56 Time November 8/November 15, 2021
the President. As Thelwell later told it,
Rap just happened to be in the SNCC of-
fice when the organization needed to sub
someone in at the last minute. The meet-
ing left Rap disgusted, by the actions of
both President Johnson and the leaders
who went to the White House supposedly
to push for change.
In his memoir, Rap wrote, “The
dude from the NAACP got up and said,
‘Mr. President, it really is a pleasure to
be here. This will be something that I’ll
be proud to tell my children and grand-
children about.’ Then came another fool
and he said the same thing.” By the time
it was Rap’s turn to talk, he was fed up.
“I think it’s unnecessary that we have
to be here protesting against the bru-
tality that Black people are subjected
to.” He wasn’t done. “And furthermore,
I think that the majority of Black people
that voted for you wish that they had
gone fishing.”
At 21, Rap was becoming a man who
had no time for civility, who would say
what everyone else was thinking, damn
the consequences. He understood what
white America had done to a large portion
of Black people, who understood being
agreeable as a path toward salvation,
while secretly starving for action. From
that moment, Rap offered Black people
a different type of leader, one who spoke
seemingly without fear.
By the spring of 1967, he was elected
chairman of SNCC, which had become
an increasingly militant organization,
following in the footsteps of Stokely
Carmichael. And by July, he was in
Cambridge, Md., speaking at a rally.
The year 1967 was one of more than
150 race riots. It was the year the phrase
When the looting starts, the shooting starts
was popularized by Walter Headley,
then the police chief of Miami, more than
a half century before it was brought back
into the public consciousness by Donald
Trump in response to protests after the
murder of George Floyd. It was the year
COINTELPRO, a program started by the
FBI, would target a group of “Black Mes-
siahs” (Rap included) who could “unify,
and electrify, the militant black national-
ist movement.” And it was the year Rap’s
relationship with law enforcement began
its rocky road.
Rap was speaking on top of a car,
above a crowd in Cambridge, as attendees
cheered him on. “We are going to control
our community. We ain’t going to have the
honky coming over here and appointing
five or six nigger cops to come down here
and ruin our community. That’s Black
Power.” He went on. “Newark exploded.
Harlem exploded. Dayton exploded. Cin-
cinnati exploded. It’s time for Cambridge
to explode, baby.”
The cheers only intensified. “They say,
if Dayton don’t come around, we’re gonnaburn Dayton down. Black folks built
America. If America don’t come around,
we should burn it down.”
After the speech, as Rap walked an
attendee home, he was struck by police
buckshot and was rushed to get medical
attention. Hours later, Cambridge started
to burn. Most of the national news por-
trayed Rap as the catalyst. We would later
learn, from a once buried memo from the
Kerner Commission report, that investi-
gators determined that the real blame lay
with the Cambridge police chief, for his
“emotional binge in which his main de-
sire seems to have been to kill Negroes.”
A fugitive warrant was out for Rap’s
arrest, and ultimately he was charged
by the state of Maryland with inciting
a riot. What followed, as described by
Peter B. Levy in his book The Great Up-
rising, was Rap being “arrested, released
from jail, and rearrested on at least eight
separate and unrelated charges over the
next four years.”
Rap’s lawyer was William Kunstler,
the man who would later be best known
for defending the Chicago 7. He argued
that the U.S. government had a clear
vendetta against his client, claiming
“vindictive and unrelenting efforts to
destroy him.” Another attorney argued
that the COINTELPRO practices were in
full bloom, stating that it wasn’t actually
about any cases against Rap sticking, but
rather more to slow momentum, “so that
the wellsprings of social action can’t move
in a directed form.”
By 1970, his trial for the incident in
Cambridge was finally set to start. Rap,
who was now 26, did not appear. In May,Why was I told
so little about
Jamil Al-Amin, a
man crucial to
understanding
Black liberation?1967
Jazz singer Nina Simone with
Brown during a surprise visit to
a convention in Atlanta
1968
Brown stands with his
wife Karima outside a New
Orleans courtroom1970
Brown is added to the
FBI’s most-wanted list—
for the first time