H. Rap Brown, 82, Equal Justice Activist Led In 60s Struggle

By Rosaland Tyler
Associate Editor
New Journal and Guide

Equal Rights Advocate H. Rap Brown from the 1960s civil rights era has died of cancer at age 82. Brown, who changed his name decades ago to Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, died in late November 2025, in a prison hospital at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, N.C.

Today, non-Whites and women are enjoying equal rights and political ascension that can be traced back to protests launched by Brown and Stokely Carmichael, the head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, known as SNCC. Brown and Carmichael led numerous protests in the 1960s to the point that their names were associated with the 1960s civil rights struggle, which attracted the attention of the FBI, then headed by J. Edgar Hoover. (Carmichael, who changed his name to Kwame Ture, and self-exiled to Africa, died of prostate cancer on November 15, 1998 at age 57, in Conakry, Guinea).

Brown’s legal problems stemmed from a 1971 robbery conviction. He insisted he was innocent but was convicted and served five years of a 5-to 15-year sentence at the infamous Attica Prison in upstate New York.

In prison, Brown converted to Islam where he changed his name.

When he was released from prison, he no longer wore the uniform of Black radicals nationwide: Afro, Black sunglasses, Black beret, denim pants, leather jacket. He moved to Atlanta, launched a mosque, opened a small grocery store and raised a family.

Kairi Al-Amin, his son, recently confirmed his father’s death in a social media message.

“He wins either way,” Kairi Al-Amin said in an Instagram video. “They don’t have him anymore. He’s free.”

The FBI campaign against Al-Amin never ended. Not only does Joshua Clark Davis’ 2025 book, “Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back,” support the claim, documents later uncovered by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution showed the FBI sent paid informants to Al-Amin’s mosque in an effort to link him to various crimes, including the drug trade and 14 murders. Other charges were unsuccessfully launched until 2000.

Brown was living in Atlanta in 2000 when he was accused of shooting and killing a sheriff’s deputy and slightly wounding another deputy. Brown was convicted in 2002 and was serving a life sentence in a prison in Butner, N.C., when he died, according to CNN.

He started as a sociology major at Baton Rouge’s Southern University in 1960. He dropped out in 1962 to devote himself full-time to civil rights organizing in Mississippi for  SNCC. He was elected to replace Stokely Carmichael as national SNCC chair in May 1967.

A cause of death was not immediately available, but Karima Al-Amin told The Associated Press that her husband had been suffering from cancer.