Hit & Run 3.23.00 [snip]
The *New York Times* described it sneeringly: "This afternoon, after standing in handcuffs and ankle chains before a federal magistrate in Montgomery to be turned over to Georgia authorities, he looked at a reporter in the courtroom and uttered a familiar sentiment:
"'It's a government conspiracy,' he said, as he was being led away."
Not that we don't believe early reports http://www.cnn.com/2000/US/03/21/al.amin.03/index.html that he shot two sheriff's deputies in a black-on-black crime in Atlanta last week, but, well, look at it this way: If you're Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, formerly H. Rap Brown, seeing conspiracies is probably second nature.
After all, it's not everyone who has a law named after him (the so-called Rap Brown Law of 1968 was the first federal law aimed at preventing individuals from crossing state lines "with intent ... to incite a riot"). And it's not everyone who's special enough to have fat sheafs of COINTELPRO http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/copap5b.htm memos documenting that they've been singled out — along with Stokely Carmichael, Elijah Muhammed, and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. — for "special attention" for years on end. (Heck, if we hadn't already ruined any chance for it all on our own, maybe we'd have had the FBI trying to prevent us from becoming "a messiah" too.) And it's not everyone who's had eight bounty hunters (led by a guy named Buck Buchanan, no less) after him for the $3,000 he'd bring from the fine, upstanding bail bondsmen at AAA Bonding.
Still, things don't look very promising for Al-Amin at the moment. As an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the mid-1960s, H. Rap Brown did a lot of good work. And by all accounts, Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin did a lot of good work, too, as founder of the Atlanta Community Mosque in that city's West End neighborhood. Though long out of print, Brown's 1969 book *Die N-word Die!* (The Dial Press) is well worth a read, straddling both autobiography and political polemic (Rap describes LBJ as "old cracker ass Lightning Bug Johnson") and including shrewd synopses of history, American culture ("It just goes to show you, you give the cracker an inch, he wants a yard, give him a yard, and he'll BURN A CROSS ON IT, every time"), and media crit ("Jet magazine, the cullard Playboy, a cross between a stag magazine and the Pittsburg Police Gazette, talks Black and sells white"); a riff on the floating exchange rate; and some dozens verses guaranteed to put any opponent in his place:
I fucked your mama till she went blind. Her breath smells bad, But she sure can grind.
Clearly, however, Al-Amin's life at the periphery of American politics took its toll. Like Abbie Hoffman — about whom a new film, *Steal This Movie!*, did well in early screenings at the South By Southwest film festivals — Brown/Al-Amin began as an orator, huckster, and showman who tried to make the prospect of political revolution more urgent and appealing. And while Vincent D'Onofrio is, in fact, appealing as Abbie Hoffman in *Steal This Movie!*, the film served mainly as a simple reminder that, once upon a time, politics was something worth watching on television. We can only hope *Court TV* will do justice to Rap's trial.
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