Former Black Panther leader H. Rap Brown dies in prison hospital at 82

BUTNER, N.C. (AP) — H. Rap Brown, one of the most vocal leaders of the Black Power movement, has died in a prison hospital while serving a life sentence for the killing of a Georgia sheriff’s deputy. He was 82.

Brown died Sunday at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina, his widow Karima Al-Amin said Monday.

A cause of death was not immediately available, but Karima Al-Amin told The Associated Press that her husband had been suffering from cancer and had been transferred to the medical facility in 2014 from a federal prison in Colorado.

Like other more militant Black leaders and organizers during the racial upheaval of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Brown decried heavy-handed policing in Black communities. He once stated that violence was “as American as cherry pie.”

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