WaPo: “Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, who as H. Rap Brown becamea magnetic and polarizing force in the 1960s Black Power movement, died Nov. 23 at a federal prison hospital near Butner, North Carolina, where he was serving a life sentence without parole for the 2000 murder of a sheriff’s deputy. He was 82….Mr. Al-Amin rose to prominence during the waning days of the civil rights movement and reinvented himself decades later as an imam and shopkeeper in Atlanta. In 1967, he was elected chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which had maintained a commitment to Gandhian nonviolence under leaders such as John Lewis, the future congressman.
Under Mr. Al-Amin and his immediate predecessor, Stokely Carmichael, the group adopted a more radical approach to civil rights activism. In a decision that cost the organization many of its White allies, Mr. Al-Amin successfully pushed the SNCC to drop the word “nonviolent” from its name.
“I say violence is necessary,” he said in a 1967 interview. “Violence is a part of America’s culture. It is as American as cherry pie.”
Mr. Al-Amin took over the organization on the eve of the “long, hot summer of 1967,”as riots began to break out in Black neighborhoods across the country. Often sporting a black beret over his Afro, he became a face of the rage that was sweeping America’s cities. More than a century after the Emancipation Proclamation, Black America’s patience had run out, he argued, andthe United States would either make good on its promises to Black citizens or face violence.
“Black folk built America,” he would often say in his speeches, “and if it don’t come around, we’re going to burn America down.””