Former Black Panther leader H. Rap Brown dies in prison hospital at 82

BUTNER, North Carolina — H. Rap ​​Brown, one of the most vocal leaders of the Black Power movement, died in a prison hospital while serving a life sentence for the murder of a Georgia sheriff’s deputy. He was 82 years old.

Brown died Sunday at Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina, his widow Karima Al-Amin said Monday.

The cause of death was not immediately available, but Karima Al-Amin told The Associated Press that her husband suffered from cancer and was transferred to a medical facility in 2014 from a federal prison in Colorado.

Like other, more militant black leaders and organizers during the racial upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Brown denounced authoritarian policing in black communities. He once said that violence was “as American as cherry pie.”

“Violence is part of American culture,” Brown said at a press conference in 1967. “…America has taught black people to be violent. We will use that violence to get rid of oppression, if necessary. We will be free by any means necessary.”

Brown served as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a powerful civil rights group, and in 1968 he was named Justice Minister of the Black Panther Party.

Three years later, he was arrested for a robbery that ended in a shootout with the New York police.

While serving a five-year prison sentence for the robbery, Brown converted to the Dar-ul Islam movement and changed his name to Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin. Upon his release, he moved to Atlanta in 1976, opened a grocery and health food store and became an imam, a spiritual leader for local Muslims.

“I’m not unhappy with what I did,” Al-Amin told an audience in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1998. “But Islam has made things clearer. … We must care about our well-being and that of those around us, and that comes through submission to God and raising consciousness.”

On March 16, 2000, Fulton County Deputy Sheriff Ricky Kinchen and Deputy Aldranon English were shot and killed after meeting with Al-Amin outside his Atlanta home. Deputies were there to execute an arrest warrant for failure to appear in court for driving a stolen car and impersonating a police officer during a traffic stop the previous year.

English testified at trial that Al-Amin fired a high-powered assault rifle when deputies tried to arrest him. Then, prosecutors said, he used a handgun to fire three shots into Kinchen’s groin as the injured deputy lay in the street. Kinchen would die from his wounds.

Prosecutors portrayed Al-Amin as a deliberate killer, while his lawyers described him as a peaceful religious and community leader who helped revitalize poverty-stricken areas. They suggested he had been accused of a government conspiracy dating from his years as an activist.

Al-Amin maintained his innocence but was convicted in 2002 and sentenced to life in prison.

He argued his constitutional rights were violated during the trial and in 2019 challenged his imprisonment in a U.S. appeals court. In 2020, the United States Supreme Court declined to take up the case.

“For decades, questions have surrounded the fairness of his trial,” Al-Amin’s family said in a statement Monday. “Newly discovered evidence – including previously unpublished FBI surveillance files, inconsistencies in eyewitness accounts and third-party confessions – has raised serious concerns that Imam Al-Amin did not receive the fair trial guaranteed by the Constitution. »