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.”

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.

“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 insure 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.

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, Karina, 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 Korans, and for the next quarter century was known to his neighbors as a local businessman and spiritual leader.

He organized summer youth games and led efforts to curb street crime and drug trafficking in the city’s West End, where he lived. He and his wife had two children — a boy, Ali, and a girl, Kairi. 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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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, Ga., 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.

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.”

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.”

Information on survivors was not immediately available.

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.

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 American Indians, foreign wars and civil strife.

“People ask me if I didn’t mean apple pie,” he added. “No, George Washington and cherry pie.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/us/h-rap-brown-dead.html

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