As the movement's center of gravity shifted from civil rights to Black Power, prosecution shifted with it — from local breach-of-peace charges to state and federal cases aimed at leadership. SNCC chairman H. Rap Brown was charged with inciting riot and arson after a 1967 speech in Cambridge, Maryland; Congress responded to him personally with the 1968 federal anti-riot act, known in Washington as the "Rap Brown law," which criminalized crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot and would later be used against the Chicago Eight.
The pattern repeated across the country: RAM organizers in Philadelphia and New York arrested on conspiracy charges built by informants in 1967, SNCC workers jailed for draft resistance and "criminal anarchy," and Black Power spokesmen held on charge after charge until organizations exhausted themselves posting bail. By 1972, when Brown began a five-year robbery sentence after being wounded and captured in New York, most of the generation's leadership had passed through prison — the bridge between the civil-rights jailings and the COINTELPRO-era frame-ups that followed.