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H. Rap Brown | |
|---|---|
,_news_conf(erence)_(LOC)_(15356484161).jpg) Brown in 1967 | |
| 5th Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee | |
| In office May 1967 – June 1968 | |
| Preceded by | Stokely Carmichael |
| Succeeded by | Phil Hutchings |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Hubert Gerold Brown October 4, 1943 Baton Rouge, Louisiana, U.S. |
| Died | November 23, 2025 (aged 82) |
| Spouse | Karima al-Amin |
| Known for | Black Power movement |
| Criminal information | |
| Convictions |
|
| Criminal penalty | Life in prison |
| Imprisoned at |
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Jamil Abdullah al-Amin (born Hubert Gerold Brown; October 4, 1943 – November 23, 2025), was an American Muslim cleric who was the fifth chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s. Best known as H. Rap Brown, he served as the Black Panther Party's minister of justice during a short-lived (six months) alliance between SNCC and the Black Panther Party.[2][3]
Brown was perhaps known for his proclamations during that period, such as, "Violence is as American as cherry pie",[4] and, "If America don't come around, we're gonna burn it down."[5] He was also known for his autobiography, Die Nigger Die! He served a life sentence for murder following the shooting of two Fulton County, Georgia, sheriff's deputies in 2000.[6]
Activism
Brown's activism in the civil rights movement included involvement with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Brown was introduced into SNCC by his older brother Ed. He first visited Cambridge, Maryland, with Cleveland Sellers in the summer of 1963, during the period of Gloria Richardson's leadership in the local movement. He witnessed the first riot between whites and blacks in the city over civil rights issues, and was impressed by the local civil rights movement's willingness to use armed self-defense against racial attacks.[citation needed]
He later organized for SNCC during the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer, while transferring to Howard University for his studies. Representing Howard's SNCC chapter, Brown attended a contentious civil rights meeting at the White House with President Lyndon B. Johnson during the Selma crisis of 1965 as Alabama activists attempted to march for voting rights.[7]
Major federal civil rights legislation was passed in 1964 and 1965, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to establish federal oversight and enforcement of rights. In 1966, Brown organized in Greene County, Alabama to achieve black voter registration and implementation of the recently-passed Voting Rights Act.[8]
Elected SNCC chairman in 1967, Brown continued Stokely Carmichael's fiery support for "Black Power" and urban rebellions in the Northern ghettos.[9]
During the summer of 1967, Brown toured the nation, calling for violent resistance to the government, which he called "The Fourth Reich". "Negroes should organize themselves", he told a rally in Washington, D.C., and "carry on guerilla warfare in all the cities". They should "make the Viet Cong look like Sunday school teachers". He declared, "I say to America, Fuck it! Freedom or death!"[10]
Cambridge riot incident
In this period, Cambridge, Maryland, had an active civil rights movement, led by Gloria Richardson. In July 1967 Brown spoke in the city, saying "It's time for Cambridge to explode, baby. Black folks built America, and if America don't come around, we're going to burn America down."[11] Gunfire reportedly broke out later, and both Brown and a police officer were wounded. A fire started that night and by the next day, 17 buildings were destroyed by an expanding fire "in a two-block area of Pine Street, the center of African-American commerce, culture and community."[12] Brown was charged with inciting a riot, due to his speech.[13][12]
Brown was also charged with carrying a gun across state lines. A secret 1967 FBI memo had called for "neutralizing" Brown. He became a target of the agency's COINTELPRO program, which was intended to disrupt and disqualify civil rights leaders. The federal charges against him were never proven.[14] Brown was defended in the gun violation case by civil rights advocates Murphy Bell of Baton Rouge, well-known radical lawyer William Kunstler, and Howard Moore Jr., general counsel for SNCC. Feminist attorney Flo Kennedy also assisted Brown and led his defense committee, winning support for him from some chapters of the National Organization for Women.[15]
The Cambridge fire was among incidents investigated by the 1967 Kerner Commission. But their investigative documents were not published with their 1968 report. Historian Dr. Peter Levy studied these papers in researching his book Civil War on Race Street: The Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge, Maryland (2003). He argues there was no riot in Cambridge. Brown was documented as completing his speech in Cambridge at 10 pm July 24, then walking a woman home. He was shot by a deputy sheriff allegedly without provocation. Brown was hastily treated for his injuries and secretly taken by supporters out of Cambridge.[12]
Later that night a small fire broke out, but the police chief and fire company did not respond for two hours. In discussing his book, Levy has said that the fire's spread and ultimate destructive cost appeared to be due not to a riot, but to the deliberate inaction of the Cambridge police and fire departments, which had hostile relations with the black community.[12] In a later book, Levy notes that Brice Kinnamon, head of the Cambridge police department, said that the city had no racial problems, and that Brown was the "sole" cause of the disorder, and it was "a well-planned Communist attempt to overthrow the government".[16]
While being held for trial, Brown continued his high-profile activism. He accepted a request from the Student Afro-American Society of Columbia University to help represent and co-organize the April 1968 Columbia protests against university expansion into Harlem park land in order to build a gymnasium.[17]
He also contributed writing from jail to the radical magazine Black Mask, which was edited and published by the New York activist group Up Against the Wall Motherfucker. In his 1968 article titled "H. Rap Brown From Prison: Lasima Tushinde Mbilashika", Brown writes of going on a hunger strike and his willingness to give up his life in order to achieve change.[18]
Brown's trial was originally to take place in Cambridge, but there was a change of venue and the trial was moved to Bel Air, Maryland, to start in March 1970. On March 9, 1970, two SNCC officials, Ralph Featherstone and William ("Che") Payne, died on U.S. Route 1 south of Bel Air, when a bomb on the front floorboard of their car exploded, killing both occupants. The bomb's origin is disputed: some say the bomb was planted in an assassination attempt, and others say Payne was carrying it to the courthouse where Brown was to be tried. The next night, the Cambridge courthouse was bombed.[19]
1970 and later life
Brown was a fugitive from May 1970 until October 1971. He did not appear for trial and disappeared, causing him to be posted on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Ten Most Wanted List. He was arrested after a reported shootout with officers in New York City following an attempted robbery of a bar there.[20] He was convicted of robbery and served five years (1971–76) in Attica Prison in Western New York.[citation needed] While in prison, Brown converted to Islam. He formally changed his name from Hubert Gerold Brown to Jamil Abdullah al-Amin.[citation needed]
After his release, he moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where he opened a grocery store.[citation needed] He became an imam, a Muslim spiritual leader, in the National Ummah, one of the nation's largest black Muslim groups.[citation needed] He also was a community activist in Atlanta's West End neighborhood. He preached against drugs and gambling. It has since been suggested that al-Amin changed his life again when he became affiliated with the Dar ul-Islam Movement.[21]
2000 arrest and conviction
On May 31, 1999, al-Amin was pulled over in Marietta, Georgia, by police officer Johnny Mack for driving a suspected stolen vehicle. During a search, al-Amin was found to have a police badge in his pocket. He also had a bill of sale in his pocket, explaining his possession of the stolen car, and he claimed that he had been issued an honorary police badge by Mayor John Jackson, who served as the Mayor of White Hall, Alabama,[22][23] Jackson verified this statement. Despite this, al-Amin was charged with speeding, auto theft, and impersonating a police officer.[24]
On March 16, 2000, in Fulton County, Georgia, Sheriff's deputies Ricky Kinchen and Aldranon English went to al-Amin's home to execute an arrest warrant for failing to appear in court over the charges.[11] After determining that the home was unoccupied, the deputies drove away and were shortly passed by a black Mercedes headed for the house. Kinchen (the more senior deputy) noted the suspect vehicle, turned the patrol car around, and drove up to the Mercedes, stopping nose to nose. English approached the Mercedes and told the single occupant to show his hands. The occupant opened fire with a .223 rifle. English ran between the two cars while returning fire from his handgun, and was hit four times. Kinchen was shot with the rifle and a 9 mm handgun.[citation needed]
The next day, Kinchen died of his wounds at Grady Memorial Hospital. English survived his wounds. He identified al-Amin as the shooter from six photos he was shown while recovering in the hospital.[citation needed] Another source said English identified him shortly before going into surgery for his wounds.[citation needed]
After the shootout, al-Amin fled Atlanta, going to White Hall, Alabama. He was tracked down by U.S. Marshals who started with a blood trail at the shooting site, and arrested by law enforcement officers after a four-day manhunt. Al-Amin was wearing body armor at the time of his arrest. He showed no wounds.[25] Officers found a 9 mm handgun near his arrest site. Firearms identification testing showed that this was used to shoot Kinchen and English, but al-Amin's fingerprints were not found on the weapon. Later, al-Amin's black Mercedes was found with bullet holes in it.[26]
His lawyers argued he was innocent of the shooting. Defense attorneys noted that al-Amin's fingerprints were not found on the murder weapon, and he was not wounded in the shooting, as one of the deputies said the shooter was. A trail of blood found at the scene was tested and did not belong to al-Amin or either of the deputies.[27] A test by the state concluded that it was animal blood, but these results have been disputed because there was no clear chain of custody to verify the sample and testing process.[24] Deputy English had said that the killer's eyes were gray, but al-Amin's were brown.[25]
At al-Amin's trial, prosecutors noted that he had never provided an alibi for his whereabouts at the time of the shootout, nor any explanation for fleeing the state afterward. He also did not explain why the weapons used in the shootout were found near him during his arrest.[28]
On March 9, 2002, nearly two years after the shootings, al-Amin was convicted of 13 criminal charges, including Kinchen's murder and aggravated assault in shooting English. Four days later, he was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole (LWOP).[29] He was sent to Georgia State Prison, the state's maximum-security facility near Reidsville, Georgia.[citation needed]
Otis Jackson, a man incarcerated for unrelated charges, claimed that he committed the Fulton County shootings, and confessed this two years before al-Amin was convicted of the same crime. The court did not consider Jackson's statement as evidence. Jackson's statements corroborated details from 911 calls following the shooting, including a bleeding man seen limping from the scene: Jackson said he knocked on doors to solicit a ride while suffering from wounds sustained in the firefight with deputies Kinchen and English.[30] Jackson recanted his statement two days after making it, but later confessed again in a sworn affidavit, stating that he had only recanted after prison guards threatened him for being a "cop killer".[24] Prosecutors refuted Jackson's testimony, claiming he couldn't have shot the deputies as he was wearing an ankle tag for house confinement that would have shown his location. Al-Amin's lawyers allege that the tag was faulty.[31]
Al-Amin appealed his conviction on the basis of a racial conspiracy against him, despite both Fulton County deputies being black. In May 2004, the Supreme Court of Georgia unanimously ruled to uphold al-Amin's conviction.[28][32][33]
In August 2007, al-Amin was transferred to federal custody, as Georgia officials decided he was too high-profile for the Georgia prison system to handle. He was first held in a holdover facility in the USP Atlanta; two weeks later he was moved to a federal transfer facility in Oklahoma, pending assignment to a federal penitentiary.[citation needed]
On October 21, 2007, al-Amin was transferred to ADX Florence, a supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.[34] He was under an unofficial gag order, prevented from having any interviews with writers, journalists or biographers.[35]
Al-Amin sought retrial through the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Investigative journalist, Hamzah Raza, has written more about Otis Jackson's confession to the deputy shootings in 2000, and said that this evidence should have been considered by the court. It had the potential of exonerating al-Amin.[36] However, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected his appeal on July 31, 2019.[37]
In April 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from al-Amin.[38] His family and supporters continued to petition for a new trial.[39][40]
Health and death
On July 18, 2014, having been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, al-Amin was transferred to Butner Federal Medical Center in North Carolina.[41] In the late 2010s to the early 2020s, he was incarcerated at the United States Penitentiary, Tucson.[1]
In March 2025, al-Amin was transferred once again to FMC Butner after family members requested he receive medical help.[42][43] He died at FMC Butner on November 23, 2025, at the age of 82.[44][45]
Works
- Die Nigger Die!: A Political Autobiography, Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill Books, 1969; London: Allison & Busby, 1970.
- Revolution by the Book: The Rap Is Live, 1993.
Related Works
- The Imprisonment of Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown): Is It A Government Conspiracy? - El-Hajj Mauri Saalakhan, Silver Spring, MD: The Afia Foundation, Inc., 2020.
- The Dar Ul-Islam Movement in America Part 1: The Administration" - Imam Isa Abdul Kareem, North Haven, CT, 2025.
See also
- Timeline of the civil rights movement
- Black Panther Party
- Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
- Anti-Riot Act of 1968
Notes
- "Federal Bureau of Prisons Inmate Locator". Federal Bureau of Prisons. Retrieved April 1, 2018. (BOP Register Number 99974-555)
- H. Rap Brown Summary. BookRags. Retrieved May 3, 2022.
- "H. Rap Brown". SNCC Digital Gateway. Retrieved September 16, 2021.
- "Comm; CBS Library of Contemporary Quotations; H. Rap Brown". American Archive of Public Broadcasting. Retrieved September 16, 2021.
- "Untitled1". msa.maryland.gov. Retrieved September 16, 2021.
- Brumback, Kate. "Court rules against cop-killing militant formerly known as H. Rap Brown". The Montgomery Advertiser. Retrieved September 16, 2021.
- Lawson, Steven F. (January 13, 2015). Civil Rights Crossroads: Nation, Community, and the Black Freedom Struggle. University Press of Kentucky. p. 306. ISBN 9780813157122.
- "H. Rap Brown – SNCC Digital Gateway". SNCC Digital Gateway. Retrieved October 2, 2018.
- Levy, Peter B. (January 25, 2018). The Great Uprising. Cambridge University Press. p. 67. ISBN 9781108422406.
- Malcolm McLaughlin (2014). The Long, Hot Summer of 1967: Urban Rebellion in America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Firestone, David (March 21, 2000). "60's Rights Leader is Arrested in Death of Sheriff's Deputy". The New York Times.
- HOLT, DUSTIN (July 23, 2017). "Author debunks riot myth". Dorchester Star.
- "Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Actions 1960–1970". Mapping American Social Movements.
- Peter B. Levy (2018). The Great Uprising. Cambridge University Press. p. 113. ISBN 9781108422406.
- Sherie M. Randolph (2015). "Defending Black Liberation Leader H. Rap Brown". Florynce "Flo" Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical. UNC Press Books. pp. 140–143. ISBN 9781469647524.
- Levy, Peter B. (January 25, 2018). The Great Uprising: Race Riots in Urban America during the 1960s. Cambridge University Press. pp. 70–89. ISBN 9781108422406.
- Bradley, Stefan M. (August 27, 2018). "1968 protests at Columbia University called attention to 'Gym Crow' and got worldwide attention". The Conversation. Retrieved December 7, 2018.
- Hahne, Morea, Ron, Ben (1993). Black Mask & Up Against the Wall Motherfucker : The Incomplete Works of Ron Hahne, Ben Morea and the Black Mask Group. London: Unpopular Books & Sabotage Editions. pp. 74–75.
- Todd Holden (March 23, 1970). "Bombing: A Way of Protest and Death". Time. Archived from the original on June 4, 2011. Retrieved February 14, 2010.
- "H. Rap Brown Shot in Holdup". Herald and Review. October 17, 1971. p. 1.
- Black America, Prisons, and Radical Islam (PDF). Center for Islamic Pluralism. September 2008. ISBN 978-0-9558779-1-9. Retrieved February 14, 2010.
- Siddiqui, Obaid H. (May 18, 2018). "The Unofficial Gag Order of Jamil Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown): 16 Years in Prison, Still Not Allowed to Speak". The Root. Retrieved November 25, 2025.
- "Former Alabama Mayor Sentenced to Two Years in Prison for Filing False Tax Returns". U.S. Department of Justice. July 15, 2011. Retrieved November 25, 2025.
- "Rap Sheet: H. Rap Brown, Civil Rights Revolutionary - Cop Killer/FBI Target?" (PDF). December 2012. Retrieved February 13, 2022.
- "Muslim Cleric Jamil Al-Amin Is Convicted of Murder; Prosecutors Urge Jurors to Sentence The Muslim Spiritual Leader to Death". Democracy Now!. March 12, 2002. Retrieved November 30, 2016.
- "Ex-Black Panther convicted of murder". CNN. March 9, 2002. Archived from the original on January 2, 2007. Retrieved June 10, 2022.
- Browne, Rembert (November 1, 2021). "The Many Lives of H. Rap Brown". Time. Retrieved January 9, 2022.
- "Law.com". Law.com. Retrieved November 30, 2018.
- "Deputy Sheriff Ricky Leon Kinchen". Officer Down Memorial Page. Archived from the original on September 30, 2007. Retrieved January 8, 2008.
- Siddiqui, Obaid H. (May 30, 2018). "The Unofficial Gag Order of Jamil Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown): 16 Years in Prison, Still Not Allowed to Speak". The Root. Retrieved November 30, 2018.
- Proctor, Aungelique (August 10, 2020). "Civil rights groups call to reopen case of Georgia deputy's murder". Fox 5 Atlanta. Retrieved August 25, 2021.
- Hart, Ariel, "Court in Georgia Upholds Former Militant's Conviction", The New York Times, May 25, 2004
- Al-Amin v. State, 597 S.E.2d 332 (Ga. 2004).
- Bluestein, Greg (August 3, 2007). "1960s Militant Moved to Federal Custody". ABC News. Archived from the original on April 11, 2008. Retrieved January 18, 2008.
- Siddiqui, Obaid H. (May 30, 2018). "The Unofficial Gag Order of Jamil Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown): 16 Years in Prison, Still Not Allowed to Speak". The Root. Retrieved February 6, 2022.
- Raza, Hamzah (May 2, 2019). "Potential Retrial In Sight For Imam Jamil Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown)". MuslimMatters.org.
- "Court rules against militant formerly known as H. Rap Brown". ABC News.
- "Supreme Court declines H. Rap Brown case". Associated Press. April 6, 2020.
- whathappened2rap (April 6, 2020). "What Happened 2 Rap". whathappened2rap. Retrieved August 3, 2020.
- Collins, Sam P. K. (February 2, 2025). "Political Prisoner Jamil Al-Amin In Need of Urgent Medical Care, Family and Comrades Say".
- "Imam Jamil Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown) transferred to Butner Federal Medical Center, N.C.", San Francisco Bay View newspaper, July 18, 2014.
- Writer, Staff (March 18, 2025). "What Happened to H. Rap Brown?". The Michigan Chronicle. Retrieved September 2, 2025.
- Collins, Sam P. K. (February 2, 2025). "Political Prisoner Jamil Al-Amin In Need of Urgent Medical Care, Family and Comrades Say". The Washington Informer. Retrieved September 2, 2025.
- Vitello, Paul (November 23, 2025). "Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, Black Power Activist Known as H. Rap Brown, Dies at 82". The New York Times. Retrieved November 23, 2025.
- "CAIR, CAIR-Georgia Extend Condolences After Imam Jamil Al-Amin Passes Away in Prison for Crime He Did Not Commit" (Press release). November 23, 2025. Retrieved November 24, 2025.
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Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, Black Power Activist Known as H. Rap Brown, Dies at 82
A charismatic orator in the 1960s, he called for armed resistance to white oppression. As a Muslim cleric, he was convicted of murder in 2000 and died in detention.
Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, who as H. Rap Brown defined Black militancy in the 1960s with a call to arms against white oppression, and who later lived quietly as a Muslim cleric and shopkeeper until his arrest in 2000 in the murder of a sheriff’s deputy, died on Sunday in a federal prison hospital in North Carolina. He was 82.
His death, at the Federal Medical Center, Butner, was confirmed by Kristie Breshears, the director of communications for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which operates the hospital. She did not specify a cause. In February, The Washington Informer reported that Mr. Al-Amin had multiple myeloma and that his health was deteriorating.
He had been serving a life sentence without parole.
Before converting to Islam and changing his name in the 1970s, Mr. Al-Amin was one of the most incendiary orators among the Black Power activists who emerged in the late 1960s to challenge the leadership and nonviolent strategy of the civil rights movement.
An admirer of the Cuban revolution, he preached armed resistance and separatism, declaring: “Violence is necessary. Violence is a part of America’s culture. It is as American as cherry pie.”
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With his trademark black beret and sunglasses, dexterous mind and imposing 6-foot-5 inch frame — 7 feet, with his Afro — he was a persuasive and charismatic figure to many, adept at rallying Black audiences to his cause while alarming many white listeners.
Elected chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in May 1967, he made an immediate mark by getting the word “nonviolent” removed from its name, persuading the organization’s leaders to change it to the Student National Coordinating Committee.
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.
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“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.”
Wanted by the F.B.I.
Enmeshed in court proceedings resulting from federal and state charges he faced in five cities, Mr. Al-Amin went into hiding in 1970 and spent 18 months on the F.B.I.’s Most Wanted list. He resurfaced in Manhattan on Oct. 16, 1971, in dramatic fashion — wounded in a shootout with the New York City police. The police said he and several accomplices had tried to hold up an uptown Manhattan tavern and exchanged gunfire with officers who were pursuing them.
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Mr. Brown, who denied the charges, was convicted on charges of robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. He served five years of a five-to-15-year sentence at the Attica state prison in upstate New York.
By the time he was released on parole in 1976, he had converted to the Muslim Sunni sect known as Dar-ul Islam. By his account, he had become a new man with a new name. He moved to Atlanta, where his wife, Karima, had established a law practice, and publicly renounced the revolutionary ambitions of his youth.
Mr. Al-Amin founded a mosque, called the Community Masjid, opened a small general store selling groceries, incense and Qurans, and for the next quarter century was known to his neighbors as a local businessman and spiritual leader. He and his wife of 57 years, Karima Al-Amin, had two sons, Kairi and Ali Al-Amin, all of whom survive him.
In Atlanta’s West End, where he lived, Mr. Al-Amin organized summer youth games and led efforts to curb street crime and drug trafficking. The head of an Islamic civic group in Atlanta called him “a pillar of the Muslim community.”
Law enforcement authorities came to view him differently. Beginning shortly after the first World Trade Center bombing, in 1993, local and federal authorities began a series of investigations into Mr. Al-Amin’s activities, according to police files uncovered by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2000.
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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.
His re-emergence — like his resurfacing in 1971 — was announced by a hail of gunfire exchanged with the police.
A Deputy Sheriff Dead
While approaching Mr. Al-Amin’s store on the night of March 16 to serve Mr. Al-Amin with an arrest warrant for missing a court appearance on a minor traffic case, the Fulton County, Ga., deputy sheriff Richard Kinchen and his partner, Aldranon English, were both shot by a heavily armed man standing on the street outside. In an ensuing shootout, Mr. Kinchen was fatally shot in the abdomen. Mr. English was struck by four bullets but survived.
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That night, in a hospital, Mr. English identified Mr. Al-Amin as the assailant through a photograph and told investigators that he was pretty sure he had shot the man. His account was supported by a trail of blood leading from the spot where the gunman had stood.
Mr. Al-Amin was arrested four days later at a friend’s home in rural Alabama. He showed no sign of a gunshot wound or injury to explain the blood at the scene, as his lawyers later pointed out at his murder trial. The police and prosecutors later said that the blood had proved to be a false lead, unrelated to the March 16 shootings.
Mr. Al-Amin denied being the gunman and characterized his arrest as the latest in a series of secret government efforts to frame him.
“The F.B.I. has a file on me containing 44,000 documents,” he told The New York 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,” he added, “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.”
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A jury — nine of whose members were Black — convicted him after a three-week trial. The chief witness against him was Mr. English, who testified that on the night of the shootings, he and his partner approached Mr. Al-Amin on the street, told him they had a warrant and asked him to show his hands. “He said, ‘Yeah,’ frowned and swung up an assault rifle and started shooting,” Mr. English said in court.
In a death penalty hearing, a parade of witnesses testified on Mr. Al-Amin’s behalf, asking that his life be spared. One was Andrew Young, the former mayor of Atlanta and ambassador to the United Nations, who said that Mr. Al-Amin had helped reduce crime and improve conditions for many people in the city’s impoverished West End.
Louisiana-Born
Hubert Gerold Brown (Rap was a nickname from his youth) was born in Baton Rouge, La., on Oct. 4, 1943, the youngest of three children of Eddie and Thelma Brown. His father, who was serving in the Army when Hubert was born, worked for the Standard Oil company for 30 years. His mother worked two jobs — as a domestic and as a teacher at an orphanage for Black children — and was partial toward Hubert “because I was lighter,” he wrote in his 1969 autobiography, “Die, Nigger, Die!”
Light-skinned Black people, he wrote, were considered more likely to gain a foothold in white society, according to the hierarchy of skin color observed by his mother and her generation in the early 20th-century South. “Because I was lighter, it meant that I was supposed to get ahead,” he wrote, adding that the favor she showed him created tension between him and his two siblings, especially his older brother, Ed.
“Ed and I are very close now, and that color thing doesn’t come between us anymore,” he wrote. “But it’s a thing which could really damage the Black community if people don’t begin to understand it. Black is not a color but the way you think.”
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After graduating from a private school affiliated with Southern University, a historically Black institution in Baton Rouge (his mother insisted that all her children attend it), Mr. Al-Amin spent two years at Southern, then left for Washington to work in the civil rights movement with his brother. Ed Brown, a student at Howard University, had become active in organizing lunch-counter sit-ins for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Mr. Al-Amin participated in voter registration drives in Mississippi and Alabama and in rural Lowndes County, Ala., where only a handful of Black citizens were registered to vote, even though 85 percent of its population was Black. He became friendly with Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture), who was a veteran of the early 1960s Freedom Rides and one of S.N.C.C.’s rising stars.
In 1965, when Mr. Al-Amin was named head of the Washington, D.C., chapter of S.N.C.C., he joined a faction led by Mr. Carmichael, and calling itself the Young Turks, in urging the organization to take a more aggressive posture. Outmaneuvering moderate leaders like the S.N.C.C. chairman, John Lewis, the future Georgia congressman, and Julian Bond, who went on to become a Georgia state senator, the militant faction elected Mr. Carmichael chairman in 1966.
Mr. Carmichael made the first of his many “Black power” speeches shortly afterward, warning that until Black people achieved the necessary economic, political and firearm power — as was their right under the Second Amendment — there would never be racial harmony in America.
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By the time Mr. Al-Amin succeeded Mr. Carmichael as chairman in May 1967, S.N.C.C. had adopted a Black separatist agenda, a policy barring white people from leadership roles and the stated goal of achieving freedom, in the words of Malcolm X, the nationalist leader assassinated in 1965, “by any means necessary.”
The beginning of Mr. Al-Amin’s tenure coincided with the urban riots that swept the county in what came to be known as the Long Hot Summer of 1967.
Mr. Al-Amin visited Cincinnati in June to show support for the young Black men who had rioted for three nights running, then gave a speech the next day to several hundred youths in Dayton that the Dayton police said incited a window-breaking rampage covering 12 square blocks.
On July 24, after addressing a crowd of several thousand at a rally in Cambridge, Md. (“If Cambridge doesn’t come around, burn it down!” he told them. “Take your violence to the honkies!”), Mr. Al-Amin suffered a superficial gunshot wound in the forehead when the police fired their weapons to disperse the crowd, setting off a riot there, too.
Under Surveillance
In memos later made public, the F.B.I. director, J. Edgar Hoover, ordered his agents to begin arresting Mr. Al-Amin and other S.N.C.C. leaders “on every possible charge until they could no longer make bail.”
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Informants were dispatched to infiltrate S.N.C.C. and other groups referred to by Hoover as “nationalist hate-type organizations” to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize” them.
Mr. Al-Amin continued to hopscotch the country as indictments, subpoenas and extradition orders began raining down. He was under surveillance around the clock. But the pressure did not change his rhetoric.
“If President Johnson is worried about my rifle,” he told reporters after being released on bail for federal weapons charges in New York in 1967, “wait until I get my atom bomb.”
Mr. Al-Amin’s brother, Ed, who became president and chief executive of the Southern Agriculture Corp., a nonprofit organization helping Black farmers obtain federal subsidies and other benefits historically denied them, died in 2011.
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Mr. Al-Amin twice appealed his murder conviction, in 2004 and 2019, and was denied each time. But as recently as 2020, his supporters had sought a new trial on the grounds that exculpatory evidence — including a prison inmate’s confession to having shot Deputies Kinchen and English — was withheld from his defense lawyers.
From the time of his arrival in a federal Supermax prison in Colorado, Mr. Al-Amin was held for long periods in solitary confinement, which his family members contended was a violation of constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment.
In a 1995 interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Mr. Al-Amin said he was forever being asked about his famous aphorism about violence being “as American as cherry pie.”
He said the remark referred to the sweep of American history, beginning with the Revolutionary War and continuing through slavery, the subjugation of Native Americans, foreign wars and civil strife.
“People ask me if I didn’t mean apple pie,” he added. “No, George Washington and cherry pie.”
