Ex-Black Panther leader H. Rap Brown dies in prison hospital
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.”
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 died from his wounds.
Brown maintained his innocence but was convicted in 2002 and sentenced to life.