Abstract

H. Rap Brown/Jamil Al-Amin: A Profoundly American Story

"Die Nigger Die!," the autobiographical political memoir by H. Rap Brown, is a vital American historical document-historical almost in the sense of a message found in a time capsule, a missive from another age. But it remains of considerable interest for what it tells readers about social and political attitudes, behaviors and expectations of a time-so the students believe-long past. The time, in this case, being a discrete, relatively short period of domestic upheaval in this country during the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time of revolutionary black uprising in Northern ghettos following hard on the heels of the Southern, nonviolent, direct-action movement engineered by Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Congress of Racial Equality and Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a movement usually associated with Martin Luther King Jr. Rap's book has an added dimension of sociological interest, being a voice from the frontlines, the personal and political testimony of a radically militant chairman of SNCC who came to symbolize the defiance of a generation of angry and militant black youth.