Nationwide — H. Rap Brown, later known as Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, a fiery and influential voice of the Black Power era, has died at age 82 while serving a life sentence in a federal prison hospital. His widow, Karima Al-Amin, confirmed that he passed away on Sunday at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina, where he had been held for years due to declining health.
According to CNN, Karima Al-Amin said no official cause of death has yet been released, but noted that her husband had battled cancer and was moved to the North Carolina medical unit in 2014 after previously being housed in a Colorado federal prison. His final years were spent under medical supervision as his condition worsened.
Brown gained national attention in the late 1960s and early 1970s as one of the era’s most outspoken militants, condemning police brutality and systemic racism. During a 1967 news conference, he famously declared that violence was “as American as cherry pie,” insisting that America itself had taught violence to Black communities and that oppressed people had the right to defend themselves “by any means necessary.” He later served as chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and, in 1968, was appointed minister of justice for the Black Panther Party.
His life took a dramatic turn in the early 1970s, when he was arrested in connection with a New York robbery that escalated into a shootout with police. While serving a five-year sentence, he embraced the Dar-ul Islam movement, changed his name to Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, and upon release in 1976, moved to Atlanta, where he opened a grocery and health food store and became an Imam. In 1998, he reflected on his journey, saying Islam had given him clarity and a deeper responsibility to uplift his community through faith and consciousness.
Al-Amin’s later years became defined by the deadly 2000 shooting of Fulton County Deputy Sheriff Ricky Kinchen and the wounding of Deputy Aldranon English. Prosecutors alleged that Al-Amin opened fire with a rifle when deputies attempted to arrest him outside his Atlanta home on charges related to a prior traffic stop, and then shot Kinchen at close range as he lay wounded. Defense attorneys countered that the former activist was a respected religious leader targeted by a long-standing government effort to undermine him, arguing that he had been framed.
He was convicted in 2002 and sentenced to life in prison, continuing to assert his innocence for the rest of his life. His family maintained that the trial was unfair and pursued multiple appeals, including a challenge before a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2019. Although the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2020, relatives insist that newly uncovered FBI files, conflicting witness accounts, and outside confessions raise significant doubts about whether Imam Al-Amin ever received the fair trial promised by the Constitution.