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the FBI added him to its most-wanted list,
where he stayed for 18 months. In Octo-
ber 1971, in a standoff with police, he was
shot and apprehended. He spent the next
two years awaiting trial in a variety of
prisons, including Rikers Island and the
Manhattan Detention Complex, known
as “The Tombs.” Once he was sentenced,
Rap spent five years in Attica.
Karima al-amin met her future hus-
band in Harlem, one week after he was
shot in Cambridge.
The daughter of a woman who man-
aged the payroll for the NAACP Legal
Defense Fund, she spent her early life
much closer to the traditional civil rights
movement. “I became the babysitter for
Thurgood Marshall and most of the Afri-
can American judges and lawyers in that
whole circle,” says Karima, now an immi-
gration attorney. “So by the time I met
Imam Jamil, that was my background.”
Jet magazine announced their March
1968 nuptials under the headline
She’S With him, with a photo of the
couple outside a federal court in New
Orleans, his hand on her shoulder, her
Afro larger than his. In three years, how-
ever, Rap would be in prison and no lon-
ger known as H. Rap Brown.
It didn’t happen overnight. He was
invited to partake in Jumu’ah, the Is-
lamic Friday prayer, and joined. Speak-
ing with City Paper in 1992, he recalled
that Malcolm X made him more curious
about Islam, and that as his interest grew,
he began to see the religion as a “contin-
uation of a lifestyle,” noting “it became
evident that to accomplish the things
we had talked about in the struggle, you
would need a practice.”
Upon his release in October 1976,
H. Rap Brown, now known as Jamil Al-
Amin, settled with Karima in Atlanta,
where she had moved while he was in-
carcerated. It was there, in the neighbor-
hood of the West End, that he became an
organizer again, building a small Muslim
community, opening a grocery store and
eventually being chosen as the imam.
“We came to be good friends from
playing ball because a lot of people
couldn’t whoop him down there,” says
Chad Russell, Al-Amin’s friend for more
than 30 years, on their basketball- playing
days in the neighborhood. For hours, we
sat on the corner near Al-Amin’s old store,
as Russell told stories about the area’s
transformation. He sold fruit and sand-
wiches to passersby, situated across the
street from a mural of Al-Amin, dressed
in all white and praying, that was painted
during the pandemic.
For a second time, Al-Amin was an un-
likely leader. But it was different this time.
His loud, often profane way had been ex-
changed for a more docile demeanor. In
1993, he penned a scholarly book on the
foundations of Islam. But evident from
the title, Revolution by the Book, these
changes did not result in a fully new man.
“In terms of being able to speak truth
to power,” says Akinyele Umoja, profes-
sor of African American studies at Geor-
gia State University. “That element of him
had not been compromised.”
Professional athletes flocked to him,
no matter where he lived. Karima remem-
bers cooking when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
would come to town. “And if he didn’t
come to eat, the imam would take the
food to him, and then I would look at
the game on TV and hope that he doesn’t
cramp over my food,” Karima says.
And that community was only a frac-
tion of his influence. Because you may
evolve, and you may grow up, but you
don’t just lose the cool. Even as he left be-
hind “H. Rap Brown,” the growing popu-
larity of rap music meant a new genera-
tion was discovering his words.
“When I became an MC in 1977, any-
one who was rapping tried to gain an edge
on the competition by dipping into places
where you wouldn’t think others would
find rhymes,” says Davey D, a journalist
and hip-hop historian who grew up in the
Bronx in the 1970s. “Some people dipped
into the Mother Goose rhymes, some
people knew about Dolemite or Blowfly.
I knew about H. Rap Brown, so, quite nat-
urally, he was going to be my direct influ-
ence as an MC.”
“Coming up, hip-hop was such a
young art form,” says Killer Mike, rapper
and activist from Atlanta. “Rapping in the
’60s and ’70s was cats talking that sweet
shit, or highly informed politicized jive,
but it sounded good. So I always thought
he had the coolest name in the world with
H. Rap Brown. I thought his name was the
most revolutionary shit.”
Going back to their time as a couple
in Harlem, the Al-Amins had always at-
tracted Black people who spoke up,
from Nina Simone to Muhammad Ali.
Al-Amin also inspired unique corners of
Black thought, gracing the cover of Nikki
Giovanni’s book of poems Black Judgement
2000
Al-Amin’s mug shot after he
was accused of shooting
two Georgia deputies
1976
Stokely Carmichael, LeRoi
Jones and Al-Amin at Michaux’s,
a bookstore in Harlem
FROM LEFT: AP (2); FBI; JAMES E. HINTON—LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; REUTERS
