The news that Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin was being charged in the killing of one Atlanta sheriff's deputy and the wounding of another came as a shock to some, especially those who knew him as a practicing Muslim and a quiet community leader. To others, who remember him as H. Rap Brown, leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee when that organization turned from nonviolent activism to a call for Black Power, it must have sounded like a fitting epitaph to his 56 years.
Too often the media paint the era that people such as Al-Amin/Brown helped define with broad brush strokes: a picture of angry, irresponsible black hoodlums engaged in ceaseless protest and illegal activity. It's the only picture many have of those times.
To this generation of Americans, Al-Amin probably seems something of a dinosaur. After writing my first book, ''The Shadow of the Panther,'' I was amazed to learn how many people in their twenties and thirties knew little or nothing about people like Rap Brown.
Even as the reports come in about his past, the truth gets garbled. Saturday's New York Times, for example, erroneously reported that Al-Amin made his name as a Black Panther leader when in fact he was associated with that organization only briefly, when SNCC and the Panthers embarked on an ill-fated alliance.
A minor inaccuracy, perhaps, except that it shows the tendency to lump all black protest of the time into one movement when in fact there were important factional differences between the groups. This was especially so with regard to the Black Power advocates of SNCC and the original leaders of the Black Panthers. But before that there were serious differences between the promoters of nonviolence within SNCC (Bob Moses and John Lewis, now a congressman from Georgia, for instance) and those who eventually called for Black Power (Stokeley Carmichael and Rap Brown).
Some veterans of that time, such as Lewis and Rep. Bobby Rush of Illinois, a former Panther leader, are active in public life. Many, though, must feel as if history has passed them by. If I had risked my life for a good cause, as so many of them did (virtually all of the SNCC veterans, I would say), I too might feel bitter about the lack of appreciation for -- or at least understanding of -- the social earthquake I was part of.
Of course there was a certain amount of youthful hubris in them -- a feeling that they were going to alter the course of history. Lewis has been quoted as saying that he and his fellow workers could come into rural southern counties and change the lives of those he called ''the natives.'' In fact, they did change many things, and in any event, young people are supposed to show a certain degree of naive optimism.
Rap Brown had more than his share of youthful zeal when, in 1967, he was accused of inciting citizens of Cambridge, Md., to riot. It was the beginning of a series of events that led to his becoming a fugitive, then a prisoner and finally -- after leaving prison in 1976 -- a devout Muslim.
This was the man I met in Atlanta in 1992. I had sought him out for an interview for my book on the Black Panthers. He was the imam of a mosque whose worshipers gathered in a clapboard house in southwest Atlanta. He seemed kind, considerate and intelligent -- hardly the same person I had read about and remembered seeing on TV when I was a little boy fascinated by the Black Power movement. Those who came to the mosque seemed more concerned with solving the mundane problems of life than with throwing bricks through windows or shouting about ''honkies.''
After the service Al-Amin invited me to join him in his convenience store around the corner. Some young boys walked in to borrow a basketball. They clearly adored him, and he treated them with great kindness.
When the boys had gone, I asked him to elaborate on what he remembered about SNCC and the Black Panthers. He politely declined, telling me that all I needed to know was contained in James Foreman's book, ''The Making of Black Revolution-aries.''
Now, as he faces extradition to Atlanta on charges of murder, Al-Amin insists that he is the innocent victim of a government conspiracy. That sounds more like the Rap Brown of the Black Power/Black Panther era. Today such paranoia seems senseless, since neither Al-Amin nor any of his old associates poses much of a threat to the state.
The only thing that gives his accusation a shred of credibility is the all but inexplicable contrast I see between the Rap Brown of my childhood and the man named Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin whom I met eight years ago. If his deportment in 1992 was an act, then he missed his true calling. He should have become an actor. By now he might have earned an Academy Award.
Pearson's most recent book is ''Under the Knife: How a Wealthy Negro Surgeon Wielded Power in the Jim Crow South.''
