Jamil Abdullah al-Amin
Biography
Jamil Abdullah al-Amin (aka H. Rap Brown) was chairman of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and a Black Panther leader. FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover himself named H. Rap Brown – along with Stokely Carmichael, Elijah Muhammad, and Maxwell Stanford – as targets of COINTELPRO.
al-Amin spoke at a Civil Rights Movement rally in Cambridge, Maryland on July 24, 1967 (during the "Long Hot Summer of 1967"). Police reported that gunfire broke out later, and both Brown and a police officer were wounded. A fire started that night expanded across city blocks and al-Amin was charged with inciting a riot, due to his speech. However, a secret 1967 FBI memo had called for "neutralizing" Brown; and historian Dr. Peter Levy found that there was no riot, al-Amin was shot by a police officer without provocation, and the fire was unrelated, having spread so drastically because the city's fire department refused to respond to the predominantly Black neighborhood. After the attempt on his life, al-Amin disappeared for 18 months.
In a October 1971 standoff with police, he was shot and seized, and spent five years in Attica prison. From 1992 to 1997, the FBI closely surveilled al-Amin, generating pages of 44,000 documents. In 2000, two sheriffs came to al-Amin’s store with a warrant for failure to appear in court for a case later thrown out. Both were shot and one killed. al-Amin was sentenced to life without parole, even though Otis Jackson confessed to the shootings. al-Amin has filed for multiple appeals, only for them to be denied despite his old age, blindness and cancer diagnosis.
Hubert Gerold Brown, known as H. Rap Brown in the late 1960s and as Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin after his 1971 conversion to Islam, was the fifth chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (1967-68), the Minister of Justice of the Black Panther Party in 1968, the author of Die Nigger Die! (1969), and one of the most prominent Black Power figures of the late 1960s. After his prison conversion to Sunni Islam he became the imam of the Atlanta Community Mosque and a leading figure in the Imam Jamil Action Network and Dar ul-Islam mosque movement. The Atlanta community mosque he led at the West End drew thousands and was widely credited with reducing drug-related crime in the neighborhood.
On March 16, 2000, Fulton County Sheriffs Deputies Ricky Kinchen and Aldranon English approached him outside his West End store to execute a warrant. Gunfire was exchanged; Kinchen was killed and English was wounded. He fled and was apprehended four days later in White Hall, Alabama. On March 9, 2002 he was convicted by a Fulton County jury and on March 14, 2002 sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.
His defense and supporters consistently maintained that the conviction relied on disputed eyewitness identifications and that another man — federal inmate Otis Jackson — had repeatedly confessed under oath to having committed the killings. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Imam Jamil Action Network, and other Muslim civil rights organizations called for the case to be reopened. He died at FMC Butner in North Carolina on November 23, 2025, age 82, while still serving the life sentence.
Former SNCC chairman imprisoned at Green Haven on a 1971 robbery and assault conviction; The Black Panther Vol. 15 (1976) reports he won parole and that a federal appeals court overturned his federal gun conviction after the trial judge was overheard making a racist remark. [Source: The Black Panther (Black Panther Party newspaper), v15 no.25,29; digitized at marxists.org — https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/black-panther/index.htm]
