Hubert Gerold Brown emerged from the struggle against segregation to become a prominent organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. By the spring of 1967 he had been elected SNCC’s national chairman, succeeding Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), and pulled the organization openly into the politics of Black self-defense, anti-imperialism, and refusal of the war in Vietnam. As Minister of Justice of the Black Panther Party and author of the 1969 memoir Die Nigger Die!, he became one of the most surveilled, sought, and slandered figures of his generation. The FBI named him in COINTELPRO directives calling for his neutralization. His 1967 speech in Cambridge, Maryland, became another flashpoint in disputes over Black protest, policing and responsibility for subsequent unrest.
He was imprisoned in 1971 in connection with a New York City robbery and shootout case. While serving a New York state prison sentence, he embraced Islam and took the name Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin. After his release in 1976, and he made his home in the West End of Atlanta - first as a corner-store proprietor, eventually as the founding imam of a Sunni Muslim community that would, over more than two decades, anchor a neighborhood notorious for street-level drug economies and police violence. In the West End he was known to neighbors of every faith as a man who walked the block, called the prayers, fed the hungry, and made it his business to know the names of everyone he passed.
On March 16, 2000, two Fulton County sheriffs deputies came to his West End store with a warrant, and one of them - Deputy Richard “Ricky” Kinchen - was killed. His supporters pointed to a confession by Otis Jackson in challenging the conviction. That disputed claim did not overturn the jury’s verdict, and it should not be presented as a judicial exoneration. Al-Amin was arrested four days later in Whitehall, Alabama, after a four-day FBI manhunt, and was tried in Fulton County Superior Court in 2002. The jury convicted him on March 9 of that year, and he was sentenced on March 13 to life without the possibility of parole. He maintained his innocence to the end of his life. Beginning in 2007 he was held in federal supermax custody at ADX Florence in Colorado, transferred to USP Tucson in his last years as his health declined, and finally to FMC Butner. His family and supporters raised longstanding concerns about his declining health and medical care. His widow reported that he had been suffering from cancer; an official cause of death was not immediately available in the initial reporting.
Al-Amin died at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina, on November 23, 2025, aged eighty-two. Contemporaneous reporting records his death and his widow’s account of his illness. He was a witness to the long sweep of the era - from sit-ins to soul music to the consolidations and betrayals of the elected Black political class he had helped, in his way, to make possible. Tea Troutman and DaShaun L. Harrison, writing in Scalawag, captured his last decades better than most: a man who, in the absence of any reasonable hope of personal release, did the patient inside work of remaining a teacher to those who wrote to him, of declining to disappear.
The National Political Prisoner Coalition extends its condolences to the Imam’s family, his wife Karima Al-Amin, the Community Mosque in Atlanta’s West End, and the network of organizers across four generations who knew him. We continue to call for the release of every elder still serving COINTELPRO-era sentences, and for a public reckoning with the cases - Al-Amin’s among them - that his family and supporters have continued to contest.
