Black History Month

H. Rap Brown (Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin) American activist, writer (1943-) Former 60s radical H. Rap Brown now Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin was convicted of 13 counts related to a shooting in which Al-Amin killed an Atlanta police officer and wounded his partner. Al-Amin’s trial now enters its death penalty phase. Under Georgia law, a person found guilty of a murder and an aggravating crime, such as killing a police officer, can receive the death penalty. Al-Amin appeared first on the public stage as the fiery leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and later Black Panther Party member who famously asserted that violence was “as American as cherry pie” and once claimed he might shoot Lyndon Johnson’s wife. Brown was imprisoned several times in the late 1960s. In 1967 he was charged with inciting a riot and convicted of armed robbery in 1973. By the time of his release in 1976, Brown had converted to Islam and taken on the Al-Amin name. Until his latest legal problems, Al-Amin ran a grocery store and mosque on the west side of Atlanta. In Marc 2000, Sheriff’s Deputies Ricky Kinchen and Aldranon English went to Al-Amin’s store were they attempted to serve a warrant on Al-Amin for missing a previous court date on charges of impersonating an officer and theft. Al-Amin opened fire on the officers with a Ruger .223 rifle and a Browning pistol, wounding one officer and ki8lling the other. Although Al-Amin was later captured with the rifle and bullets from a 9mm Beretta used by the police officers were found in Al-Amin’s Mercedes, Al-Amin’s defense claimed that someone else did the shooting. A Fulton County jury convicted Mr. Al-Amin, of all 13 charges against him stemming from a shootout with two deputies across the street from his mosque in an impoverished section of Atlanta west of downtown. Because prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against him, the jury must decide whether Mr. Al-Amin, 58, should be executed or should spend the rest of his life in prison. That phase of the trial, in which his lawyers are expected to present character witnesses on his behalf. The jury, made up of nine blacks, two whies and on Hispanic. Jurors deliberated 10 hours over the days before finding the Muslim cleric now called Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin guilty of shooting to death Deputy Ricky Kinchen and wounding Deputy Aldranon English. The decision essentially concludes a case that might have proved divisive in the days when Rap Brown was urging street violence and Atlanta was dominated by a white establishment. Instead, it revealed how much the city has changed: the two deputies who were shot that night were black, as is the county sheriff, the mayor, the district attorney and most of the city. As a result, there has been little sympathy here for Mr. Al-Amin among black residents except for his cloest. The crucial testimony in the three-week trial came from Deputy Aldranon English, who stood up in court and identified Mr. Al-Amin as the man who shot him and his partner, Deputy Ricky Kinchen. Mr. English said he was attempting to serve an old arrest warrant on Mr. Al-Amin on the night of March 16, 2000, when Mr. English asked to see the cleric’s obscured right hand. “He said, ‘Yeah,’ frowned, and swung up an assault rifle and started shooting,” Mr. English said in court. One of the rounds went under Mr. Kinchen’s bulletproof vest into his abdomen, and be died the next day.supporters.