Black Press USA Senior National Correspondent
Rap Brown did not wait for permission to define himself. Long before federal agents called him a menace and politicians wrote laws in his name, he was a young man from Baton Rouge who believed the country needed an honest confrontation with its own history. Long before he died at 82 in a federal medical facility in North Carolina, he had already become Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, a name he adopted after turning to Islam inside Attica.
“Violence is necessary. Violence is a part of America’s culture. It is as American as cherry pie,” he said during the height of the Black Power movement…