I can hardly wait to see what kind of defense the black nationalist formerly known as H. Rap Brown is going to put on. So far, it is beginning to sound like rhetoric from a decade more paranoid than this one.
The former Brown, now known as Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, has been charged with shooting one sheriff’s deputy to death and wounding a second in Atlanta. After his arrest in Alabama, his lawyer, J.L. Chestnut of Selma, Ala., told The Selma Times-Journal that “the system” conspired to frame his client.
Al-Amin “will be fighting the system until the day he dies,” his lawyer said. “He will not be the first or the last black man framed by the system.”
Ah, yes. I remember “the System.” Back in the late ’60s, when I was a collegiate journalist immersed in the period’s turmoil, “the System” often was spelled with a capital “S.” It described the entire political, legal, academic and industrial “Establishment” that maintained “the status quo” and decided who would succeed and who would not.
But if the System still cares enough about old H. Rap to try to set him up, it would be a great compliment to him, for he has not posed much of any visible threat to the System for more than 30 years.
To truly appreciate how much of a threat he used to pose, you have to go back to when he, the late Stokely Carmichael (who later became Kwame Ture) and the Black Panthers, among others, formed the hot center of “black power” militancy.
Between 1965 and 1968 more than 400 riots and civil disturbances erupted in American cities and Brown’s fiery rhetoric made him a leading symbol of the country’s angry mood and a darling of chic radicals.
But after the Vietnam War, times changed and so did Brown, in the sense that he lowered his profile, changed his name and changed his orientation from politics to Islam.
Three decades later the System appears to have worked to help African-Americans better and faster than Brown ever said it would or could.
If the System truly was out to get Al-Amin, that is not much of a compliment to his racial pride, since the System, once it stopped resisting black aspirations, appears to be embracing more of us by the day. Every level of every corner of America’s public and private life is being slowly but resolutely occupied by African-Americans who appear to reject Brown’s narrow definition of blackness.
The New York Times reports, for example, that almost every representative of the System who figured in the chain of events leading up to Al-Amin’s arrest was black.
They include the mayor and police chief of Atlanta, the sheriff and district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., where the shootings took place, the two deputies who were shot as they were serving Al-Amin an arrest warrant on minor charges, and the Lowndes County, Ala., sheriff’s deputy who captured Al-Amin.
As a product of an American era more blatantly racist than today’s, Al-Amin has plenty of reason to be angry. But his own contribution ought to give him reasons to feel proud. When he was a young Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) volunteer knocking on doors to register black sharecroppers to vote in the early ’60s, black elected officials were almost non-existent in America. Today they number in the thousands. So do African-Americans in prominent private-sector jobs and corporate suites.
The tragedy of H. Rap Brown may be that he failed to adjust his own agenda to the changing times he helped to bring about.
For most of us African-Americans, the System has worked well enough for us to prefer it over any of the alternatives we have been offered.
Unfortunately, it has not worked for everybody.
For example, the schools in Lowndes County, where Al-Amin was arrested, remain among the most impoverished and lowest performing in the country.
Low academic achievement and poverty go hand-in-hand, a problem that is by no means limited to black folks. Problems with poverty and academic achievement are inextricably linked. The least educated have the least chance of generating wealth and the poor have the poorest schools. That cycle of poverty may be the System’s biggest remaining flaw and it is by no means limited to racial minorities. Nationally, too large a gap remains between the rich and the poor of every color. Poverty is a shared problem that calls for shared action and shared remedies.
The real salvation of the less fortunate in this country is less likely to come through violent rhetoric than through the tough day-to-day work of mentoring children, showing up at parent-teacher meetings and organizing neighbors to fight for better schools. The System works. Our challenge today is to make it work for everyone.
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