BUTNER, N.C. -- Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, the Black Power movement leader formerly known as H. Rap Brown, has died in a prison hospital while serving a life sentence for the killing of a Georgia sheriff's deputy. He was 82.

He died Sunday at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, N.C., 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.

During the racial upheaval of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Al-Amin decried heavy-handed policing in Black communities. He once stated that violence was "as American as cherry pie."

"Violence is a part of America's culture," he said duri

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