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A Retrospective on
H. Rap Brown's Die Nigger Die!
By Amin Sharif
I don't really remember when I met H.
Rap Brown. I believe it was in the Baltimore SNCC office [432 E.
North Avenue]. It might have been down in D.C. or maybe in New
York. But I remember what Rap looked like—slender as a reed,
huge afro and defiant as hell. I remember that he called me
"blood" and spoke a few words to whomever I was with.
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The next time I saw Rap was on TV. Then, along with Huey P.
Newton, Rap was considered one of the most dangerous black men
in America. That was when America's cities were burning and
Martin Luther King was dead.
That's who Rap was. And, for some, that's who
Rap will always be. To see H. Rap Brown as an Imam of Islam,
which he has now become, is for some like seeing a fundamental
law of nature altered. It is as if being told that the speed of
light is no longer 186,282 miles per second or that the law of
gravity no longer applies to the earth. Knowledge of Rap's
change in character is as shattering as was the fact, for the
Vatican of the Dark Ages, that the sun, not the earth, is the
center of our solar system.
But the H. Rap Brown we knew in the
1960s is gone. Time changes everything. And I like many others, am going
to miss the old H. Rap Brown. I know, nevertheless, that
whatever changes Rap has made have been for the better.
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Die Nigger Die!
(his autobiography) is
now a requiem, not only for H. Rap Brown, but also for entire
revolutionary movement of the 1960s. There are no longer angry
protests, nor the fiery black student movement that fought Jim
Crow election laws in the South. There are no white radicals
called Weathermen or Yippes (International Youth Movement)
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Revolutionary sentiment has all
but vanished from the earth. The new sentiment is to become Yuppies or
Buppies.
Those who once wore the red, black, and green pins of
revolutionary black nationalism now sport pins declaring their
allegiance to a decided non-revolutionary brand of Afrocentrism,
or, even worse, have become cronies of the Republican Party.
All the "true believers" of real
changes are dismissed or are buried in their graves. It is
almost as if the collective consciousness of the country has
forgotten why black people burned the cities. It has been lost
why King and Malcolm died.
We have only the books and the voices of
those few who are left alive from that turbulent time to make us
remember when a decidedly more racist country looked at every
living black face and screamed—Die Nigger Die! |
 |
H. Rap Brown was born on October 4, 1943. In
his autobiography he describes his birth. He describes the world
outside his mother's belly as the first moments of his suffering
at the hands of a white person:
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My first contact with
white america was marked by her violence, for when a
white doctor pulled me from between my mother's legs and
slapped my wet ass, I, as every negro in america,
reacted to this man-inflicted pain with a cry. A cry
that america has never allowed to cease; a cry that gets
louder and more intense with age; a cry that can only be
heard and understood by others who live behind the color
curtain. |
The "Color Curtain" like the "Iron Curtain"
was a feature of a bygone age called the "Cold War." Lasting
from the end of the second World War to the recent fall of the
Berlin Wall, the Cold war sought to defeat the worldwide
Communist movement and to make every white soul free.
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The "Color Curtain," however, was raised when
the first African slave landed on the shores of America. It
divided the country forever into two classes--one white and
free; the other black and oppressed. It was into this divided and unequal world
that H. Rap Brown was born. It is behind the "Color Curtain
that he began his war with racist America.
Revolutionaries are not born full blown from
the head of Jove. H. Rap Brown did not become a
revolutionary over night. The revolutionary process begins
when one makes the observation that he is forced to live
against his will under an unjust order. Slowly, the
potential revolutionary comes to know where he stands in
the order of things.
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In
Die Nigger Die!
Rap describes this
step in the conversion process:
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If one examines the
structure of this country closely he will note that
there are three basic categories: they are white america,
negro america, and Black America . . . [and that] Color
is the first thing Black people become aware of. |
For Rap, white America is the oppressor
class. Negro America is the class filled with those of African
descent who are trapped behind the Color Curtain. And Black
America is the force of revolutionary change. Rap, also, makes
the early observation that there is no "real" reason
for America to be divided into two classes--one white and free
and the other dark and oppressed. The division is solely
arbitrary. It exists only to keep some in power and others
enslaved. Rap describes this absurdity of black existence:
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In and of itself, color has no
meaning. But the white world has given it
meaning—political, social, economic, historical,
physiological and philosophical. Once color has been
given meaning an order is thereby established. |
In a world where everything is defined by
color, there quickly is established an alliance between certain
forces within Negro America and White America to keep Black
America from obtaining the power to change the existing order.
This alliance is rooted in fear and enforced by terror. Negro
America believes that it cannot resist the power of White
America. But Black America is different. In
Die Nigger Die!
Rap clarifies this crucial philosophical perspective:
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The biggest difference
between being known as a Black man or a negro is that if
you're Black, then you do everything you can to fight
white folks. If you're negro, you do everything to
appease them |
But every moment for a potential
revolutionary is not filled with zeal. There are times when the
potential revolutionary is engaged in the under culture that
surrounds him. H. Rap Brown grew up in a Southern city like any
other brother on the streets. Gifted with a quick tongue and
scathing wit, Rap earned his nickname by being a master at
"playing the dozens and "signifying."
Now for those who don't know, the masters of
the dozens and signifying were the first street poets of Black
America. The dozens is a merciless game aimed at "totally
destroying" one's opponent with words, usually by insulting
his mother. Signifying is more humane in that one restricts
one's verbal attack to one's opponent rather than extend it to
his ancestry.
In the word game of the dozens, one scores
points by coming up with the funniest and most entertaining
character assassination of the opponent's mother. And, to make
matters more difficult, each player must sometimes use a rhyme
scheme to accomplish his task. For those who have seen the
dozens played by true masters, there is no doubt about the skill
and viciousness involved in the game. It is no small testimony
to his poetic and oratory skills that Rap won his nickname under
these circumstances.
If revolutionaries do not spring full blown
from the head of Jove, then what is the process that makes their
conversion experience a "true one"? Political education, not
mere observation, is the key. But not just any political
education will suffice the true revolutionary.
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Only political education borne of
authentic struggle will do. Rap's political education
was initiated by his brother Ed.It was Ed who pulled Rap into the growing
"sit-in" movement and who got him involved with
Non-Violent Action group (NAG). It was Ed that got Rap reading
Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Marcus Garvey, and Richard Wright.
And it was Ed Brown who got Rap involved with the Student
Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the organization that
broke away from the civil rights movement to explore
"revolutionary politics" and "Black Power."
From sit-ins, voting rights campaigns,
and marches, Rap learned that there was an authentic
spirit to be found among some of those who lived in the
Black Belt of the South. Here racism was uncompromising,
naked, and brutal. Water hoses, vicious dogs, and white
mobs often met black and white students who attempted to
desegregate lunch counters, motels and other public
accommodations.
Struggling with black Americans who
were ready, if necessary, to give up their lives for the
cause of freedom and the brutal response to that effort by
conservative and liberal whites alike began to have a
profound impact on Rap's thinking. He began to see
"integration" as "impractical." t
was somewhere during this period that Rap's
revolutionary conversion took hold. And at that moment,
he no longer saw the current order as one that could be
reformed. racism was rooted too deeply into the fabric
of America to be laid to rest by the changing of a few
laws. |
IChange, if it was to mean anything to those trapped behind the
Color Curtain, had to be all-pervasive and not dependent upon
the good graces of the oppressor class. "We cannot allow
the government to be an outlaw, particularly when the crime is
against the people," Rap declares in
Die Nigger Die! The evidence of Rap's revolutionary
conversion came on a fateful day in 1965. Several black leaders
were called to the White House to meet with President Johnson
concerning matters pertinent to the civil rights movement. In
Die Nigger Die! Rap describes the scene:
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Johnson was arrogant
as hell and mad 'cause we were there. His whole attitude
was "What you niggers doin' here taking up my
time." |
It seems that all the "negro
leaders" were entirely too passive for Rap's liking. For
instance, when they brought up the fact of their human rights in
the South, none of them answered when Johnson cut them off
saying, "Speaking of deprivation of rights, my two
daughters couldn't sleep last night because of all that
picketing noise out in front of the White House."
It was only Rap who came up with a righteous answer to the
Johnson quip:
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So I told him, "I
don't think anyone here is interested in whether your
daughters could sleep or not. We are interested in the
lives of our people. Which side is the federal
government on?" |
From then on Rap was a marked man. He was
called up for the draft after his meeting with Johnson, caught
up in a shoot-out with police in Cambridge, Maryland, arrested
and re-arrested in Virginia. Then Rap went underground in March
of 1970.
For eighteen months Rap eluded the FBI and other law
enforcement agencies. There were rumors Rap was in Cuba, West
Africa, and Algeria. No evidence has ever surfaced proving or
disproving that Rap Brown was ever in any of these places. Then,
in 1973, Rap surfaced. he was wounded in an alleged shoot-out
with police in "an uptown Manhattan bar."
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Since Rap has never given any specific details concerning the
shoot-out, we can only speculate as to what his role was in the
affair. It is here that Rap Brown disappears and Imam Jamil
Abdullah Al-Amin emerges. After serving five years of a fifteen
year sentence, the revolutionary black nationalist
becomes a Muslim. Today, a very different H. Rap Brown (Jamil
Abdullah Al-Amin) sits in jail convicted of murder. To say
the least, the entire affair smells of an old 1960s
frame-up. We have Imam Al-Amin's sworn word that he did
not commit the crime. After invoking the Name of Allah,
the Imam said: "Let me declare before the families of
these men, before the state, and any who would dare to
know the truth, that I neither shot or killed
anyone."
Still the State of Georgia holds Imam Al-Amin
in custody for the shooting and killing of a Fulton County
Sheriff's deputy. Whether or not Imam Al-Amin is able to prove
his innocence and one day walk among us again will be determined
by future events.
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But there is one thing we know, H. Rap Brown
or Imam Al-Amin is still one of the most dangerous black men
alive because he seeks truth and fights injustice. He will
remain dangerous because he is struggling for the good of his
people in a racist country that screams out to every living
black face
Die Nigger Die! *
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Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (born October 4, 1943, as Hubert Gerold
Brown), also known as H. Rap Brown, was chairman of the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s, and later
the Justice Minister of the
Black Panther Party. He is perhaps most famous for his proclamation
during that period that "violence is as American as cherry pie", as well
as once stating that "If America don't come around, we're gonna burn it
down". He is also known for his autobiography
Die Nigger Die!. He is currently serving a
life sentence for the murders of two Fulton County Sheriff's
deputies in 2000.
Brown was born in
Baton Rouge,
Louisiana. He became known as H. Rap Brown during the early 1960s.
His activism in the
civil rights movement included involvement with the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), of which he was
named chairman in 1967. That same year, he was arrested in
Cambridge, Maryland, and charged with inciting to riot as a result
of a speech he gave there. He left the SNCC and joined the
Black Panthers in 1968.
He appeared on the
FBI's
Ten Most Wanted List after avoiding trial on charges of inciting
riot and of carrying a gun across state lines. His attorneys in the gun
violation case were civil rights advocate Murphy Bell of Baton Rouge,
and the self described "radical lawyer"
William Kunstler. Brown was scheduled to be tried in Cambridge, but
the trial was moved to Bel Air, Maryland on a change of Venue.
On March 9, 1970 two black
radicals, Ralph Featherstone and William ("Che") Payne died on U.S.
Route 1 south of Bel Air, Maryland when a bomb being carried between
Payne's legs on the front floorboard of their car exploded, completely
destroying the car and dismembering both occupants. Allegedly the bomb
was intended to be used at the courthouse where Brown was to be tried.
The next night the Cambridge, Maryland courthouse was bombed.
Brown disappeared for 18 months,
and then he was arrested after a reported shootout with officers. The
shootout occurred after what was said to be an attempted robbery of a
bar in 1971 in
New York.
He spent five years (1971-1976) in
Attica Prison after a robbery conviction. While in prison, Brown
converted to
Islam and changed his name to Jamil Abdullah al-Amin. After his
release, he opened a grocery store in
Atlanta,
Georgia and became a Muslim spiritual leader and community activist
preaching against drugs and gambling in
Atlanta's West End neighborhood.—Wikipedia
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Die Nigger Die!
A Political
Autobiography
By H. Rap
Brown (Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin)
foreword by
Ekweueme Michael Thelwell
Introduction
by Don L. Lee
"A powerful
autobiographical and revolutionary statement . . . written with precision
and a poetic flow of language."—Gilbert Osofsky, Chicago Daily
News
"It
requires exceptional courage to read Die Nigger Die! but failure to read
this book is the kind of cowardice that could destroy
America."—Claude Brown
"A bold
portrait of a bold man." —Playboy *
* * * *
H. Rap Brown/Jamil Al Amin
A Profoundly American Story
By Ekwueme Michael Thelwell
February 28, 2002
Die Nigger Die!,
the autobiographical political memoir by H. Rap Brown, is a vital
American historical document—historical almost in the sense of a message
found in a time capsule, a missive from another age. But it remains of
considerable interest for what it tells us about social and political
attitudes, behaviors and expectations of a time—so my students
believe—long past. The time, in this case, being a discrete, relatively
short period of domestic upheaval in this country during the late 1960s
and early 1970s, a time of "revolutionary" black uprising in Northern
ghettos following hard on the heels of the Southern, nonviolent,
direct-action movement engineered by SNCC (Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee), CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and SCLC
(Southern Christian Leadership Conference), a movement usually
associated with Martin Luther King Jr.
 |
Rap's book has an added
dimension of sociological interest, being a voice from the
frontlines, the personal and political testimony of a
radically militant chairman of SNCC who came to symbolize
the defiance of a generation of angry and militant black
youth. A third, perhaps less compelling, area of interest is
the personal: what the voice and language reveal about the
character and personality, the sensibility, if you will, of
the speaker. Who is this man, of whom McGeorge Bundy
reportedly commented at the founding gathering of the
National Urban Coalition, "Wouldn't you, wouldn't all of us,
sleep much better tonight if we knew that H. Rap Brown . . .
was somewhere quietly running his own little drugstore?"
(This essay will appear
in longer form as the introduction to
Die Nigger Die!,
forthcoming from Lawrence Hill Books in April.)
Well,
for one thing, the author, H. Rap Brown, is no longer among
us. Nor has he really been since 1971, when, as a young man
in his late twenties, he made his shahadah (the
Muslim declaration of faith). During a period of
incarceration by the State of New York, the black activist
known to the media as H. Rap Brown converted to orthodox
Islam and emerged as Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, a Sunni Muslim.
Brown went in and Al-Amin emerged. This change was by no
means cosmetic or strategic.
By all accounts and the overwhelming
preponderance of evidence over years, this was a genuine religious
conversion, a classically "profound transformation of self." Al-Amin
embarked on a life of rigorous study and spiritual and moral inquiry
with the same single-minded intensity and uncompromising commitment Rap
had brought to militant social struggle. . . .
The Nation |
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* * *
Poem: Fireman's
Ball
* *
* * *
It Aint
My Fault by Mos Def & Lenny Kravitz
* * *
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Bill Moyers and James Cone (Interview) /
A Conversation with James Cone
* * *
* *
John
Coltrane, "Alabama" /
Kalamu ya Salaam, "Alabama"
/
A Love Supreme
A Blues for the Birmingham Four
/ Eulogy for the Young Victims
/ Six Dead After Church
Bombing
* *
* * *
What We Want
By Stokely Carmichael
Reverend
Marion Bascom Civilrighting /
A
Christian Goon Squad in Black Baltimore
Clarence Logan and the Northwood Movement
/ Chester Wickwire Desegregating Gwynn Oak Amusement Park
Roy Wilkins and Spiro Agnew in
Annapolis /
Agnew Speaks to Black
Baltimore Leaders 1968
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* * *
Walter Hall Lively /
Forty Years of Determined Struggle
/
The Wayfarer 4th Quarter 1967 Black Baltimore
Putting
Baltimore's People First
Dominance of Johns Hopkins
A Brief Economic History of Modern Baltimore
Understanding the Monumental City: A
Bibliographic Essay on Baltimore History ( Richard
J. Cox)
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* * *
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The Shadows of Youth
The Remarkable Journey of the Civil
Rights Generation
By Andrew B. Lewis
With deep admiration and rigorous
scholarship, historian Lewis (Gonna
Sit at the Welcome Table)
revisits the ragtag band of young men
and women who formed the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Impatient with what they considered the
overly cautious and accommodating pace
of the NAACP and
Martin
Luther King Jr., the black college
students and their white allies,
inspired by Gandhi's principles of
nonviolence and moral integrity, risked
their lives to challenge a deeply
entrenched system. Fanning out over the
Jim Crow South, SNCC organized sit-ins,
voter registration drives, Freedom
Schools and protest marches. Despite
early successes, the movement
disintegrated in the late 1960s,
succeeded by the militant Black Power
movement. The highly readable history
follows the later careers of the
principal leaders. Some, like
Stokely Carmichael and
H. Rap
Brown, became bitter and
disillusioned. Others, including
Marion Barry,
Julian Bond and
John Lewis, tempered their idealism
and moved from protest to politics,
assuming positions of leadership within
the very institutions they had
challenged. According to the author, No
organization contributed more to the
civil rights movement than SNCC, and
with his eloquent book, he offers a
deserved tribute.—Publishers
Weekly |
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Ratification
The People Debate the Constitution,
1787-1788
By Pauline Maier
A notable historian
of the early republic, Maier devoted a
decade to studying the immense
documentation of the ratification of the
Constitution. Scholars might approach
her book’s footnotes first, but history
fans who delve into her narrative will
meet delegates to the state conventions
whom most history books, absorbed with
the Founders, have relegated to
obscurity. Yet, prominent in their local
counties and towns, they influenced a
convention’s decision to accept or
reject the Constitution. Their
biographies and democratic credentials
emerge in Maier’s accounts of their
elections to a convention, the political
attitudes they carried to the conclave,
and their declamations from the floor.
The latter expressed opponents’
objections to provisions of the
Constitution, some of which seem
anachronistic (election regulation
raised hackles) and some of which are
thoroughly contemporary (the power to
tax individuals directly). Ripostes from
proponents, the Federalists, animate the
great detail Maier provides, as does her
recounting how one state convention’s
verdict affected another’s. Displaying
the grudging grassroots blessing the
Constitution originally received, Maier
eruditely yet accessibly revives a
neglected but critical passage in
American history.—Booklist |
 |
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* * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By
W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
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____ 2005
Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
* *
* * *
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/ January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
* * * * *
* *
* * *
updated 3 October 2007
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