close personal association with the legendary Queen Mother Audley Moore. Malcolm put his blessings on Stanford's Revolutionary Action Movement by becoming an officer of the organization. Among the most important of Stanford's contributions were his assistance to Amiri Baraka and the Newark, New Jersey, movement, his support for members of the Black Liberation Army under Assata Shakur, and his encouragement of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit. He was influential in efforts to encourage Robert F. Williams to assume a nationally prominent leadership role upon Williams return from exile in China. Stanford helped found the African Liberation Support Committee and promoted the concept of "reparations" to descendants of American slavery. And he remained an important voice of criticism of Black Panther strategies of the 1970s. He established the African Peoples Party in the early 1970s in an effort to keep the flame of revolutionary nationalism alive. While underground he embraced Islam and since the early 1970s, he has been known as Muhammad Ahmad. Since the 1970s, he has been one of the leading historians and theoreticians of revolutionary black nationalism.
(Source: "The Papers of Robert F. Williams," Lexis/Nexis)