H. RAP BROWN, BLACK MAN AMERICA LOVED TO HATE, HAS DIED
SAID "VIOLENCE IS PART OF AMERICA'S CULTURE. IT IS AS AMERICAN AS CHERRY PIE." BECAME IMAM JAMIL ABDULLAH AL-AMIN. WAS SERVING LIFE SENTENCE FOR KILLING GEORGIA COP
MALONE, NEW YORK Nov. 23, 2025
The Black man America loved to hate has died.
Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, known in the 1960s as H. Rap Brown, was finally felled by cancer in federal prison while serving a life sentence for killing a Georgia police officer and wounding another in 2000.
Al-Amin once served as leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC (pronounced "snick"). Then he became the Black Panther Minister of Justice and toured the Nation urging Black Americans to take up arms and wage guerilla war against the Government.
"I say violence is necessary," Al-Amin, then still Brown, said in 1967. "Violence is a part of America's culture. It is as American as cherry pie."
Kairi Al-Amin, his son, confirmed his death in social media messages.
“He wins either way,” Kairi Al-Amin said in an Instagram video, “They don’t have him anymore. He’s free.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations said in a news release that Al-Amin was innocent of shooting police and urged the Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney's office to vacate his conviction. CAIR also “condemned the federal prison service for failing to properly treat Imam Al-Amin's cancer. CAIR and others had repeatedly warned the Bureau of Prisons that his health was deteriorating.”
Hubert Geroid Brown was born in Baton Rouge, La., Oct. 4, 1943. His father, Eddie Charles Brown, worked for the Esso Petroleum Company. His mother was Thelma Warren. He attended Baton Rouge public schools and joined the Boy Scouts.
He started as a sociology major at Baton Rouge's Southern University in 1960. He dropped out in 1962 to devote himself full-time to civil rights organizing in Mississippi for the SNCC. He was elected to replace Stokely Carmichael as national SNCC chair in May 1967.
“You’ll be happy to have me back when you hear from him,” Carmichael joked to reporters on his way out the door. “He’s a bad man.”
Brown wore the uniform of Black radicals nationwide: afro, black sunglasses, black beret, denim pants, leather jacket. In mere months, Brown established himself as a firebrand preacher of the Black liberation movement.
"Freedom cannot be given," a 24-year-old Brown said in 1967. "Its not a welfare commodity. It's something that has to be gotten and taken by the people who are oppressed."
Excluded from political power by laws that made it hard and sometimes practically impossible for some Black Americans to vote, Brown argued since Black people did not hav a real say in making laws, they were not required to follow them.
"We did not make the laws in this country," he said in Oakland a year later. "We are not legally or morally confined to those laws. Those laws that keep them up, keep us down."
"We tend to equate progress with concessions," he added. "We can no longer make that mistake."
Brown opposed the gymnasium Columbia University wanted to build in Harlem that led to a historic occupation of a school building—including the president's office—in protest. Opponents archly called the project "Gym Crow." Brown surfaced in New York at a protest rally.
“If they build the first story, blow it up. If they sneak back at night and build three stories, burn it down," Brown told the crowd. "And if they get nine stories built, it’s yours. Take it over, and maybe we’ll let them in on the weekends.”
Also in 1967, Brown traveled to Cambridge, Maryland to support civil rights efforts there. Gloria Richardson, a local leader in the movement, invited him. He spoke to a crowd of about 400 on July 24.
“It’s time for Cambridge to explode, baby," Brown said. "Black folks built America, and if America don’t come around, we’re going to burn America down.”
Cambridge started burning a few hours later. Brown was shot by police with a shotgun, but only lightly wounded. He was arrested and charged with inciting riot and arson. William M. Kunstler, the legendary criminal defense and civil rights attorney, was his lawyer.
After authorities moved the trial to a town the New York Times reported was so conservative "the local movie theater refuses to admit youths with long hair," Kunstler complained bitterly that Brown would never get a fair trial. To root out racists, Kunstler proposed a list of 167 questions for prospective jurors, including:
“Can you define the following terms (a) cool it; (b) right on; (c) playing the dozens; (d) up tight; (e) pigs; (f) he dig no black folks; (g) stop jivin’ around; (h) honky and/or peckerwood; (i) the man; (j) handkerchief‐headed nigger.”
While he was out on bail, Brown penned a memoir. He titled it "Die Nigger Die!"
"I had been born in 'america, the land of the free,'" the book starts. "But who would insure my freedom? Who would make democracy safe for Black people?"
Before he could be tried, Brown vanished. Two associates were killed by a bomb blast while they were, apparently, driving to the courthouse where a hearing was being held for the case.
Brown resurfaced in New York City on Oct. 16, 1971. Then 28 and on the run from charges not just in Maryland but in New Orleans and three other jurisdictions, Brown and three associates robbed an Upper West Side bar called the Red Carpet Lounge. Cops caught wind of the robbery, and foiled their escape. Cops chased Brown to the roof of a nearby building and shot him twice—they said he had a .357 magnum revolver in his hand.
In 1973, he was convicted of armed robbery and assault but acquitted of attempted murder of police and sentenced to 5-to-15 years in prison. He was sent to the notorious Attica Correctional Facility—where prisoners revolted two years before, seized control of part of the maximum-security prison and demanded to be treated "as men, not beasts" only to be massacred in an indiscriminate hail of police gunfire three days later.
While he was in prison in New York, Brown became Muslim and adopted the name Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin. When he was paroled he moved to Atlanta and opened a grocery store along with a mosque.
"As the leader of Atlanta’s West End neighborhood, Imam Al-Amin led many African-Americans to Islam while pushing drug use and crime out of the local community," CAIR's news release announcing his death said.
But law enforcement officials thought he was a threat and investigated him for six years—from 1992 until 1997—before giving up.
Then, in 2001, Al-Amin was back in the news. This time he was accused of gunning down two cops sent to arrest him (for quite possibly bogus charges) in a hail of bullets from a Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifle and a 9mm handgun. One died. Fulton County prosecutors tried to have Brown sentenced to death.
The two officers said they wounded Brown, but when he was captured four days later he was not. He was wearing a bulletproof vest. In the area where he was captured, police found the 9mm and the Mini-14 that had been used in the shooting. Police also found the car Al-Amin was driving at the time of the shoot out—with bullet holes in it.
Al-Amin said he was innocent. A jury convicted him, but spared his life and sentenced him to life in prison without parole instead.
Information about survivors other than his son was not immediately available.
Georgia prison officials transferred Al-Amin to federal custody in 2007. He spent about a decade at Florence—the federal "supermax" high in the Rocky Mountains, before being transferred to a federal prison in Arizona. There, last January, his son said on social media that his father needed medical treatment but was not getting it.
Al-Amin died at Butner, a federal hospital prison in North Carolina.
Before he was sentenced for armed robbery in New York in 1973, Al-Amin told the court “Truth crushed into the earth will rise again.”
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