Then, as Al-Amin sat in a black Mercedes outside his store last Thursday night, Fulton County deputies Ricky Kinchen and Aldranon English approached with a warrant for his arrest. Directing him to leave the car, one of the officers ordered, “Show your right hand.” According to police, Al-Amin answered, “OK, here it is,” then, producing a .223 assault rifle, fired at least 20 shots, wounding both officers, Kinchen fatally. Al-Amin, who was apparently also wounded, escaped, leaving a trail of blood toward a nearby building. The Mercedes also mysteriously disappeared while an ambulance team helped English and Kinchen. SWAT teams fanned the neighborhood, conducting a tense door-to-door search.
For the lanky, inscrutably calm activist, the shoot-out punctuated a long history of acrimonious battles with the police. Though he came to prominence in the nonviolent wing of the civil-rights movement, Hubert Geroid Brown, known as “Rap” for his fiery ’60s oratory, became more militant, roiling passions with his 1967 declaration that “violence is as American as cherry pie.” In 1970, the FBI placed him on its Most Wanted list after he allegedly incited a riot outside a Maryland school. He disappeared from the national stage three years later after being convicted of robbery and assault in New York. He converted to Islam in prison.
Al-Amin’s life in Atlanta renewed both his community activism and his conflicts with the police. He established a Sunni mosque in the West End, which he eventually expanded into a nationwide network known as the Dar-Ul Islamic sect. But he remained under steady suspicion. In 1995, he was arrested after a man named William Miles said Al-Amin shot him (Miles later recanted). Meanwhile federal authorities arrested and won convictions against a handful of members of his mosque for gun-running. Al-Amin was never charged.
By late last week Al-Amin, if he was still alive, continued to elude an ever-expanding dragnet. Some of his neighbors, who credit him with making their area safer, refused to believe he did the shooting. But as police and FBI agents intensify their manhunt, Al-Amin’s agenda of principled resistance seems to be unwinding in meaningless death.
