55
begins to challenge this authority, both
within Negro America and the big white
world when he confronts it,” Rap wrote.
Die Nigger Die! is a serious text, written
by a hilarious man. He was “a jokester,”
says Dave Dennis, civil rights activ-
ist, member of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and
Brown’s high school classmate. Brown
was also a standout athlete in both bas-
ketball and football. But by 1962, at age
18, he began joining his brother in Wash-
ington, D.C., where his work in the civil
rights movement officially began. “Ed
had great eloquence in the Southern oral
tradition, and it was clear that linguistic
skill was shared in the Brown family. Be-
cause when [Hubert] came to Howard,
his nickname was already Rap,” says the
writer and professor Ekwueme Michael
Thelwell, who was at Howard University
from 1960 to 1964, serving as the direc-
tor of SNCC’s Washington office in 1964.
In Rap’s autobiography, he writes
about his younger years, which he says
were defined by the art form of signify-
ing: “I learned how to talk in the street,
not from reading about Dick and Jane
going to the zoo and all that simple shit.”
It’s also filled with rhymes: “Known
from the Gold Coast to the rocky shores
of Maine/ Rap is my name and love is
my game.”
Once this verbal dexterity combined
with politics and action, he set out on a
new course. He became chairman of the
Howard-based Nonviolent Action Group
(NAG), even though he didn’t attend the
university. “I saw my role as one of try-
ing to get college students to identify
with the brothers in the street,” he wrote.
“College students, however, get caught in
a trick, because they think that to be ac-
cepted by the young bloods, they have to
be tough, be a warrior. But all they have
to do is show the brother that they respect
him and that they recognize that he is a
brother. All Black people are involved in
the same struggle.”
Rap continued to make a name for
himself, while not being everyone’s cup
of tea. This was particularly true in 1965,
when he was sitting in the White House,
telling LBJ, “I’m not happy to be here.”
Less than a week after “Bloody Sun-
day” on the Edmund Pettus Bridge,
Rap joined a multiracial coalition of na-
tional civil rights leaders to meet with△
Al-Amin during jury selection while on trial in 2002 on charges of
murdering one Fulton County sheriff ’s deputy and wounding another