‘60s Radical Guilty in 2000 Murder, Could Face Death

Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, the 1960s black-power activist known as H. Rap Brown, was convicted of murder Saturday in Atlanta in the shooting death of a sheriff’s deputy two years ago.

Al-Amin, 58, who changed his name when he converted to Islam while in prison for robbery in the 1970s, was found guilty of 13 counts, including murder, aggravated assault on a police officer, obstruction and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. He faces the death penalty when jurors reconvene Monday to consider his punishment for killing Deputy Ricky Kinchen, who was gunned down while trying to serve an arrest warrant. Another deputy was wounded in the incident. The jury, which included nine blacks, deliberated 10 hours.

The verdict came after a three-week trial, which had been postponed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks because the judge feared anti-Muslim sentiment would affect the sentiments of the jury pool.

With his big, black sunglasses, bushy hair and fiery rhetoric, the charismatic Brown became one of the symbols of the turbulent 1960s, an angry son of the segregated South who believed that using violence as a political tool was as “American as cherry pie.”

He seemed to undergo a radical transformation after becoming a Muslim in the mid-1970s. Living in relative obscurity, he ran a small grocery in Atlanta, was increasingly influential in the Islamic community and was credited by neighbors with helping to reduce poverty, crime, drugs and prostitution in his neighborhood.

Al-Amin’s troubles with the law renewed in May 1999 when he was charged with receiving stolen property, driving without proof of insurance and impersonating a police officer.

Ten months later, on March 16, 2000, two Fulton County deputy sheriffs in Atlanta--Kinchen, 35, and Aldranon English, 28--stopped Al-Amin near his grocery shop to serve him with a warrant for missing a court date. Prosecutors said he opened fire on the officers with a high-power rifle and a handgun.

Kinchen was killed. English, who was wounded in his legs, left arm and chest, identified Al-Amin from a photo. Four days later, Al-Amin was arrested in White Hall, Ala., where he had once worked registering black voters. FBI agents said ballistics tests on two guns they found in nearby woods matched weapons used in the shootings.

During his trial, the defense argued that Al-Amin was a victim of ongoing harassment by law enforcement officers as a result of his more radical days. They also pointed out that English said the shooter had gray eyes and that he had wounded Al-Amin in the stomach during the exchange of fire. Al-Amin has brown eyes and was not injured when arrested.

Hubert Brown--the “Rap” nickname came during the 1960s--rose to prominence as the man who succeeded Stokely Carmichael as the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The group’s more conciliatory founders, such as Julian Bond, viewed Brown as more moderate than the ousted leader. Carmichael disagreed, saying: “You’ll be happy to have me back when you hear from him. He’s a bad man.”

Brown, a college dropout, was briefly on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list during the protest era. He was arrested in 1968 trying to board a plane in Washington, D.C., carrying an M-1 rifle. In 1973, he was sentenced to prison for robbery. Paroled in 1976, he made a pilgrimage to Mecca, Islam’s holy site, and began his social work in Atlanta, where he founded the Community Mosque of Atlanta.

Though his rhetoric softened, he continued to rail against perceived injustices in the U.S. “When we begin to look critically at the Constitution of the United States, we see that, in its main essence it is diametrically opposed to what Allah has commanded,” he wrote in 1994.