Brrnngg!_ I got the call
around 8 a.m. on my day off fromwork. "Did you hear?" said a woman's voice. "H.
Rap Brownis being sought by police after two cops were shot."
Hubert "Rap" Brown. A name seen more often
in history books than in newspapers these days. Early advocate of Black Power.
One-time chairman of SNCC, the legendary Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee
that won voting rights for blacks in Mississippi and rural Georgia in the Sixties.
Recalcitrant whites often shot and bombed SNCC workers, but the men responsible
for stopping the violence---the police and FBI---often sided with the perpetrators.
I thought about
what the woman on the phone had just told me. "Sounds bogus," I said. While my
field of expertise is not civil rights history---I have a doctorate in mathematics
from Oxford, and I was only born in 1970---I _am_ a student of the Black Power
Movement. And I'd heard this story too many times before: A Black Power advocate
is accused of violent crimes, despite all evidence to the contrary.
A California
congressman once compared H. Rap Brown and Nelson Mandela to white serial killer
Ted Bundy. You see, in America, being passionately pro-black is itself almost
a felony.
Let me
explain: In the late Sixties, after years of seeing racist whites murder black
women and children with impunity, Rap Brown concluded, reluctantly, that blacks
must take whatever means are necessary to secure our Constitutional freedoms,
even if that means talking back or shooting back at rioting whites.
When, in 1967, a riot erupted in Maryland
after one of his speeches, even though he was no longer in the state, Brown was
arrested. Maryland governor Spiro Agnew (later Vice President) said that, just
for giving the speech, he hoped that police would "put [Brown] away and throw
away the key." So much for the First Amendment; so much for due process.
Evidence of a conspiracy against Rap---to
keep him from leading blacks to America's promised land---was plain to all: The
FBI had tapped Rap's phones even before he became SNCC's chairman, and, the day
before Rap's trial on the riot charges was to begin, two of his SNCC associates
were murdered by a car bomb.
Further,
secret FBI documents uncovered by the Senate in the Seventies tell a chilling
story: Even though FBI agents reported from the field that Black Power groups
like the Panthers posed no threat of violence, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover insisted
that stories be "leaked" to the media that these groups were violent and criminal
in order to erode their liberal support.
Brown
was sentenced to the max. Because of the threats on his life, he fled, but was
later caught and forced to serve time. After prison, Rap became a Muslim and changed
his name to Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin.
I hung up the phone and turned on CNN.
I already knew what I would hear, but I braced myself nonetheless:
Two
Atlanta police officers had been sent to speak to Brown after some type of incident.
When they approached his place of residence, in an Atlanta ghetto, shots were
fired. (It is not clear whether the police fired first or not.) Only deep into
the story did the reporter point out that _Brown was not even a suspect_ in the
shooting. The headline was misleading, but the damage had already been done: In
the American imagination, the term Black Power had once again been branded with
the labels "criminal" and "guilty."
