At the end of his book, Die Nigger Die, H. Rap Brown wrote, “This country was born of violence. Violence is as American as cherry pie. Black people have always been violent, but our violence has always been directed toward each other.” Over the course of his long career of activism, including being chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Brown (Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin) was never far from violence, though he died nonviolently on Sunday, Nov. 23, in a federal prison hospital in North Carolina. He was 82 and had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma.
“My first contact with white America was marked by her violence,” Brown wrote in his autobiography, “For when a white doctor pulled me from between my mother’s legs, and slapped my wet ass, I, as every other negro in America, reacted to this man-inflicted pain with a cry.” It was a cry that never ceased, though he found ways to apply various means of resistance in his fight for Black liberation.
He was born Hubert Gerold Brown on Oct. 4, 1943, in Baton Rouge, La. At 17, he moved to Washington, D.C. and joined the Non-Violent Action Group (NAG), a stepping stone to his membership in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1966, as Director of the organization’s Voter Registration in Alabama, his charisma and innate leadership skills were immediately recognized. A year later, he was appointed to succeed Stokely Carmichael as national chair. He said it was a position he did not seek but accepted, nonetheless.
In July 1967, already beginning a relationship with the Black Panther Party, he was in Cambridge, Md., as a guest speaker and was leaving the rally when gunshots broke out. “I got shot — I was hit in the head with some shotgun pellets,” he recounted… “The Vietcong ain’t had nothing on me about getting low.” The next day, he was in Washington, D.C., when he learned that a federal warrant for his arrest had been issued. Subsequently, he was jailed in Alexandria, Va. Faced with criminal charges, his plan to radicalize SNCC went awry, and his situation was compounded in 1970 after he disappeared on a firearms charge and was placed on the FBI’s most wanted list.
In 1971, he was arrested for armed robbery during a time when he was allegedly leading a cadre of young men determined to end the flow of narcotics into the Black community. Several of the converts were native Detroiters who, influenced by Brown’s tactics and purposes, launched a similar campaign against drug dealers in their hometown. Meanwhile, Brown was convicted and sentenced to five years in the Attica State Prison.
While in Attica, where he arrived a month after the infamous 1971 riot, he adopted Islam and changed his name to Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin. In 2000, he was charged with the death of a Black police officer and injuring another during a shootout near a store he owned. Two years later, he was convicted of murder and other charges and sentenced to five to fifteen years in prison.
He will be remembered for his fiery speeches, particularly at Columbia University during the student uprising there, in Detroit right after the 1967 rebellion, and the Federal Anti-Riot Act of 1968, enacted by Congress to make it a federal crime to incite, organize, promote, or encourage a riot. His former name, according to some musical historians, may have inspired the rap genre.
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