Former Black Panther leader H. Rap Brown dies in prison hospital at 82
Source: ABC News/AP
November 24, 2025, 1:43 PM
BUTNER, N.C. -- H. Rap Brown, one of the most vocal leaders of the Black Power movement, has died in a prison hospital while serving a life sentence for the killing of a Georgia sheriff’s deputy. He was 82. Brown died Sunday at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina, his widow Karima Al-Amin said Monday.
A cause of death was not immediately available, but Karima Al-Amin told The Associated Press that her husband had been suffering from cancer and had been transferred to the medical facility in 2014 from a federal prison in Colorado. Like other more militant Black leaders and organizers during the racial upheaval of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Brown decried heavy-handed policing in Black communities. He once stated that violence was “as American as cherry pie.”
“Violence is a part of America’s culture,” Brown said during a 1967 news conference. “... America taught the black people to be violent. We will use that violence to rid ourselves of oppression, if necessary. We will be free by any means necessary.”
Brown was chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a powerful civil rights group, and in 1968 was named minister of justice for the Black Panther Party. Three years later, he was arrested for a robbery that ended in a shootout with New York police.
Read more: https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/former-black-panther-leader-rap-brown-dies-prison-127832830
DAMN. This story was buried so deep that I needed a backhoe to retrieve it.
I lost track of what happened to him - probably because he was in prison (had been sentenced to life in 2002).
= new reply since forum marked as read
