Asante Sana, #HRapBrown #ImamJamilAlAmin

Posted on November 24, 2025 by toddpanther

Dear Friends of SNCC,
The family of Jamil Al-Amin aka H. Rap Brown announced his passing on Sunday, October 23, 2025 at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina. Jamil Al-Amin served as the fifth Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Before becoming SNCC Chairman, Jamil was an active member of the Howard University SNCC chapter the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG). He also worked in the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project, and organizing in Greene County, Alabama in 1965-1966. Jamil Al-Amin is the author of two books, Die Nigger Die (1969) and Revolution by the Book (1993).
The SNCC family offers its condolences and love to Jamil’s wife Karima Al Amin and son Kairi.
While chairman of SNCC, Jamil asserted that “violence was as American as cherry pie.” His statement referred to the thousands of Black and Brown men, women and children who were and are brutalized and killed in America without any accountability. The violent deaths of Medgar Evers, Sandra Bland, Emmitt Till, Aura Rooser, Jimmie Lee Jackson, Michelle Cusseaux, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mya Hall, Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Janisha Fonville, Tamir Rice, Natasha McKenna, George Floyd and Freddie Gray are an undeniable part of America’s history.
In 2025, thousands of Brown men, women and children are being swept off the streets by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and disappeared without due process. Unlike white Americans, Black and Brown people are presumed guilty and are subjected to being stopped, frisked, detained, jailed, and/or shot.
After serving as SNCC Chairman, Jamil was arrested for robbery and jailed in Attica Prison from 1971 to 1976. While in prison he joined the Muslim faith and changed his name from Hubert Gerold “Rap” Brown to Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin.
Since 2000, Jamil had been serving a life sentence for the accused murder of two Deputy Sheriffs in Fulton County, Georgia. Jamil’s son, Kairi, has been working for more than a decade to secure his father’s release from prison. He has continually stated that there was evidence to prove Jamil innocent of the murders.
It is the hope of SNCC veterans, who over the past 65 years have engaged in the struggle to make America a less violent society for Black and Brown people, that all Americans will continue the very hard work of fighting against all forms of inequality and injustice. We must ensure that America becomes a place where all people feel safe and are not subjected to violence by federal, state or local governments, and non-state actors because of the color of their skin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._Rap_Brown

https://imamjamilactionnetwork.org/

Jared Ball, Black Power Media and “The Penny Trick:” What I Thought About Peacock’s “Lowndes County and The Road To Black Power”

Posted on March 19, 2023 by toddpanther

As usual, I’ve gotta come here to fix my many goofs! The “her” I’m talking about @ 00:27:00 is Melissa Haizlip, director of the Mr. Soul film and the niece of the Soul! host/producer.

Book Mini-Review: Black Marks

Posted on August 5, 2021 by toddpanther

Run: Book One.

John Lewis and Andrew Aydin. Art by L. Fury and Nate Powell.

New York: Abrams Comic Arts, in conjunction with Good Trouble Productions, 154 pp., $24.99.

The change of artist did nothing to hinder the entrance into John Lewis’ world: one of bloodshed, and courage and almost constant activity and sound. Kudos to co-writer Andrew Aydin and artist L. Fury, who took the baton well from Nate Powell. The award-winning March (examined by this reviewer here) is followed up with a new triology, completed in text just before the congressman’s death last year. In this first installment, Lewis slowly realizes that the attributes that propelled him to Movement leadership–Christian witness, closeness to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King (derisively called “Da Lawd” by some youth activists) and a belief in integrated work–has got him ousted from his beloved Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. It’s a time of X marking new spots, of Watts and draft cards afire, of Black Power shouted, of Stokely Carmichael ascendant, of Black self-determination on Black terms, and Lewis is exhausted. To Be Continued in Book Two. After all these decades, it is sad to see Lewis still refer to Black nationalism as Black “separatism”–as if such nationalism was still some abberation–but at least he explained in detail here why some thought it justified. Wedded to American thoughts and ideals, the hero decides not to put on a new face but to find a new place and space.

Book Review: Black Power, Explained In “Documentary Comic” Form

Posted on October 1, 2016 by toddpanther

Civil Rights For Beginners (2016).
Paul Von Blum. Illustrations by Frank Reynoso, et. al.
Foreword by Peniel E. Joseph.
Danbury, CT: For Beginners Books.
ISBN-10: 1934389897; ISBN-13: 978-1934389898.
161 pp., $15.95.

Malcolm X For Beginners (1992).
Text and Illustrations by Bernard Aquina Doctor.
Danbury, CT: For Beginners Books.
ISBN-10: 1934389048; ISBN-13: 978-1934389041.
186 pp., $16.99.

Black Panthers For Beginners (1995).
Herb Boyd. Illustrations by Lance Tooks.
Danbury, CT: For Beginners Books.
ISBN-10: 193999439X; ISBN-13: 978-1939994394.
154 pp., $15.95.

Fanon For Beginners (1998).
Text and Illustrations by Deborah Wyrick, Ph.D.
Danbury, CT: For Beginners Books.
ISBN-10: 1934389870; ISBN-13: 978-1934389874
184 pp., $15.95.

This month marks the 50^th anniversary of the Black Panther Party. Although the Black Power movement officially began months earlier, with Stokely Carmichael, stalwart of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, publicly using the term in Alabama, for this writer the Black Power movement started when two brothers met in Oakland and, borrowing a symbol that SNCC was politically organizing with, developed a 10-point program for Black liberation. Under Carmichael, SNCC stood with the Congress of Racial Equality as the Black Power wing of the Freedom Movement, with an emphasis on organizing Black people to see themselves as members of self-determining Black communities, of miniature Black/African nations in the land of the thief, home of the slave.

Providing art and information to The People—like Fannie Lou Hamer, formally uneducated but politically astute—was a priority for the Black Power Movement. Africana Studies, an idea that had just begun to be implemented in American academia, was still being written in the streets in blood, footnoted with broken glass and Molotov cocktails.

The “For Beginners” books series, originally published by Writers and Readers, are books for The People. The company describes what it produces as “documentary comicbooks.” Being a little more precise, what they create, actually, are well-researched introductory books about complex topics and personalities illustrated by drawings that oftentimes mimic comicbook style. These four books listed were chosen to highlight and celebrate the Black Power movement through their collective analysis and unique presentation. (Although, it is known that this idea is far from new: the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a white liberal group, published “Martin Luther King and The Montgomery Story” in 1957, and Julian Bond published an anti-Vietnam comicbook targeting the Black community ten years later.)

The publisher allows description and explanation on its authors’ terms. Von Blum’s book, for example, takes the entirety of Black history and describes it through the lens of the Civil Rights Movement, reminding the reader that Ida B. Wells sat down and refused to move on a train before Rosa Parks was even a gleam in one of her parents’ eyes. It mentions unheralded actors such as the Southern Tenants Farmers Union, which held a sit-in in the U.S. agriculture secretary’s office in 1934. Doctor’s book on Malcolm is a wonderful text-collage combo (done in the pre-digital era!) that is not afraid to go for the symbolic image: seeing a tiny Malcolm being held in the palm of “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”’s “Sophia” (Bea), his white lover, makes the statement. Doctor provides an impressionistic history of Malcolm—a story of Black ideas that override chronology (and unfortunately, sometimes biographical facts) and ideological complexity.

Out of the four, the two that stand out overall are Boyd’s BPP and Wyrick’s Fanon. Wyrick blasts the complex Fanon into understandable chunks of intellectual peanut brittle, explaining and dissecting, critiquing and footnoting. Her thoughtfulness, care and talent shows through, since her own illustrations do a wonderful job of supplementing and complementing her deceptively simple text. Her closing chapter on Fanon’s multifaceted legacy, and her beautifully crafted first-person epilogue, is alone worth every tree that was sacrificed to make this book. Boyd’s snappy, bouncy prose style is more than equaled by Tooks’ energetic, playful art. (This reviewer wishes that the publisher would have made Von Blum follow the Boyd/Tooks model, instead of providing dry, trying-to-get-tenure academic text punctuated by even drier art by the Civil Rights book’s main artist, Reynoso. Liz Von Notias, sadly a supplementary artist for the text, provides the narrative’s more vibrant, alive drawings.) Boyd quotes from most of the Panther scholarship that existed at the time of publication, creating a mosaic of first-person recollections from Panthers as well as its public enemies and private informants. The sections on sexism within the BPP and the Huey Newton/Eldridge Cleaver split is very strong, as is the tracing of police plant Gene Roberts from Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity to the Panthers.

With the exception of Von Blum’s Civil Rights, which was published this year, the major problem with these books is that they desperately need updating. For example, at least a score of studies, anthologies, memoirs and biographies have been published on the Black Panther Party since Boyd and Tooks, and Boyd himself is the co-editor of “The Diary of Malcolm X,” a 2014 book that, like “Blood Brothers,” the recent Randy Roberts/Johnny Smith narrative history on Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, must be incorporated into Doctor’s almost 25-year-old “For Beginners” text. The books also can be editorially uneven; for example, some titles have indexes and some don’t. That sloppiness should not be tolerated.

In spite of these flaws, these books need to be supported by The People. (With the eight-year White House national experiment with being adjective-less “Americans” almost over, it’s time for Black America to go back to its socio-historio-cultural basics.) They need to be purchased and passed out to the Black masses, of any age, who, like the high school seniors and college freshmen the “For Beginners” series is apparently targeted to, may be intimidated by “serious,” “scholarly” texts. Google Search, Wikipedia and YouTube need not have the first, and last, word when it comes to African/Black leaders and movements. As unlikely as it seems, mass political education of The People might only be a few million “documentary comicbooks” away.