Pearl River The obituary for H. Rap Brown, now know as Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, was on the front page of the New York Times. He had died in prison at 84 years old, where he had been for some years, convicted controversially for shooting some deputy process servers at his store in the Atlanta area. His death brought back memories of days in the late 1960’s and later in the mid-70’s, when my path crossed that of the Brown family.
Brown-Al-Amin was a controversial and iconic figure in the late years of the civil rights movement. He had been head of SNCC following Stokely Carmichael. He was the anti-King figure, arguing famously that “violence was as American as cherry pie.” He was a fierce advocate of black power and threatened many with his call to arms to advance the cause and protect their communities.
I had gone to the Spring Mobilization where Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke at the United Nations in April 1967 and then the March on the Pentagon in October of that year. In the early winter of 1968, after a brief training in draft resistance and counseling in Boston with the Boston Draft Resistance Group, I had dropped out of college to do my part in the whirlwind and returned to New Orleans to organize around the draft.
Brown-Al-Amin was regularly in the news in New Orleans at the time. He was on trial on a gun charge that was being tried in the federal court housed then in the middle of the French Quarter. I can remember going down there to rubberneck at a rally, as he was being transported to trial where he tried to speak briefly. Later that spring on May 22, 1968, he was convicted in on the federal firearms charge. He was later resentenced on this same conviction on June 2, 1972. The Times notes that his activity in 1968 triggered a provision in the ’68 fair housing bill making it illegal “to incite, organize, promote or encourage” a riot, more popularly known as the “H. Rap Brown Federal Anti-Riot Act.”
Brown-Al-Amin was born and raised in Baton Rouge, up the river, the youngest in his family, while Eddie Brown was the oldest. In 1975, as ACORN was beginning organizing in New Orleans, I reached out for Ed for advice, having made the connection through the Center for Community Change in DC. Ed was well-known in organizing circles at the time as the founder of MACE, Mississippi Action for Community Education, in Greenville. I was on the board of the Youth Project at the time with an organizer for MACE. He had also been one of the founders of the Delta Foundation, which was popular with foundations and specialized in community development. Many years later for some years we managed a radio station licensed to the Delta Foundation. I met Ed in New Orleans several times when we both happened to be there. He was helpful in providing advice and suggesting contacts that we needed to meet to advance our work in the city. His more famous brother would come up regularly in those conversations.
Over the years, Brown-Al-Amin ended up in Atlanta. I lost touch with Ed Brown when he went to Africa to work in development there. I heard that he had returned to Atlanta at some point. The Times fills in the story, noting that he was the CEO and president of the “Southern Agriculture Corporation, a nonprofit helping Black farmers obtain federal subsidies historically denied them.” He had also been head of the Voter Education Project at one point. He died in 2011.
Our paths had crossed in Louisiana almost tangentially, but both were giants in the state, nationally, and internationally, and cast large shadows for everyone involved in organizing and social change.