Obituary: Jamil Abdullah al-Amin (H. Rap Brown) Dies Unbroken and Unapologetic in Federal Prison

Jamil Abdullah al-Amin’s life in service to the people has ended, unbowed and unbroken by decades of imprisonment. On Sunday, the great fighter for Black people, well-known as H. Rap Brown, has entered the pantheon of revolutionaries forged in the United States.

A Civil Rights Leader

Born to the Black working class of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, al-Amin would enter the struggle for equality of Black people in the 1960s. Then known as H. Rap Brown, he showed poetic talent and a sharp intellect, entering revolutionary struggle as a university student in the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which he would later chair. With his talent for organizing extending beyond the student body, he emerged as a leader of the peoples struggles.

Having relocated back to the South, he led the struggles against the exclusion of Black people from voting, using elections as one example of the oppression of Black people. However, Brown offered no illusions about changing the government or society through elections.

By 1966, a year marked by mass uprisings and the development of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, Brown along with many other revolutionaries made a decisive leap in revolutionary consciousness. For the SNCC, this was expressed in overcoming the morass of liberalism that plagued the organization earlier. Solidarity with the national liberation war waged by the Vietnamese people was important to this development.

Brown frequently quoted Chairman Mao Zedong of the Communist Party of China and leader of the World Proletarian Revolution at this time in many of his speeches, which honorably defended not only self-defense of Black people, but promoted armed struggle as the sole means for their liberation. Brown expressed the materialist sentiment, “Individuals do not create rebellions; conditions do.”

He understood the fact that revolution was proceeding rapidly from the colonial and semi-colonial countries of the world, and that Black people found common struggle with the oppressed nations as an oppressed group within an oppressed class. “If this town don’t come around,” he told a crowd of demonstrators in Cambridge, MD, “this town should be burned down!” After this declaration he was shot by the police, and the masses proceeded to unfurl rebellion in the majority-Black areas.

COINTELPRO Targeting

Identified by the old-state as a leader among the deepest and most profound masses, Brown became one of, if not the first, targets of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), a program which sought to discredit the most militant leaders and revolutionaries forged in the fight for civil rights, as well as to neutralize them through means of imprisonment and murder.

After the Cambridge Rebellion, Brown was singled out by the top reactionaries at the FBI and the repressive agency would target Brown for the rest of his life. At this time he faced numerous trumped up charges.

In 1968, Brown was an important leader of the student rebellion at Columbia University and linked the rebellion to the surrounding Black neighborhood of Harlem, mobilizing the masses beyond campus.

Brown’s ideology began to develop in a less positive direction in 1969, influenced by the revisionism of Regis Debray and the critical theories of Franz Fanon; however, his stance against capitalism and US imperialism was maintained.

Brown would eventually be driven underground when an alleged bombing attempt “linked” to SNCC took place around one of his court dates. The police claimed Brown’s involvement in a shoot-out with police where he was apprehended in 1971 and again shot by the police. He plead innocent to 24 counts.

By 1973, Brown was sent for five years in the notorious Attica Prison, where he underwent another ideological development and converted to Islam, and changed his name to Jamil Abdullah al-Amin. After his release he would move to Atlanta, Georgia, where as an imam he would continue serving the people of the impoverished Black working class.

In West Atlanta, al-Amin organized the local community against poverty and drugs, which were being used as a weapon against Black people. In 1999 the old-state would again target al-Amin. Charges stemming from the 1999 harassment led to the execution of a warrant against al-Amin, resulting in the death of a Sheriff’s Deputy. In spite of the fact that another man confessed, the accounts of eye-witnesses—which insisted al-Amin was not the shooter—and the ruling that the initial harassment in 1999 was illegal search and seizure, al-Amin was convicted of life imprisonment at the Georgia Department of Corrections.

In the state-run prison, al-Amin faced oppression for organizing the small Muslim population of the prison. In a panic, the authorities began investigating him, and when finding no evidence of wrongdoing, they moved to transfer him to federal prison, claiming that he was too high profile for the state to handle.

Transferred to a federal supermax prison in Colorado, in spite of no disciplinary record, al-Amin would endure seven years of torture by solitary confinement. The transfer to federal prison indicates the continued and desperate attempts of the old-state to break the great fighter, to separate him fully from his people and demoralize all attempts at challenging the reactionary US racial and class order.

The miserable conditions of the supermax prison, and the medical neglect that comes with it, deteriorated al-Amin’s health. Battles were waged by al-Amin and his supporters for the inadequate transfers to a medically-capable facility, where al-Amin may have succumbed to his state-caused illness, but never succumbed mentally, spiritually or politically to their ceaseless repression.

Photo: Jamil Abdullah al-Amin in 1990. Credit: Georgia Encyclopedia.

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