Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, known in the 1960s as H. Rap Brown, succumbed to cancer in federal prison while serving a life sentence for killing a Georgia police officer and wounding another in 2000. He spent 25 years in jail.

Al-Amin once led the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC (pronounced “snick”). He later became the Black Panther Minister of Justice, touring the nation urging Black Americans to take up arms and wage guerilla war against the government.

“I say violence is necessary,” Al-Amin, then still Brown, said in 1967. “Violence is a part of America’s culture. It is as American as cherry pie.”

Kairi Al-Amin, his son, confirmed his death on social media.

“He wins either way,” Kairi said in an Instagram video. “They don’t have him anymore. He’s free.”

Hubert Geroid Brown was born in Baton Rouge, La., on Oct. 4, 1943. His father, Eddie Charles Brown, worked for Esso, and his mother was Thelma Warren. He attended Baton Rouge public schools and joined the Boy Scouts.

He began as a sociology major at Southern University in 1960 but dropped out in 1962 to organize full-time for the SNCC in Mississippi. He was elected to replace Stokely Carmichael as national SNCC chair in May 1967.

Brown wore the uniform of Black radicals nationwide: afro, black sunglasses, black beret, denim pants, leather jacket. Within months, he became a firebrand preacher of the Black liberation movement.

“Freedom cannot be given,” a 24-year-old Brown said in 1967. “It’s not a welfare commodity. It’s something that has to be gotten and taken by the people who are oppressed.”

Excluded from political power by restrictive voting laws, Brown argued that Black Americans, lacking a voice in lawmaking, were not bound to obey laws that oppressed them.

“We did not make the laws in this country,” he said in Oakland a year later. “We are not legally or morally confined to those laws. Those laws that keep them up, keep us down.”

Brown opposed Columbia University’s planned gym in Harlem, dubbed “Gym Crow” by opponents, which led to a school occupation. He told protesters, “If they build the first story, blow it up. If they sneak back at night and build three stories, burn it down.”

Also in 1967, Brown traveled to Cambridge, Maryland, to support civil rights efforts. Invited by Gloria Richardson, he spoke to about 400 on July 24.

“It’s time for Cambridge to explode, baby,” Brown said. Hours later, Cambridge burned. He was lightly wounded by police, arrested, and charged with inciting riot and arson before being released on bail.

While out on bail, Brown appeared in New York City in December 1968 to support striking high school students. Standing beside activist Leslie R. Campbell, he urged them to fight for Black power. “So you had better get your gun, brother. Stop smoking your reefers and use the money to buy bullets,” he told the crowd.

A year later, still out on bail, he published his memoir, “Die Nigger Die!” which began: “I had been born in ‘america, the land of the free.’ But who would insure my freedom?”

William M. Kunstler defended him, noting that moving the trial to a conservative town made a fair trial impossible.

Before facing trial, Brown vanished. Two associates were killed by a bomb while driving to court.

He resurfaced in New York City on Oct. 16, 1971. Then 28 and on the run from multiple charges, Brown and three associates robbed the Red Carpet Lounge. Police foiled their escape, chasing Brown to a nearby roof and shooting him twice.

In 1973, he was convicted of armed robbery and assault, acquitted of attempted murder of police, and sentenced to 5-to-15 years. He was sent to the notorious Attica Correctional Facility, site of a prisoner revolt two years earlier that ended in a deadly police assault.

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