Al-Amin, Jamil Abdullah

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Al-Amin, Jamil Abdullah

October 4, 1943

Writer and activist Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, formerly known as H. Rap Brown, was born Hubert Gerold Brown in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He became involved in the civil rights movement while a student at Southern High School. Brown attended Southern University in Baton Rouge, but in 1962 he left school and devoted his time to the civil rights movement. He spent summers in Washington, D.C., with his older brother, Ed, and became a member of the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG). In 1964 Brown was elected chairman of NAG. Simultaneously, he became involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

In May 1966 Brown was appointed director of the SNCC voter registration drive in Alabama. He increased his involvement with SNCC, and in June 1967 he became Stokely Carmichael's successor as national chairman of SNCC, where he continued its militant stance. In 1968 Brown also served as minister of justice for the Black Panther Party during a brief working alliance between the two black power organizations.

As urban rebellions expressing black discontent spread across the United States, Brown's militant advocacy of black power made him a popular public speaker; his advocacy of black self-defense and condemnations of American racism—perhaps most memorably in his oft-quoted aphorism that "violence is as American as cherry pie"—made him a symbol of resistance and black pride within the Black Power movement. His rhetorical and vituperative talents—the source of his adopted name, "Rap"—were displayed in his one book, Die Nigger Die! (1969), a semiautobiographical account of his experiences with white racism. Brown embraced the term "nigger" as an embodiment of black resistance against racism.

Brown was consistently harassed by the police and was targeted by the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) because his speeches supposedly triggered volatile situations and violent outbreaks. On July 24, 1967, he was accused of "counseling to arson" in Cambridge, Maryland, because a city school that had been set on fire twice before was burned a third time after one of his speeches.

On August 19, 1967, Brown was arrested for transporting weapons across state lines while under indictment, although he had never been formally notified that he was under indictment. In May 1968 Brown resigned as SNCC chairman. Later that year he was found guilty of the federal weapons charges and sentenced to five years in prison. He was released on bond to stand trial on the Cambridge, Maryland, charges. Brown never appeared at the Maryland trial; two of his friends had recently been killed in a suspicious automobile explosion, and his defense attorney claimed that Brown would be endangered if he appeared. Brown went into hiding, and in 1970 he was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List. He was apprehended in 1972 but was released four years later.

Brown converted to Islam while in prison and took the name Jamil ("beautiful") Abdullah ("servant of Allah") Al-Amin ("the trustworthy"). Upon his release from jail, he moved to Atlanta, Georgia. In the 1990s Al-Amin continued to reside in Atlanta as the proprietor of a grocery called the Community Store and as the imam (leader) of the Community Mosque. He was the spiritual leader of hundreds of Muslim families in Atlanta and in thirty other cities, including Chicago, New York, and Detroit. Al-Amin practiced a strict Sunni interpretation of the Qur'an, with his followers maintaining a spiritual distance from the larger society.

In September, 1999, Al-Amin was indicted on charges of theft and impersonating an officer. When he failed to appear for his pre-trial hearing, a warrant was issued for his arrest. The following March, Al-Amin was charged with the shooting death of the sheriff's deputy who had come to deliver his arrest warrant, and for seriously wounding another deputy on that same occasion. Two years later, a jury sentenced him to life in prison without parole, rejecting a request for execution.