Assata Shakur and Jamil Abdullah al-Amin (H. Rap Brown) Symbolized the Transformation of the Black Struggle
Shakur (1947-2025) and al-Amin (1943-2025) came out of the African American youth movement in the South as well as the North
Assata Shakur (formerly known as Joann Chesimard) and Jamil Abdullah al-Amin (also known as H. Rap Brown) passed away during 2025 amid the rise of state repression and fascism in the United States under the government of President Donald Trump.
Shakur had joined the movement as a college student at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and the City College of New York where she worked with an organization focused on the promotion of African American culture and history.
It was during this period in 1969-70 when she came into contact with the Black Panther Party in NYC. The Panthers were under fierce attack by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), whose Director, J. Edgar Hoover, had labeled the BPP as the greatest threat to U.S. national security in decades.
In April 1969, 21 members of the Party were arrested and charged with plotting to carry out bombings around the New York area. The local police in New York, like in many other cities, followed the lead of the FBI by viewing the Panthers as an existential threat to their existence.
Numerous police-provoked confrontations with Party members along with other militant groupings resulted in the injuring and deaths of law-enforcement agents. These clashes between the police and African Americans occurred during and in the aftermath of urban rebellions which swept the U.S. between 1964-1970.
Of course, these rebellions and confrontations with the state and its agents did not take place within a political vacuum. In many areas of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, mass and armed struggles were being waged for national independence and socialism.
Consequently, people within the African American community were influenced by the African, Latin American and Asian movements for liberation. Some of these movements utilized petitioning, mass demonstrations and strikes to reach their objectives. Others, after meeting harsh repression, such as the massacre of dock workers in Guinea-Bissau in 1959 and the anti-pass campaigners at Sharpeville, South Africa in 1960, turned to guerilla warfare in their campaigns to win independence.
The Black Liberation Army (BLA), which grew out of the Black Panther Party in 1971, was a direct outcome of political repression and the refusal of the U.S. capitalist system to fundamentally address the national oppression and class exploitation suffered by African Americans and millions of other working people. As the 1970s progressed, revolutionaries and other progressive forces were forced to grapple with the rapid rise in technology and its impact not only on politics but the social psychology of workers and oppressed peoples.
A statement issued by the BLA in 1976 provides their rationale for viewing armed struggle as a logical outcome of the social character of African American oppression during this time period where in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the defeat of U.S. imperialism in Southeast Asia, the ruling class was facing a deeper and more protracted crisis. Assata, having lived underground for two years, was captured in May 1973 in New Jersey. One other BLA leader and cadre, Sundiata Acoli, was captured along with Assata Shakur. Zayd Malik Shakur was killed by the New Jersey State Troopers during the same traffic stop which captured Assata and Sundiata. (See this)
According to the BLA document from 1976, it says:
“How will the movement as a whole be able to fight the oppressor in the future when all other ‘legal’ methods are completely exhausted? How will we implement political struggle without the machinery and capacity for revolutionary violence when it is abundantly clear that our oppressor maintains armed organs of violence for the enforcement of his rules? We as a movement will be unable to fight in the future if we do not develop the capacity for revolutionary violence in the present. But revolutionary violence is not an alternative to mass movement and organization, it is complementary to mass struggle, it is another front in the total liberation process.”
Assata was liberated from maximum security prison in New Jersey on November 2, 1979. The action was carried out by the BLA and the Weather Underground Organization (WOU). Several years later Assata was granted political asylum in Revolutionary Cuba.
Her transition came amid an escalation in imperialist destabilization efforts by the Trump administration. A close ally of Cuba, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, was subjected to an unprovoked attack and kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro and First Lady Cecilia Flores who are being held illegally in a federal detention facility in New York.
Avenues of redress within the bourgeois democratic system are severely restricted. The same ideological and strategic questions which surfaced during the 1970s remain today although with deeper implications for those living inside and outside the U.S.
Imam Jamil Abdullah al-Amin: A Lifetime of Resistance
Image: Imam Jamil Abdullah al-Amin, formerly known as H. Rap Brown
Born during World War II as many other activists who emerged during the 1960s, Imam Jamil Abdullah al-Amin made his transition after being incarcerated unjustly for more than a quarter-century. In 2000, al-Amin was arrested and accused in the shooting of two Fulton County Sheriff Deputies, one fatally.
Although there was no material evidence that al-Amin committed these shootings, he was convicted and sentenced to prison.
During the 1960s, thousands of African American youth and students took leading roles in the struggles to destroy legalized segregation in the South as well as the North. Known then as H. Rap Brown, he would join the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG) in Washington, D.C. NAG was an affiliate of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) formed in April 1960.
Brown (al-Amin) had been a student at Southern University in Louisiana where he was born. He became active in the movement like many others throughout the South. By 1966, he was active in doing field work in Greene County, Alabama. This was the time when the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) and others had united to build the Alabama Black Panther Party.
Image: Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown at Hamilton Hall Columbia, 1968
After the chairmanship of Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) for SNCC during 1966-67, Rap took over the organization. His tenure coincided with a rise in urban rebellions throughout the U.S. Due to the revolutionary trajectory of SNCC by 1966-67, the organization became more of a target of the FBI Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) which was designed to disrupt and liquidate African American organizations.
The work of SNCC in the South influenced many northern-based organizations such as the Black Panther Party for Self Defense formed by Dr. Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in October 1966. Other groups such as the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) and the Deacons for the Defense would emerge to address the reality of oppression and state violence. Robert F. Williams and Mabel Williams began organizing rifle clubs in Monroe, North Carolina to defend the community against racist violence as early as the 1950s.
Image: Assata Shakur in custody
Al-Amin was said to have gone underground in March 1970 after the violent deaths of Ralph Featherstone and William Che Payne of SNCC in a car blast in Maryland. Many in the movement believed that the two SNCC organizers were assassinated while the corporate media and the authorities accused them of transporting a bomb in order to disrupt the trial of al-Amin Cambridge. (See this)
In 1971 al-Amin was captured in New York City and prosecuted on trumped up robbery charges. When he emerged from incarceration he had converted to Islam. He would continue to engage in religious activities, settling in Atlanta and opening a neighborhood mosque and grocery store.
The fact that he died in prison of illnesses that could have been effectively treated with proper medical care illustrates the unjust character of the U.S. criminal justice system. The lesson of Imam Jamil’s life is his resilience and commitment to revolutionary change.
Resistance and Historical Studies
This year, 2026, is important as it relates to African American history. There is a concerted effort in the year of the centenary of African American History Month to reverse even the minimal gains made through the various struggles during the 20th and early 21st centuries.
As the generation of Assata Shakur and Jamil Abdullah al-Amin was faced with imperialist war in Vietnam and throughout the African continent, today’s youth are being forced to engage in the battle against the cost of war. Attempts to eliminate nations and peoples while denigrating their national and regional life is creating instability on an international level.
The focus in the third decade of the 21st Century is international. The ruling class from both political camps in the U.S. are committed to the subjugation of the peoples of the Global South. Therefore, the task of the majority of the world’s population is to take up the mantle of the legacies of Assata and Rap to continue the process of total liberation.
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