Former Black Panther leader H. Rap Brown dies in prison hospital at 82
[November 25, 2025]
BUTNER, N.C. (AP) — H. Rap Brown, one of the most vocal
leaders of the Black Power movement, has died in a prison hospital while
serving a life sentence for the killing of a Georgia sheriff’s deputy.
He was 82.
Brown — who later in life changed his name to Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin —
died Sunday at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina, his
widow, Karima Al-Amin, said Monday.
A cause of death was not immediately available, but Karima Al-Amin told
The Associated Press that her husband had been suffering from cancer and
had been transferred to the medical facility in 2014 from a federal
prison in Colorado.
Like other more militant Black leaders and organizers during the racial
upheaval of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Brown decried heavy-handed
policing in Black communities. He once stated that violence was “as
American as cherry pie.”
“Violence is a part of America’s culture,” he said during a 1967 news
conference. “... America taught the black people to be violent. We will
use that violence to rid ourselves of oppression, if necessary. We will
be free by any means necessary.”
Brown was chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a
powerful civil rights group, and in 1968 was named minister of justice
for the Black Panther Party.
Three years later, he was arrested for a robbery that ended in a
shootout with New York police.
While serving a five-year prison sentence for the robbery, Brown
converted to the Dar-ul Islam movement and changed his name. Upon his
release, he moved to Atlanta in 1976, opened a grocery and health food
store and became an Imam, a spiritual leader for local Muslims.
“I’m not dissatisfied with what I did,” he told an audience in Kansas
City, Missouri, in 1998. “But Islam has allowed things to be clearer.
... We have to be concerned about the welfare of ourselves and those
around us, and that comes through submission to God and the raising of
one’s consciousness.”
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Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin watches during the sentencing portion of his
trial in Atlanta, Monday, March 11, 2002. (AP Photo/Ric Feld, File)
On March 16, 2000, Fulton County Deputy Sheriff Ricky Kinchen and
deputy Aldranon English were shot after encountering the former
Black Panther leader outside his Atlanta home. The deputies were
there to serve a warrant for failure to appear in court on charges
of driving a stolen car and impersonating a police officer during a
traffic stop the previous year.
English testified at trial that Brown fired a high-powered assault
rifle when the deputies tried to arrest him. Then, prosecutors said,
he used a handgun to fire three shots into Kinchen’s groin as the
wounded deputy lay in the street. Kinchen would die from his wounds.
Prosecutors portrayed Brown as a deliberate killer, while his
lawyers painted him as a peaceful community and religious leader who
helped revitalize poverty-stricken areas. They suggested he was
framed as part of a government conspiracy dating from his militant
days.
Brown maintained his innocence but was convicted in 2002 and
sentenced to life.
He argued that his constitutional rights were violated at trial and
in 2019 challenged his imprisonment before a U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals. In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take the case.
“For decades, questions have surrounded the fairness of his trial,”
his family said Monday in a statement. “Newly uncovered evidence —
including previously unseen FBI surveillance files, inconsistencies
in eyewitness accounts, and third-party confessions — raised serious
concerns that Imam Al-Amin did not receive the fair trial guaranteed
under the Constitution.”
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