H. Rap Brown

In and of itself, color has no meaning. But the white world has given it meaning—political, social, economic, historical, physiological and philosophical. Once color has been given meaning an order is thereby established.

Hubert Gerold Brown was born October 4, 1943 in Baton Rouge, earning the nickname "Rap" as a teenager because of his verbal skills. He attended Southern High School and Southern University in Baton Rouge, spending summers in Washington D.C. with his older brother Ed, a a student at Howard University and member of Howard's Nonviolent Action Group (NAG). In 1964 he stayed in Washington instead of returning for his final year of college, and began working at the United Planning Center, a neighborhood anti-poverty program, and was named chair of NAG although he was not a Howard student.

Through NAG Brown had met several SNCC members, and in 1966 he became SNCC's Alabama Field Organizer, working on voter registration. When Stokely Carmichael resigned from SNCC the next year, Brown replaced  him as chairman but left himself in 1966 to join the Black Panther Party as a Minister of Justice.

"I say violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie."

After speaking at a July 1967 rally in Cambridge, Maryland that resulted in armed confrontations with police and fires that destroyed two city blocks, Brown was charged with inciting to riot and arson. His attorney, William Kunstler, arranged for him to turn himself in to the FBI, and while he was out on bail he was arrested for being in possession of a rifle while flying from Baton Rouge to New York City. The weapons charges were eventually dropped but when the Cambridge courthouse where Brown's arson trial was scheduled to take place was bombed, he disappeared and was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. He was arrested in New York City in October 1971 on robbery charges and served five years in Attica state prison.

While in Attica Brown converted to Islam, changing his name to Jamil Abdullah al-Amin. When he was released in 1976 he went to Atlanta, opening a grocery store and leading the Atlanta Community Mosque.

In 2000 he was charged with shooting Sheriff's Deputies Ricky Kinchen and Aldranon English as they were serving him with a warrant for failure to appear for a speeding ticket. Kinchen was killed; English survived and named al-Amin as the shooter. He was found guilty and sentenced to life without parole. Because of his high-profile background, in 2007 he was transferred to ADX Florence supermax prison in Colorado.

James Forman

"Forman was volatile and uncompromising, an angry young man. His head had been clubbed many times on the front lines in Dixie. He was impatient with Urban League and NAACP types; he was nervous and perhaps a trifle battle-fatigued." ~ James Farmer, Lay Bare the Heart

James Forman was born October 4, 1928 in Chicago, spending time when he was not in school with his grandparents in Marshall County, Mississippi. He graduated with honors from Englewood High School in 1947 and after a semester at a community college joined the Air Force, serving in Okinawa. He then enrolled at the University of Southern California but after being arrested outside the campus library on suspicion of robbery and being beaten while in custody he returned to Chicago. In 1954 he enrolled in Chicago's Roosevelt University, graduating in three years. He began attending graduate school at Boston University, but after being inspired by the court-ordered integration of Central High acquired press credentials from the Chicago Defender in 1958 and went to Little Rock, where as his obituary in the Washington Post stated, he "filed a few stories, worked on a social-protest novel and looked for opportunities to organize mass protests in the South."

Such an opportunity came through the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and by 1961 Forman had been named Executive Secretary of SNCC under Chairman John Lewis. His skill at organizing and directing voter registration volunteers, as well as handling administrative details, publicity, and fundraising, were what Eleanor Holmes Norton called an "organizational miracle in holding together a loose band of nonviolent revolutionaries who simply wanted to act together to eliminate racial discrimination and terror." SNCC became one of the "Big Five" civil rights groups, along with the older National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, National Urban League, Congress of Racial Equality, and Southern Christian Leadership Convention. Forman took part in organizing the August 1963 March on Washington and was responsible for rewriting Lewis's speech to make it less inflammatory. The next year he led a group of 10 SNCC members in a visit to Guinea.

As SNCC became more militant, in 1966 Lewis and Forman were replaced in office by Stokely Carmichael and Ruby Doris Robinson. Forman helped negotiate the brief merger between SNCC and the Black Panther Party, and for a time took part in Panther leadership, serving as Minister of Foreign Affairs and Director of Political Education. In 1969 he participated in the Black Economic Development Conference in Detroit, culminating in the "Black Manifesto" calling for $500,000,000 in reparations.

Forman continued to write and participate in the civil rights movement. In 1980 he earned a master's degree in African American History from Cornell University, and in 1982 a PhD from the Institute for Policy Studies Union of Experimental Colleges and Universities. He taught at American University and campaigned for statehood for the District of Columbia. He died January 10, 2005 at the age of 76. His son, James Forman, Jr is a professor at the Yale Law School.

Eldridge Cleaver

I feel that I am a citizen of the American dream and that the revolutionary struggle of which I am a part is a struggle against the American nightmare.

Leroy Eldrige Cleaver was born August 31, 1935 in Wabbaseka, Arkansas near Pine Bluff. When his father began work as a dining-car waiter on the Super Chief, a train running from Chicago to Los Angeles, the family moved first to Phoenix and then to the Watts section of Los Angeles. Cleaver spent most of his teenage years in youth facilities, first serving a year for stealing a bicycle and later for marijuana sales.

When arrested again as an adult in 1954 for selling marijuana, he served two and a half years at the state prison in Soledad, where he earned his high school diploma and began reading works by Karl Marx, W.E.B. DuBois and Thomas Paine. After his release he returned to marijuana sales, as well as committing a series of rapes. He was convicted of assault, and sentenced to two to fourteen years which he served at San Quentin and Folsom prisons.

During this prison sentence Cleaver became a follower of the Black Muslims, influenced by the ideas and rhetoric of Malcolm X. He also began writing essays on race, gender and politics, as well as on his own prison experiences. The first of these were published in The Negro History Bulletin in 1962.

Cleaver became eligible for parole in 1965 and began corresponding with San Francisco civil rights attorney Beverly Axelrod. She was able to have his essay "Notes on a Native Son" published in Ramparts magazine, as well as the promise of a job at the magazine when he was released. Further essays attracted the support of writers such as Norman Mailer, and Cleaver was paroled in 1966.

He became an editor and contributor at Ramparts, and his essays and letters to Ms. Axelrod were published two years later in the best-selling book Soul on Ice. The book was viewed as the ultimate handbook for the student activists and Black Power activists of the time, as well as a scathing critique of American culture.

During this time he established Black House, a cultural center for young African Americans in Oakland. There he met Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, founders of the Black Panther Party. Cleaver soon became the party's Minister of Information, publishing its newspaper and making public appearances around the country. UC Berkeley sociologist Laile Bartlett said this about him:

"Under his leadership, the Black Panthers had developed from a local Oakland organization into an international movement being copied by liberationists around the world. As a writer--his Soul on Ice was a bestseller--Cleaver was both symbol and spokesman for a public that transcended race and class."

With the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, Cleaver was one of the most influential African American figures of the time. He created an alliance between the Black Panther Party and the mostly white left-wing Peace and Freedom Party to nominate candidates for local, state and federal offices. Cleaver himself ran for president, receiving about 35, 000 votes.

He was wounded in a gun battle with the Oakland Police in April 1968, during which fellow Panther Bobby Hutton was killed. He was arrested for parole violation but released two months later. A higher court overturned the release and added charges from the shootout. He left the country in November to avoid arrest, settling first in Cuba and later in Algeria and North Korea.

Although he was greeted as a revolutionary hero in these countries, Cleaver became disenchanted with the repressive Communist regimes. "What made Marxism-Leninism unworkable was that there was no humanity in it, no love," he said in a Reader's Digest interview after his 1975 return. "I'd rather be in jail in America than free anywhere else." Imprisoned when he first returned, his conservative politics and new-found Christian faith found him a wide range of supported and all charges were dropped by 1978. 

In that year Cleaver published a second book Soul on Fire addressing his conversion experience, although he later rejected the commercialism of evangelical Christianity and joined the Mormon Church. He was active in local politics, even challenging incumbent Alan Cranston in the U. S. Senate primary.

By the 1980's Cleaver began to have problems with drugs again, being arrested several times for cocaine use. He died on May 1, 1998 in Pomona, California at the age of 62.