Louisiana's Revolutionary: The Making of Imam Jamil al-Amin

"Individuals do not create rebellions, conditions do."

—Imam Jamil al-Amin (née H. Rap Brown), 1969. Excerpt from Which Way USA? Black Views On Race.

Imam Jamil Abdullah al-Amin, the Black Power revolutionary and political prisoner formerly known as H. Rap Brown, died in federal prison on November 23, 2025 at the age of 82. He is survived by his wife and two children. Public concerns detailed his battle with myeloma and the carceral system's denial of the adequate medical care necessary to treat him.

A handful of mainstream news outlets acknowledged his passing, mostly focusing on his imprisonment. Social justice platforms demonstrated his legacy and humanity. I have yet to discover local coverage of his death in South Louisiana, despite Al-Amin being a Baton Rouge native and the center of a high-profile 1960s federal trial in my hometown of New Orleans. 

He was a man who the press loved to hate, and I am disappointed, but not surprised, that his transition was not as widely publicized as his incarceration.

LET HIM RAP

Imam Jamil Abdullah al-Amin was born Hubert G. Brown in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in October of 1943. His father, Eddie Charles Brown Sr., worked as a laborer for an oil company, and his mother, Thelma Warren Brown, was a domestic worker and school teacher.

Al-Amin's early schooling began at Blundon Orphanage Home and he later attended McKinley High School and Southern High—a feeder school to HBCU, Southern University. His community neighbored Louisiana State University (LSU), a predominately white institution, and he recognized the disparities between LSU and Southern University at an early age, writing in his autobiography, "Negroes thought they were somebody, but all I had to do was look at the facilities LSU had and look at what Southern University had. The physical plant of LSU, even today, says the same thing it was saying when I was a kid—Negroes ain't shit". 

The 1953 Baton Rouge Bus Boycott—the first of the Civil Rights era and the inspiration for Dr. King's Montgomery Bus Boycott—was a week-long protest where Black citizens fought against the discriminatory conditions of segregated seating on city buses. They refused to ride and instead, relied on community support through a "free ride" carpool system. Valinda Brown, widow of al-Amin's late older brother Ed Brown, shared in an interview that al-Amin and Ed would ride in the car with their father as he picked up patrons from the bus stop during the boycotts. 

Al-Amin's early radicalization was shaped by Jim Crow segregation, colorism, violence, religion, and the interactions with police that he witnessed in his youth. He had one foot in school and another in the streets, earning the nickname "Rap" for his wordplay among the neighborhood kids. He recounted:  

"The teacher would test our vocabulary each week, but we knew the vocabulary we needed. They'd give us arithmetic to exercise our minds. Hell, we exercised our minds by playing the Dozens. In many ways, though, the Dozens is a mean game because what you try to do is totally destroy somebody else with words".

He resisted both "white America" and the "Negro America" that idolized and protected the white man's authority through respectability politics. He detailed an experience at Southern University where students were required to wear suits and ties to school concerts. The university's president at the time, a Black man, allowed white students from LSU to attend the concert with sports shirts and sneakers on. Al-Amin argued the contradiction, "You could put on a tie and the finest suit in the world and they wouldn't let you in a concert at LSU."

His resentment of the harm caused by "white America" and pacified by "Negro America" prompted him to envision a new reality, a Black one, that rejected the status quo. This new reality would be a fight for liberation, not a defense of whiteness. 

THE MOVEMENT

"A lot of people, Black and white, have the impression that those of us who got involved in the Movement, when it started in 1960, were fighting for integration […] But what they didn't understand was that none of us was concerned about sitting down next to a white man and eating a hamburger. It wasn't that I wanted to eat there. Hell no! I always knew we had the best food anyway. We were letting white folks know that they could no longer legislate where we went or what we did."

—Imam Jamil Abdullah al-Amin, 1968 

Al-Amin was introduced to the Civil Rights Movement through his brother. Eddie "Ed" Charles Brown Jr. was born in New Orleans in 1941 at Charity Hospital, where his parents felt they would receive more equitable treatment as a Black family. This pursuit for equity carried onto his young adult life, when he and fellow college students were arrested and expelled from Southern University for participating in protests. Ed later transferred to Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he became an active member of the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), an affiliate group of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). 

Al-Amin followed Ed's path in 1962 and began regularly visiting him at Howard during summer breaks. He spent his time in D.C. organizing across the South, participating in meetings, and studying the works of Black authors. "Ed allowed Jamil to go to all the meetings. Even if he didn't understand it, he was there," says Valinda Brown. 

PARTNERS IN REVOLUTION

"You speak of Rap and Stokely (referring to Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael) but if you white America, had been through what we have been through, you would have millions of Raps and Stokelys on the streets."

—Charles Evers, 1968 field director of the Mississippi NAACP and brother of Medgar Evers

During his frequent summer visits, al-Amin met his brother's roommate: a young Kwame Ture (née Stokely Carmichael). He and Ture organized alongside each other for various meetings and demonstrations, forming a revolutionary bond.

Al-Amin began to further define the speech that earned him the nickname "Rap" back in Louisiana and spoke with an inflammatory tongue that never minced words. He was elected the Chairman of NAG and later succeeded Ture as the Chairman of SNCC in 1967, per Ture's recommendation. Together, they rose as prominent voices of the Black Power Movement and consequently became two of the FBI's Most Wanted. 

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As "Rap and Stokely," al-Amin and Ture embodied the accumulated rage and impatience of a generation contending with the assassination of its heroes: Malcolm X in 1965 and Dr. King in 1968. Al-Amin was being held in New Orleans' Parish Prison when Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated. The day after Dr. King's death, Ture addressed the press in front of a poster of al-Amin and bluntly warned: "White America will live to cry that she killed Dr. King last night. It would have been better if she had killed Rap Brown and/or Stokely Carmichael. But when she killed Dr. King, she lost."

The federal government was funding an unpopular imperialist war in Vietnam and simultaneously surveilling Black revolutionaries for "inciting violence." Under COINTELPRO, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sought to prevent the rise of any "Black messiah" and "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" Black leaders through methods of stalking, harassing, fabricating narratives, and targeted arrests. As a result, al-Amin and Ture's speeches, interviews, alliances and direct actions routinely landed them in the press, court, jail and extensive FBI files.

FEDERAL TRIAL IN NEW ORLEANS

In 1968, al-Amin was convicted in New Orleans by a federal jury for transporting a firearm across state lines to New York while under indictment for "inciting a riot" and committing arson after a speech in Maryland—despite a lack of evidence that he participated in the crime. He faced additional, separate state charges in New York.

He stated that he legally purchased a rifle the same day he was set to travel to Baton Rouge to visit his family and carried the firearm, informed the stewardess, and asked her to hold it for him. When he traveled to New York from Louisiana, over 20 cops surrounded his location, as he was already under constant 24-hour surveillance by law enforcement. Al-Amin maintained that he wasn't even aware that he was under indictment at the time. He was held in New Orleans until SNCC could raise the $100,000 bond to have him released.

In reaction to his conviction, he expressed, "I was glad to be in Louisiana because the courtroom was filled with Black people, young Black brothers and sisters, every day. And they learned, man, because legally we beat the government on the first day." Al-Amin's defense filed a motion to have the presiding judge removed from the case because of "prejudicial, racist statements" he made about al-Amin in previous bond hearings. On February 21, 1968, a group of young civil rights supporters attended his hearing in the federal building in the French Quarter. A physical altercation ensued after police requested that they leave the premises. The Times-Picayune reported that al-Amin paused for a moment on the building steps and declared, "If I'm not out here by 7 o'clock, we're going to wreck Mardi Gras." Two hours later, he was transported to the segregated Parish Prison.

He was temporarily transferred to the "old, rat-infested" jailhouse in nearby Port Allen, Louisiana as a means to prevent him from becoming a distraction in New Orleans during the Carnival season. His supporters routinely demonstrated outside of his hearings and the former city jail located at Broad and Tulane Streets.

While in confinement, al-Amin began a hunger strike as an act of resistance, writing: "You have to resist whatever is done to you and I had no other weapon in jail except to not eat." He wrote letters explaining his decision that were circulated by SNCC. He decided that he would starve himself, "if it takes my death to organize my people to revolt."

Following multiple transfers, appeals, and status as a fugitive, he was formally resentenced in New Orleans for five years and served the majority of his sentence in Attica prison in New York. 

BECOMING IMAM JAMIL ABDULLAH AL-AMIN

After 1976, Al-Amin had relocated to Atlanta, Georgia to join his wife Karima al-Amin. His brother Ed Brown was nearby, serving as the Executive Director of the New Orleans Area Development Project, organizing advocacy groups to work for education reform and to fight against police brutality. Ed Brown later joined his brother in Atlanta, where he worked all his adult life to keep al-Amin alive from the Feds. Brown kept the culture of Louisiana close to their family, making annual trips to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and cooking gumbo, fried catfish, and crawfish bisque for family and friends.

Al-Amin was well-regarded as a community and faith leader who operated a grocery store in Atlanta and preached against drugs and gambling. He lived as a free man for over 25 years before being wrongfully convicted for the shooting of two deputies, despite repeated confessions from the admitted shooter and multiple constitutional and procedural errors. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. 

The man formerly known as "Rap Brown" had fully dedicated his life to Islam while imprisoned and became Imam Jamil Abdullah al-Amin—"beautiful servant of Allah the trustworthy." Before Ed Brown passed, he converted to Islam to be spiritually connected to al-Amin. He was buried as a Muslim for his brother.

As an activist whose resistance kept him in and out of jail since his early 20s, the freedom that Imam Jamil Abdullah al-Amin demanded for Black people is the very freedom he, in death, is now able to experience. 

In the rise of political extremism and anti-Black sentiments permeating across the United States, Louisiana has made headlines for racist policies that have set horrific precedents. Historically, these are the exact conditions that have created revolutions from the bottom of the map, upward, prompting the rest of America towards action.

Al-Amin's life followed the trajectory of that history.

He observed the impacts of Jim Crow growing up as a child in South Louisiana and gained an early analysis of the injustices Black people faced in America. In the streets of Baton Rouge, he sharpened his communication through wordplay and carried it with him throughout his early radicalization and direct action across the country. Under his brother Ed, he studied, organized, and established his voice, his "Rap," that would become his weapon and ultimately, the government's justification. He raised hell through words to demand Black people's heaven. 

Mo kouri, to vini is an expression in the Louisiana Creole language—also referred to as Kouri-Vini—that means, "I went, you came." Al-Amin went. He journeyed across the nation carrying the convictions of Black people and willingly faced every consequence. His legacy invites us to come; to look South and advance a consciousness that we dare to defend with our lives.

The same Louisiana that once sustained the Confederacy and is attempting to revive it, is the same Louisiana that conceived Imam Jamil Abdullah al-Amin (née H. Rap Brown). And for that, its duality and capacity for resistance is always worth investigating.