Brown, H. Rap (1943–)

H. Rap Brown's firebrand anti-American rhetoric and militant stances made him synonymous with the 1960s Black Power movement. Coming to political consciousness during the turbulent 1964 Mississippi Summer Project in Lowndes County, Brown became the chairman of the Non-Violent Action Group at Howard University in 1965. That same year, Brown achieved national notoriety by confronting President Lyndon B. Johnson. According to Ekwueme Thelwell, who knew Brown at the time and wrote the foreword to the 2002 reissuing of Brown's Die Nigger Die! he rebuffed President Johnson's comments that black demonstrations over the vicious riot on the Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, had prevented his daughters from getting a good night's sleep. In 1967, Brown succeeded Stokely Carmichael as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. With the movement divided among U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall's conciliatory legalistic approach, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s nonviolent mass movement demonstrations, and the Black Panther Party's increasingly militant revolutionary vanguard call for “Black Power,” Brown's endorsement of Black Power further fragmented the civil rights movement.

H. Rap Brown's work as a community organizer and black revolutionary was exemplified in the speech he gave in 1967 in Cambridge, Maryland. He urged blacks to arm themselves and be ready to die. This [Page 274]inflammatory speech led to a riot in which gunshots between protesters and the police were exchanged. He was subsequently charged by the State of Maryland with “incitement to riot,” and this began his ongoing confrontations with state law enforcement agencies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In 1970, Brown was a fugitive on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. In 1972, he was shot in an alleged attempted robbery for which he subsequently served 5 years in prison. In Attica prison, H. Rap Brown converted to Orthodox Islam (Sunni Muslim) and changed his name to Jamil Abdulla Al-Amin. However, despite this conversion, the militant revolutionary polemic of his 1969 book Die Nigger Die! remains a unique and powerful statement of black revolutionary struggle. In this powerful political tract, Brown argues that all activities are political, America is a neocolonizing power, black men should not fight in the wars of a colonizing power, and it is legitimate to arm oneself to achieve freedom. In Brown's analyses, there is only freedom or slavery, no middle ground. Brown lambastes blacks who are used by whites in maintaining the false consciousness of “White Power Politics” as “Toms.”

After almost two decades of silence in the media, Jamil Abdulla Al-Amin reemerged as imam of a mosque in Atlanta, Georgia. Imam Al-Amin is deeply respected in the Muslim communities he served. Yet, always haunted by his militant revolutionary past and harassed by federal law enforcement agents, when the World Trade Center was first bombed in 1993, Al-Amin was interrogated as a suspected conspirator. In 2000, Al-Amin was arrested and charged with four counts of felony murder for the shooting of two sheriff's deputies. In 2002, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole.