H. 'Rap' Brown's Brother Reflects on Deadly Struggle for Justice
Pacific News Service, James L. Hickey, Posted: Jan 21, 2002
As the man formerly known as H. "Rap" Brown stands on trial for murder, his brother Ed Brown reflects on the struggle for justice the two share, and how their lives so dramatically diverged.
DECANTUR, Ga.--"We fought. All brothers fight. But not that much," Ed Brown ruminates. He is a substantial fellow, not a mountain but certainly a sizeable hill, solid and tough. From a distance he appears much younger than his 61 years. Still quick as a boxer, his hands chop the air when he speaks.
But there was a moment, he says, when the fraternal fighting stopped.
"I don't think we laid a hand on each other after they butchered Emmett Till." That notorious lynching "transformed the life of Southern Blacks. Either we stood up and stood together, or we were dead."
Ed Brown's brother, Hubert, became H. "Rap" Brown, the volcanic orator and fiery propagandist who wrote "Die, Nigger, Die!" Now El Haj Jamil Abdullah Al Amin, Brown's brother is currently standing trial for murder, on the charge of having shot two sheriff's deputies trying to serve a warrant, one of whom died. The prosecutor has announced he will seek the death penalty.
When Ed speaks of his sibling, the sense of longstanding collaboration and responsibility weighs on his slumping shoulders.
"Really, he sort of followed me into the movement." Theirs is a story with 10 million parallels in Dixie the century following 1865. A fiercely patriarchal family included sharecropping paternal grandparents, a Navy veteran/refinery worker father, and an educator-mom who stuffed literacy and rigorous thinking into her children.
In 1961, when "the sit-in movement swept over the South like a wildfire," Ed was one of the leaders at Southern University, in hometown Baton Rouge. "I got myself arrested," he says, and the disorderly conduct conviction that followed saw him expelled from college. His head shakes with sadness at the notion of the administration there so invested in America's apartheid system that they threw him out.
He lived at home and worked at his father's company, where he scraped grime and toxic sludge from pipes and tanks.
Brown says he realized that "in order to get an education, I had to get out of the South," and headed for Howard University in Washington, D.C. Once there, he continued work with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and completed a degree in political science and public administration.
Brown's younger brother followed him to Washington. H. "Rap" Brown became a passionate, charismatic speaker and organizer. Stokeley Carmichael was friend and adviser to the brothers. It was in the mid-'60s, recalls Ed, when J. Edgar Hoover reportedly told FBI agents around him, "any nigger who thinks he wants to be a revolutionary should know he's going to be a dead revolutionary."
H. 'Rap' Brown twice withstood firefights with police, underwent multiple arrests that led to a single conviction still under appeal 30 years after the event, and accumulated a 50,000-page FBI file. Hoover's words "still play in my brother's head, I promise you, sitting in the Fulton County Jail, wondering if the frame" the State of Georgia has constructed "will convince a jury" to convict him, Ed Brown said.
In some ways, the paths these two brothers followed have diverged. Ed became a teacher, "like mother." He has instructed thousands of organizers, politicians, and citizens, mainly in Mississippi, in the "basics of making democracy work," even if powerful people and institutions stand in opposition. His employers include the renowned Carter Center, founded by former president Jimmy Carter.
Ed's younger brother experienced success, too, in the South, helping implement the Voting Rights Act in 1965-66, under SNCC's auspices, in Alabama. But he served four years in Attica on the armed robbery charge that is still being adjudicated. In prison he converted to Islam, becoming Jamil Al Amin. He crusaded against drugs, negotiated truces among gangs, oversaw the founding of a mosque, and became a religious and community leader in Atlanta.
Whatever travail Jamil has encountered, no matter the distance the brothers have traveled from each other, Ed has always returned to stand by his kin. The unfolding context of the trial nauseates Ed Brown. The judge has imposed a gag order on his brother and others in the case.
"It reminds me of the 'show trials' they had against labor activists in the '30s," Ed Brown says. He wonders if the public has enough courage left to demand a fair process.
The prosecution contends it has circumstantial and physical evidence to prove its case. Al Amin's defense asserts that this is just the final step in the escalating official war against him since the mid-'60s. They say they will prove mistaken identity and demonstrate such egregious procedural errors that a dismissal will be unavoidable.
Whatever happens to his "little brother," Ed Brown says he will continue efforts for change and justice that the brothers, each in his own way, have struggled to accomplish. But the thought of the state killing his sibling shakes this big, confident, competent man to his foundations.
"I know he's innocent," Ed Brown says. Sitting in his presence, one cannot help but be shaken as well.
PNS contributor James L. Hickey (freebird6969@mac.com) is a freelance writer and documentary filmmaker.
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