Remembering Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin – the freedom fighter known as H. Rap Brown

At the end of his book, “Die Nigger Die,” H. Rap Brown wrote, “This country was born of violence. Violence is as American as cherry pie. Black people have always been violent, but our violence has always been directed toward each other.” Over the course of his long career of activism, including being chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Brown (Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin) was never far from violence, though he died nonviolently on Sunday, Nov. 23, in a federal prison hospital in North Carolina. He was 82 and had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma.

- By HERB BOYD

H. Rap Brown (Public Domain photo)

“My first contact with white America was marked by her violence,” Brown wrote in his autobiography, “For when a white doctor pulled me from between my mother's legs, and slapped my wet ass, I, as every other negro in America, reacted to this man-inflicted pain with a cry.” It was a cry that never ceased, though he found ways to apply various means of resistance in his fight for Black liberation.