Butner, North Carolina – H. died. Rap Brown, one of the most prominent leaders of the Black Power movement, in a prison hospital while serving a life sentence for the murder of a Georgia sheriff’s deputy. He was 82 years old.
His widow, Karima Al-Amin, said Monday that Brown died Sunday at Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina.
The cause of death was not immediately available, but Karima Al-Amin told the Associated Press that her husband was suffering from cancer and was transferred to the medical facility in 2014 from a federal prison in Colorado.
Like other more militant black leaders and organizers during the racial unrest of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Brown denounced harsh policing in black communities. He once stated that violence is “as American as cherry pie.”
“Violence is part of American culture,” Brown said during a 1967 news conference. “…America has taught black people to be violent. We will use that violence to rid ourselves of oppression, if necessary. We will be free by any means necessary.”
Brown was president of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a powerful civil rights group, and in 1968 was appointed the Black Panther Party’s secretary of justice.
Three years later, he was arrested for a robbery that ended in a shootout with the NYPD.
While serving a five-year prison sentence for robbery, Brown converted to the Dar al-Islam movement and changed his name to Jamil Abdullah al-Amin. After 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 am not satisfied with what I did,” Al-Amin told an audience in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1998. “But Islam has allowed things to be clearer… We have to worry about the well-being of ourselves and those around us, and that comes through submission to God and raising one’s consciousness.”
On March 16, 2000, Fulton County Sheriff’s Deputy Ricky Kinchen and his deputy Alderanon English were shot after confronting Al-Amin outside his home in Atlanta. Deputies were there to serve a warrant for failure to appear in court on charges of driving a stolen vehicle 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. He then used a handgun to fire three shots into Kenshin’s thigh as the wounded deputy lay in the street, prosecutors said. Kenshin will die from his injuries.
Prosecutors portrayed Al-Amin as an arsonist, while his lawyers portrayed him as a peaceful community and religious leader who helped revitalize poor areas. They noted that he had been accused as part of a government conspiracy dating back to his military days.
Al-Amin maintained his innocence, but he was convicted in 2002 and sentenced to life imprisonment.
He said his constitutional rights were violated during the trial and in 2019 He appealed his imprisonment Before the US Circuit Court of Appeals. In 2020, The US Supreme Court declined to take up the case.
“For decades, questions have surrounded the fairness of his trial,” Al-Amin’s family said on Monday in a statement. “The newly revealed evidence – including previously undisclosed FBI surveillance files, inconsistencies in eyewitness accounts, and third-party confessions – raises serious concerns that Imam Al-Amin did not receive a constitutionally guaranteed fair trial.”