A rigorous account of the pivotal but unsung civil rights leader Jamil Al-Amin, aka H. Rap Brown. I Rise in Fire is a gripping, necessary addition to literature on revolutionary politics.

Charting a revolutionary life that reshapes our understanding of the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, and what happened to the radicalism of the 1960s, I Rise in Fire tells the captivating story of Jamil Al-Amin, formerly known as H. Rap Brown, a civil rights activist who served as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Black Panthers’ Honorary Minister of Justice, and the leader of a major Islamic organization in the 1990s.

From his youth in Louisiana to his dangerous organizing in Alabama to his time in Tanzania on the run from the CIA and the FBI, Rap Brown led a remarkable life of car chases, shootouts, manhunts, and run-ins with the mafia. A household name in the late 1960s and a major reason why rap music is called rap music, Rap Brown should be as well-known as Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, and Huey Newton. But he was largely forgotten by the end of the twentieth century. Incarcerated from 2000 until his death in 2025, he suffered a combination of historical erasure and demonization.

Resurfacing the life of this once-iconic figure, I Rise in Fire sheds light on Al-Amin’s key role in the Black Power movement, the protest at the1968 Summer Olympics, his pioneering of solidarity with the Palestinian cause, and his efforts to rid Black neighborhoods of drugs. It also exposes the various government initiatives, from COINTELPRO to counter-terrorism programs, that attempted to curtail him, culminating in his wrongful imprisonment. Drawing on declassified FBI files and a series of exclusive interviews with Jamil Al-Amin, this is a work of rigorous scholarship and rich story telling.

In our time of ever increasing political repression and surveillance, I Rise in Fire is a reminder that the radical politics of the 1960s represented one moment in a much longer struggle for freedom and justice – which continues to this day. The man who once declared “violence is as American as cherry pie” is as relevant as ever.