By Abayomi Azikiwe
On Sunday November 23, 2025, Imam Jamil Abdullah al-Amin passed away in a prison hospital after serving a quarter century of incarceration for a crime he did not commit.
Born Hubert Geroid Brown in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1943, as a World War II baby, he was very much representative of a generation which pushed the boundaries of the struggle for African American liberation from national oppression and economic exploitation.
During his upbringing in the Jim Crow South, the-then Hubert Brown was recognized by his family, friends and teachers as an intelligent gifted orator and effective organizer. Entering Southern University in the early 1960s, a Historically Black College-University (HBCU), he was swept up in the whirlwind of the Civil Rights Movement which sought to dismantle legalized segregation.
Al-Amin, like hundreds of other dedicated young people of the period, left the university after two years to work full-time for the Civil Rights Movement. He would move to Washington, D.C. to coordinate the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), an affiliate of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC was founded in April of 1960 in North Carolina in the wake of mass protests against segregation all over the South.
The role of Ella Baker was pivotal in the formation of SNCC. Baker was a seasoned organizer within the African American movement for civil and human rights.
Baker had worked for years on behalf of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) where she traveled extensively throughout the country building and strengthening branches. At the time of the founding of SNCC she was serving as the first executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which was led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
She urged the students at the conference to establish their own organization independent of the SCLC. This advice was heeded and SNCC was born in an effort to coordinate the burgeoning youth movement across the South.
SNCC was considered by many as the embodiment of the vanguard of the Black freedom struggle. In addition to the mobilizing and organizing of the students involved in the sit-in movement, it was the SNCC students based in Nashville, Tennessee who took up the Freedom Rides after the bombing of a Greyhound bus in Anniston, Alabama on May 15, 1961.
The Freedom Rides were designed to eliminate segregation in interstate travel in the U.S. Several people were severely beaten in Birmingham and other areas. Many others that arrived in Jackson, Mississippi were immediately arrested and sentenced to prison terms. Stokely Carmichael from Howard University, who would later become the Chairman of SNCC in May 1966, served nearly two months in the notorious Parchman Prison five years earlier in 1961 in the wake of the Freedom Rides.
From Freedom Now to Black Power
SNCC played a critical role in 1964 when the Freedom Summer project attracted hundreds of students, lawyers and community workers to assist in the effort to register African Americans to vote in the state of Mississippi. In the course of the SNCC organizing efforts in the state, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) was formed. Members of the MFDP traveled to Atlantic City, New Jersey for the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in an attempt to unseat the racist all-white Mississippi delegation.
Ms. Fannie Lou Hamer of SNCC and the MFDP made a powerful presentation before the DNC credentials committee narrating the horrors undergone by African Americans in Mississippi who were seeking enforcement of civil rights laws. During that summer, three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, were kidnapped and murdered by Neshoba County law-enforcement personnel in conjunction with the Ku Klux Klan.
Imam Jamil Abdullah al-Amin, then known as H. Rap Brown, participated in the MFDP challenge in August 1964. The Democratic Party leadership under then President Lyndon B. Johnson refused to seat the MFDP delegation and instead offered them two seats at-large with the pledge to not recognize any segregationist grouping at the 1968 DNC. The MFDP delegation rejected the compromise offered as Ms. Hamer said, “We did not come this far to accept two seats.”
The lessons of the Atlantic City challenge were taken into the state of Alabama the following year in the aftermath of the Selma-to-Montgomery March of late March 1965. Stokely Carmichael and other organizers from SNCC built working relationships with local activists during 1965 which led to the formation of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO). The LCFO utilized the Black Panther as its organizational and party logo. This constituted the first Black Panther Party in the United States.
Al-Amin (Rap Brown) was assigned to work in Greene County, Alabama, setting up a similar political formation. These organizing efforts resulted in the establishment of the Alabama Black Panther Party during 1965-66 in several areas of the state. These developments occurred over a year prior to the founding of the Oakland-based Black Panther Party set up by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in October 1966.
The efforts in Alabama gained widespread interest prompting the establishment of Black Panther groupings in Cleveland, Detroit, New York City and other areas by the summer of 1966. As a historical backdrop to the rise of independent political organizing was the eruption of urban rebellions in numerous cities beginning in Birmingham, Alabama in the Spring of 1963. The following year there were rebellions and self-defense initiatives in New York, Philadelphia, several municipalities in New Jersey, Cambridge, Maryland, etc.
On August 11, 1965, the Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles erupted lasting for several days. This represented a new level of struggle which alarmed the U.S. government. The following May 1966, the Hough Rebellion took place in Cleveland.
James Meredith, who had generated national attention after enrolling in the University of Mississippi in 1962, embarked upon what he called a “March Against Fear” on June 5, 1966, beginning in Memphis, Tennessee on the border with the state of Mississippi. The next day as he walked by himself along the highway in Mississippi, he was shot by a white assailant.
Meredith was hospitalized in Memphis with head wounds from shotgun pellets. Leaders from SNCC, SCLC, the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), the NAACP and the Urban League convened in Memphis. SNCC, then led by Carmichael along with Dr. King of SCLC and Floyd McKissick of CORE, vowed to continue the march. Meredith remained hospitalized for weeks and would not return to the march until weeks later.
It was during this march from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi that the Black Power slogan was raised by SNCC Field Secretary Willie Ricks and later Carmichael. The slogan gained immediate currency to only set off further alarm by the government and ruling class.
Al-Amin was appointed by Carmichael to head the Alabama Black Panther Party endeavors. The following May 1967, al-Amin, due to his successes in Greene County and other areas of Alabama, was elected as the new SNCC Chairman.
Repression was immediately brought down on the SNCC Chairman and other cadres. In late July 1967, amid rebellions in urban areas across the country, al-Amin was served with numerous warrants and detained for inciting violence. He would be restricted by the U.S. courts in his movements.
The year of 1967 was described in essays and speeches by SNCC former Executive Secretary and then International Affairs Director, James Forman, as “The High Tide of Black Resistance.” During that year, according to the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorder, over 160 rebellions occurred across the U.S. Of all the rebellions that summer, the largest was in Detroit, the industrial center of the capitalist world.
Al-Amin was invited to speak in Cambridge, Maryland in late July amidst racial tensions in the city. Cambridge had been a hotbed of mass demonstrations and rebellions for several years. After being slightly wounded by police one evening, he was later charged with inciting a riot. A warrant for his arrest was put out by the State of Maryland. As al-Amin arranged to turn himself in on the advice of his defense attorney William Kunstler in New York City, he was detained by federal agents. Later he was turned over to law-enforcement officials in Maryland.
Several weeks after the Detroit Rebellion members of the Friends of SNCC in the city invited al-Amin to address the community at the Dexter Theater on the west side where the unrest began on July 23. Thousands of people came out to see al-Amin. The theater quickly filled up, and the organizers went on to the roof and set up a public address system to speak to the crowds along Dexter Avenue and its surrounding areas. Al-Amin called for the arming of the masses in the U.S. In the same address he championed the revolutionary struggles in Africa against settler-colonialism.
He was later arrested in early 1968 after speaking at a rally in Oakland, California demanding the release of Huey P. Newton, then waiting in jail before going to trial in the shooting death of an Oakland police officer and the wounding of another. SNCC leaders entered a short-lived alliance with the BPP under Newton and Seale. Miscommunications over the character of the relationship, whether it was an alliance or a merger, which had been articulated by Eldridge Cleaver, led to acrimony among some members in both organizations.
The State of Maryland continued to pursue criminal prosecution against al-Amin. He was scheduled to stand trial in March 1970 when events would change the dynamics of his political trajectory.
Targeted Assassinations, Underground and Political Imprisonment
Ralph Featherstone and William Payne, two SNCC organizers, left their work in Washington, D.C. to drive to Bel Air, Maryland for the trial of al-Amin. They were driving on the highway near Bel Air when a bomb exploded inside their vehicle killing both of them.
There was much speculation that al-Amin had been a passenger in the car since his trial was scheduled to begin the following day. The former SNCC Chairman was not in the vehicle and escaped assassination at that time. He immediately went underground to avoid liquidation.
Soon after the news broke of the targeted assassinations of Featherstone and Payne, the FBI along with the corporate media began to state that the two SNCC organizers were carrying a bomb with the intention of attacking the courthouse where the trial was to take place. The families and comrades of Featherstone and Payne rejected this explanation of the explosion and condemned the federal government and the mainstream press for advancing this notion.
Al-Amin, having survived assassination, went underground and remained out of public view until September 1971. Reports indicated that al-Amin had been captured during an armed robbery in New York. Al-Amin denied the reports, however, he was convicted and served five years in Attica Prison where a rebellion had occurred in early September 1971.
While in prison al-Amin converted to Islam and changed his name from H. Rap Brown. After his release he would settle in Atlanta, Georgia where he established a mosque and community grocery store. He renewed his community organizing efforts while maintaining contacts with people across the U.S. and the world.
Despite his religious orientation, al-Amin continued to face harassment and unjust prosecution from the local and federal authorities. In 1993, he was falsely accused of wounding someone in the vicinity of his store. He was acquitted on the most serious of the charges.
Later in 2000, he was accused of shooting two Fulton County deputy sheriffs, one fatally. Although he pleaded not guilty, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. In recent years al-Amin was diagnosed with cancer. His condition worsened during early 2025.
The Legacy of Imam Jamil Abdullah al-Amin (H. Rap Brown)
News of his transition has prompted reflections and analyses of the Imam’s life and career as a political and religious figure spanning more than six decades. There is much to be learned from the “High Tide of Black Resistance” of the 1960s and 1970s.
Also, his capacity to transform and adapt to the developing situations is an important aspect of the effectiveness of any organizer and leader. Even without the media attention given to al-Amin as it was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, awareness of his contributions has continued among his comrades and conscious youth looking for examples and inspiration to move the African American liberation movement forward.
His conversion to Islam during the extended imprisonment between 1971-76 was misunderstood by some who were reminiscent of his days with SNCC. Yet, the Imam maintained that his religious posture represented an evolution of his revolutionary journey.
Obviously, the capitalist state wanted to punish and contain him due to his revolutionary contributions. There were numerous attempts to win an appeal in his conviction. Every effort was undermined by the state.
When it became clear that the Imam was suffering from a terminal disease, they would not release him on compassionate grounds to receive credible medical treatment. His death in detention reinforces the indictment against the U.S. racist, capitalist and imperialist system.
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