A life backfired

In an era when radicalism was just what the masses needed, H. Rap Brown was a welcome trendsetter. He ordered blacks to take up arms against those who beat them down, offering a violent solution to their oppression. It was a means to an end that more conservative civil rights leaders feared — and that a young, impatient set revered.

Now, 30 years and one murder conviction later, the trendsetter's become an unfortunate anachronism.

In a city and county predominantly run by blacks, a mostly-black jury last Saturday handed down a 13-count verdict against the very man who helped guide blacks to power in the first place — by encouraging them to vote.

The jury's swift decision was met with a surprisingly tepid reaction. Beefed-up security around the courthouse went unchallenged. The defendant's supporters gathered quietly in their West End mosque to lament their lost leader, shifting their focus from fighting for his innocence to planning for his appeal.

It's the exact opposite of what one might expect after the trial of a man who once incited a generation's explosive anger. Brown, who converted to Islam in the 1970s and changed his name to Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, has been disowned by the quorum that once empowered him.

"My impression over the years is that his reputation in Movement circles is less than pristine," says David Garrow, an Emory law professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. "I was certainly surprised that the jury came back as quickly as it did."

It took the Fulton County jury just 10 hours of deliberation to convict Al-Amin of the murder of Deputy Ricky Kinchen and the wounding of Deputy Aldranon English. Both deputies are black.

There were a few murmurs of dissent. One supporter was removed from the courtroom for invoking Bob Marley a bit too loudly: "How long shall they kill our prophets?" But there was no uprising on the scale that the case — layered with contradictions — could have warranted.

For instance: Both Deputy English and Deputy Kinchen, before he died, told investigators they shot their assailant, whom they met while attempting to serve Al-Amin a warrant two years ago. But when he was arrested, Al-Amin was unscathed. What's more, English swore that his assailant had gray eyes; Al-Amin's are clearly brown. Also, evidence at the crime scene, just outside Al-Amin's store in West End, was tainted and mishandled by the swarm of law enforcement that descended there. And the guns that were found near Al-Amin when he was captured in Alabama — guns later linked to the shooting — did not bear Al-Amin's fingerprints.

Of course, there was a strong case against the defendant, such as English's tear-jerking testimony that Al-Amin was indisputably the shooter, as well as the discovery of Al-Amin's bullet-torn Mercedes close to where he was captured. Also, the defense had its shortcomings. Defense attorney Tony Axam bombed his closing argument, when he ran around the courtroom babbling like Richard Pryor on a speed binge. Axam likened Al-Amin's appearance of guilt to the time Axam's daughter seemed to have used a pair of his pants to wipe pickle juice off the kitchen floor. She appeared guilty but wasn't, Axam told the jury. The pickle juice travesty was a far cry from that of a deputy shot with an assault rifle once through his bulletproof vest and three times in the testicles.

Still, Axam didn't do so bad that a jury of nine blacks, two Hispanics and one white could easily write off the case's inconsistencies. Axam's co-counsel Jack Martin even stepped up to the jury for some damage control, pointing during his portion of closing argument to convincing grounds for reasonable doubt, such as the gray eyes, Al-Amin's absence of injury and the neighbors who testified someone else may have been at the scene of the shooting.

So why upon the jury's decision was there no rioting in the streets, which the Fulton County Sheriff's Department was braced for? Why this quiet resolve amid Al-Amin's close-knit community of West End Muslims? Is it because the ex-militant child of the 1960s was, at the time he ran into the deputies, delivering on the prophecy he himself created decades ago, when he provoked blacks to raid gun stores and burn cities down? If so, where did his fellow children, his patrons in arms, go?

Al-Amin, back when he was H. Rap Brown, earned his fame partly by going door-to-door urging rural blacks to vote — a mission that posed genuine risks from the seated white power. He later went on to become chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a powerful Civil Rights group that was first affiliated with the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr. and, after Brown's intervention, with the Black Panthers.

At the time, the press lavished him with column inches and airtime.

"They sensed correctly that African-Americans between 14 and 25 wanted something with more edge, more anti-whitie [sentiment] than you're getting from King," Garrow says. "And so ... Rap became the sort of overnight media symbol for it."

But he fell out of the limelight, even before his conversion to Islam in the early 1970s, according to Garrett.

The Movement began to mellow as blacks rose to power, according to Al-Amin's contemporaries. Because of Al-Amin and people like him, blacks began to get elected to office. In the Alabama county where Al-Amin urged blacks to the polls, the sheriff is black, as are county commissioners and several judges.

They didn't need him anymore.

"I think that a lot of forces, who were around [in the 1960s] and who in many instances had extremely radical demands, did change," says Omali Yeshitela, a former SNCC member and the current chairman of the African People's Socialist Party in St. Petersburg, Fla. "The things that radicalized them in the first place got resolved for them. I think there is some irony in the fact that some of the same people who benefited from SNCC and the work Al-Amin did ... are now sitting as cops, judges and prosecutors. None of them could have been in those positions without him."

Thus by the time deputies Kinchen and English came looking for Al-Amin, who was wanted in Cobb County on allegations of driving a stolen vehicle, Black Power was not an intimidating force to be reckoned with; it was an institutionalized reality. And Al-Amin, who had been living quietly in Atlanta as Muslim cleric for 25 years, was no longer the black man's champion. Even before the trial, he was painted the enemy.

Al-Amin's supporters in the West End, who credit him with ridding the neighborhood of drug dealers and prostitutes, balk at the media's treatment of him pre- and post-shooting. The same media machine that helped develop him as a spokesman of the Movement backfired on him years later in portraying him as a cop-killer — within hours of the shooting.

At least in West End, he will be sorely missed.

"The drug trade is actually booming now because certain things are not done," says Shaheed Abdur Rahman, a former West End Muslim who spent four years in prison for the vigilante shooting of a drug dealer.

Rahman worries that in the sentencing phase of Al-Amin's trial, which was under way as of press time, prosecutors might try to cast Al-Amin as the mastermind of several slayings of West End prostitutes and drug dealers. "When I got arrested for the murder charge, they asked me about him for an hour before they got to what I did," Rahman says. "Any crime that anyone has been committed or even accused of, this man did not advocate."

In the 35 years leading up to last week's conviction, Al-Amin was suspected by the FBI of many crimes that he didn't commit — as evidenced by FBI documents, released in the 1970s, pointing to Al-Amin as a target of a government conspiracy, and an FBI case file compiled in the 1990s.

It appears that now, however, is not the time for clemency of former radicals. Unlike in Al-Amin's heyday, few feel for a convicted cop killer who acted against a police force that's predominantly black.

Likewise, it's a difficult time to garner sympathy for Muslims. The prosecution clearly capitalized on Al-Amin's religion when Senior Assistant District Attorney Robert McBurney delivered the final words of the guilt-innocence phase of the trial.

Throughout the trial, Al-Amin and his attorneys did not stand when the jury entered the room, as the prosecution did. It wasn't out of disrespect, but merely because, according to Islamic law, a Muslim can stand for no one but Allah. This was not explained to the jury because Al-Amin's attorneys did not want to attract any more attention to his faith than necessary.

But in the end, McBurney couldn't avoid the cheap shot. In his closing argument, he told jurors: "You watched what happened in this courtroom, [you saw] who wouldn't stand up for you. Don't stand up for him."

Obviously, they didn't.

mara.shalhoup@creativeloafing.com??