Black Revolutionary H. Rap Brown Dies At 82

Al-Amin was a prominent civil rights leader who advocated for armed resistance against white supremacy.
He was a target of the federal government for his radical views and activities.
After a controversial conviction, Al-Amin spent his later years as a local businessman and spiritual leader.

Black revolutionary Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, known as H. Rap Brown until he converted to Islam while in federal prison in the 1970s, has died at the age of 82.

Born Hubert Geroid Brown in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on Oct. 4, 1943, Al-Amin was undoubtedly one of the pro-Black civil rights leaders of the ’60s and ’70s who defined the very concept of armed resistance and the outright rejection of the nonviolent approach to fighting white supremacy and anti-Black oppression.

“Violence is necessary. Violence is a part of America’s culture. It is as American as cherry pie,” he once famously said.

In fact, according to AzatTV, in 1967, Al-Amin succeeded Stokely Carmichael, aka Kwame Ture, as Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) chairman. Carmichael, who is also an iconic Black revolutionary who didn’t shy away from preaching armed resistance to his people, joked to reporters, “You’ll be happy to have me back when you hear from him. He’s a bad man.”

That’s quite the statement coming from the great Kwame Ture. It would be like King Kong warning reporters to watch out for Godzilla.

As for the SNCC, according to the New York Times, one of Al-Amin’s first orders of business as the organization’s new chair was to remove the word “nonviolent” from its name, persuading the organization’s leaders to change it to the Student National Coordinating Committee.

Like many prominent civil rights leaders — whether they believed in nonviolent protest or not — Al-Amin became a target of the federal government, whose efforts to undermine the Black liberation and civil rights movements are well-documented.

The government was hostile enough towards Black people who preached about peace on the journey to freedom and equality; it had no tolerance for Black people who preached about taking up arms to combat the nationwide oppression and violence against Black people, which the government has never been nearly as passionate about quelling.

From the Times:

That summer, as riots erupted in Black neighborhoods in more than 100 American cities, Mr. Al-Amin made himself known to a wider audience through speeches that gave voice to Black anger and righteous indignation over a century of unfulfilled expectations since the end of slavery.

“Black folk built America, and if it don’t come around, we’re gonna burn America down,” he would say, a call-to-arms he delivered hundreds of times from 1967 to 1969 on street corners and college campuses and in meeting halls across the country.

“You’ve got to arm yourself,” he said. “If you’re going to loot, loot yourself a gun store.”

After five days of rioting in Detroit that left 43 people dead and some 2,000 buildings destroyed in July 1967, Mr. Al-Amin declared that violence would be the new language of race relations. “I don’t think you could articulate the sentiments of Black people any better than they just did in Detroit,” he said.

The rhetoric gave him a high profile in the news media, made him the target of F.B.I. surveillance and led to his repeated arrest on gun-related, arson and conspiracy charges. His actions also helped ensure passage in 1968 of the first law in the nation’s history to make it illegal “to incite, organize, promote or encourage” a riot.

Conservatives in Congress attached the provision to the landmark 1968 fair housing law as a condition of their support. Though they were reacting to riots in Detroit, Newark and the Watts section of Los Angeles, in which Mr. Al-Amin had played no known role, they called the measure the “H. Rap Brown Federal Anti-Riot Act.”

Mr. Al-Amin told reporters who sought his reaction: “We don’t control anybody. The Black people are rebelling. You don’t organize rebellions.”

Al-Amin went into hiding in 1970, while he was facing federal and state charges in five cities. He spent 18 months on the FBI’s Most Wanted list before resurfacing in Manhattan on Oct. 16, 1971, only to be caught up in an alleged shootout with New York City police officers, who claimed he and several accomplices had tried to hold up an uptown Manhattan tavern, which Al-Amin denied. In 1973, he was convicted of armed robbery and assault but acquitted of attempted murder. He served five years of a five-to-15-year sentence at the notorious Attica Correctional Facility, where he converted to Islam and adopted the name Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin.

Unfortunately, it would not be the last time he was sent to prison.

Al-Amin was released on parole in 1976. He was a new man. He moved to Atlanta, where his wife, Karina, had established a law practice, and he publicly renounced the revolutionary ambitions for which he had become famous, or infamous as far as white America was concerned.

Al-Amin founded a mosque, called the Community Masjid, and opened a small general store selling groceries, incense and Korans. And that’s who he was for the next 25 years or so; he was a local businessman and spiritual leader. He was an organizer of summer youth games and programs meant to curb street crime and drug trafficking in Atlanta’s West End.

However, to the federal government, he was still an enemy of the state.

More from the Times:

Quoting from F.B.I. documents and local law enforcement officials, the newspaper said that the F.B.I. had sent paid informants to infiltrate Mr. Al-Amin’s mosque and helped local police investigate possible links between Mr. Al-Amin and a variety of criminal activities, including terrorist plots, a gunrunning syndicate, a series of Atlanta bank robberies, an explosives-making ring and 14 murders in the city between 1990 and 1996.

No links were found, the newspaper said.

In 1995, a neighborhood resident who was shot near his store named Mr. Al-Amin as the assailant but later recanted, saying the police had pressured him into making a false accusation. (He said he did not really know who shot him.) Mr. Al-Amin’s lawyer said at the time that the police were looking for any excuse to put Mr. Al-Amin in jail.

But he remained out of jail, and relatively out of the public eye, until March 2000.

On March 16 that year, Al-Amin was at his store when he was approached by Fulton County Deputy Sheriff Richard Kinchen and his partner, Aldranon English, who had an arrest warrant for missing a court appearance on a minor traffic case. Both officers were reportedly shot by a heavily armed man standing on the street outside. Kinchen was fatally shot, while English survived his bullet wounds. He identified Al-Amin as the shooter, and Al-Amin was arrested four days later at a friend’s home in rural Alabama. While English said he was sure he shot his assailant, and that account was supposedly supported by a trail of blood leading from the spot where the gunman had stood, when Al-Amin was arrested, he showed no signs of being shot or even injured. “The police and prosecutors later said that the blood had proved to be a false lead, unrelated to the March 16 shootings,” the Times reported.

Once again, Al-Amin denied the charges against him.

“The F.B.I. has a file on me containing 44,000 documents,” he told the Times in 2002, speaking from a pay phone at the Fulton County jail on the eve of the trial. “At some point, they had to make something happen to justify all the investigations and all the money they’ve spent.

“More than anything else, they still fear a personality, a character coming up among African Americans who could galvanize support among all the different elements of the African-American community,” he continued

Still, Al-Amin was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole, avoiding the death penalty after a parade of witnesses testified on his behalf, including former Atlanta mayor and United Nations ambassador Andrew Young, who said Al-Amin had helped reduce crime and improve the living conditions of people in the West End.

The cause of Al-Amin’s death has not been reported, although, according to The Washington Informer, he had multiple myeloma, and his health had been deteriorating for years.

Rest well, Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin. You were a true revolutionary and warrior for Black liberation, and the people will not forget you, your legacy or your message.