Archive for the ‘TV’ Category

Obit watch: February 17, 2026.

Tuesday, February 17th, 2026

Another one of those “it got busy up in here all of the sudden” days.

Robert Duvall. THR.

Other credits include “T.H.E. Cat”, “The F.B.I.”, and he was the original Frank Burns in “M*A*S*H.”.

Mike the Musicologist tipped me off to this tweet. I can’t find the “embed” function on X, but here’s the long version of the video.

Frederick Wiseman, documentary filmmaker.

His directorial debut, “Titicut Follies” (1967), a harrowing portrait of the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane in Massachusetts, remains the only film ever banned in the United States for reasons other than obscenity, immorality or national security. (The ban, imposed by Massachusetts on the grounds that the film violated the inmates’ privacy, was lifted in 1991; the film subsequently aired on PBS.)

This may just be a personal reaction, but “Titicut Follies” is the most frightening film I have ever seen in my life. (I actually saw it in a screening at the old Dobie Theater.)

Mr. Wiseman’s approach to his films — shot in what he wryly referred to as “wobblyscope,” thanks to his hand-held camera — was perhaps never better expressed than during a face-off with his fellow documentarian Werner Herzog, onstage at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.
Mr. Herzog, who had been espousing a theory of “ecstatic truth” and a willingness to manipulate his nonfiction films to achieve something sublime, confided to the audience that a shot apparently made through a dewdrop in his film “The White Diamond” had actually been made through a leaf to which glycerin had been applied. Asked whether he had ever done anything similar, or would, Mr. Wiseman said he had not, but admitted that he might change a lightbulb if a room seemed too dark.

Jesse Jackson.

Yes, I know.

Monday, February 16th, 2026

Robert Duvall obits tomorrow, in keeping with the official policy of this blog. This will give some time for the errors and omissions to shake out.

Obit watch: February 12, 2026.

Thursday, February 12th, 2026

Bud Cort, actor. THR. Other credits include “Midnight Caller”, “The Chocolate War”, and “Sledge Hammer!”.

Lory Patrick, actress. She doesn’t have that long a list of credits, but this is interesting:

Her first husband was late science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison; they were married and divorced in 1966, and she was the second of his five wives.

She later married Dean Jones, and they stayed married for 42 years (until Mr. Jones died).

Andrew Ranken, drummer for The Pogues.

Among other contributions, the Pogues credited him with coming up with the title “Rum, Sodomy and the Lash,” based on a quotation attributed to Winston Churchill: “Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash.”
“It seemed to sum up life in our band,” Mr. Ranken once said.

Fred Smith, musician. Interesting story: he started out with Blondie, and then defected to Television. After he left, Blondie blew up into a huge success, while Television broke up after two albums.

James Van Der Beek. NYT (archived). Other credits include “CSI: Cyber”, “Law and Order: SVU”, “Law and Order: Criminal Intent”, and “Walker” (not “Walker, Texas Ranger”, but the reboot).

Obit watch: January 31, 2026.

Saturday, January 31st, 2026

Catherine O’Hara. NYT (share link).

Other credits include “A Mighty Wind”, voice work in “Where the Wild Things Are”, and “The Greatest Event in Television History”.

Demond Wilson. Other credits include “Today’s F.B.I.”, “Dealing: Or The Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues”, and the original “Mission: Impossible”.

He studied acting at the American Community Theater and at Hunter College but was drafted and then wounded in Vietnam while serving in the 4th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army.

Obit watch: January 13, 2026.

Tuesday, January 13th, 2026

Scott Adams. THR.

I used to be a pretty avid follower of “Dilbert”. Back at one of my previous jobs, the running joke was that “Dilbert” was a documentary about my life. Then something happened. Mr. Adams’s…eccentricities, for want of a better word, got on my nerves. (Remember the “Dilberito“, and Mr. Adams’s idea that we didn’t need to actually, you know, eat food? We could just pills with all the nutrients we needed.)

He was still on my radar, because how could he not be? But he didn’t have the relevance for me that he once had. I’m sad he’s passed on, though.

(These days, the documentary about my life is called “The Wire”.)

Elle Simone Scott, of “America’s Test Kitchen”. I get a kick out of having “ATK” on in the background while I work.

Jirdes Winther Baxter. She was 101.

Ms. Baxter was the last known survivor of the 1925 Nome diphtheria epidemic.

A copy of medical records from 1925, possessed by Mr. Baxter, a retired lawyer, indicates that Jirdes (pronounced JER-diss) Winther, then 11 months old, was hospitalized in Nome on Jan. 30 with diphtheria and what she later called a high fever. Highly contagious, diphtheria is a dangerous bacterial disease that can clog airways, severely restricting breathing, and damage the heart and kidneys.
Jirdes’s Norwegian-born mother, Ragnhild, and one of her brothers, John, were admitted on Feb. 2. Her father, Johan, and another brother, Gudmund, did not contract the disease.
At the time, there was only one doctor, Curtis Welch, in Nome, a gold-rush town of 1,400 inhabitants. After two young children died of diphtheria by mid-January, officials there instituted a quarantine advised by Dr. Welch, who had realized that a pandemic seemed “almost inevitable.”
He sent alerts, by radio telegram, to other towns in Alaska and pleaded for emergency help from the U.S. Public Health Service. The nearest supply of antitoxin, made from the blood of horses, was at a hospital in Anchorage, 1,000 miles away.

They couldn’t fly antitoxin in by plane, the port was frozen over, and there was no train service directly to Nome.

A plan was devised to carry 300,000 units of antitoxin by train from Anchorage to the railhead of Nenana in interior Alaska, about 300 miles north. From there, sled dogs would ferry the serum 674 miles west to Nome, a relay that would involve 20 mushers and about 150 dogs. It would come to be known as the 1925 Serum Run and the Great Race of Mercy.
For days, millions were enthralled by radio and newspaper accounts of the rush to keep a threatened town alive. A front-page headline in The New York Times reported, “Serum Relief Near for Stricken Nome.”
Bill Shannon, the first musher on the relay, retrieved the serum — a 20-pound package containing glass vials housed in a metal cylinder — from the train in Nenana. He insulated the container with bearskin and took off on a 52-mile stretch as midnight approached on Jan. 27.
Mushers handed off the antitoxin and rested at roadhouses along the relay, enduring aching cold and wind and blizzards that sometimes made the trail disappear. On Feb. 2, the serum arrived in Nome after five days and seven hours, frozen but quickly thawed by Dr. Welch and administered to the sick.

Ms. Baxter had a few words to say on a subject of historical interest:

Ms. Winther Baxter believed — as many now do — that Balto, a husky that helped lead his team on the final 55-mile stretch into Nome, received heroic acknowledgment, including a statue in Central Park, at the expense of Togo, another husky who was the lead sled dog for a celebrated Norwegian-born driver named Leonhard Seppala.
Togo led his team for 261 miles — 170 to meet up with the relay and 91 on the longest, most hazardous stretch, involving a treacherous crossing of a frozen bay. Decades later, Togo received his own statue in New York, but in a less prominent location, Seward Park on the Lower East Side.
“No, no, you have it all wrong,” Ms. Winther Baxter corrected people when they mentioned the Balto statue, her granddaughter recalled her saying. “Togo was the real hero.”

Obit watch: January 11, 2026.

Sunday, January 11th, 2026

Bob Weir, of the Grateful Dead.

(the sound of eight confused men getting paid)

Stewart Cheifet. My older readers may remember him from back in the day as the host of “Computer Chronicles” on PBS.

Hessy Levinsons Taft. I confess she wasn’t that notable, but this is a fun story in historical retrospect.

When she was six months old, in 1934, her family hired a photographer to take a portrait of her. The photographer, feeling whimsical, submitted the photo as an entry for a contest “to find a baby representing the epitome of the Aryan race”.

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of public enlightenment and propaganda, chose the winner.

She won the contest. Which made things rather complicated, as she and her family were Jewish.

T.K. Carter, actor. Other credits include “The Corner” (For those of you who have read the book or watched the mini-series, he was Gary McCullough. For those of you who haven’t read the book, I commend it to your attention.), “A Rage In Harlem” (1991), “Runaway Train”, and “Quincy, M.E.”.

Erich von Däniken, crank.

Mr. von Däniken was 32 and managing a hotel in Davos, Switzerland, when he published his first and by far most popular book, “Chariots of the Gods,” in 1968. In breathless prose, saturated with exclamation points and folksy interjections such as “Hey, presto!” Mr. von Däniken posited that virtually the sum of human knowledge and ability had been bestowed by extraterrestrials.
With little evidence and a lot of innuendo, he proclaimed that the Egyptian pyramids could have been built only with alien expertise. (“Is it really a coincidence that the height of the pyramid of Cheops multiplied by a thousand million — 98,000,000 miles — corresponds approximately to the distance between the earth and sun?” he wrote.)
The birdman cult of Easter Island, Mr. von Däniken declared, developed as a way to honor the supreme beings who had flitted down from the outer atmosphere to land on that remote spot in the Pacific, off the coast of South America.
Because an iron rod in a temple in Delhi, India, appeared impervious to rust, it must have been made from a celestial alloy, he insisted. Similarly, he said, when viewed from the air, the geoglyphs of Nazca, Peru, are obvious landing strips for spaceships. And artwork on a Mayan sarcophagus depicts not a king descending into the underworld, he concluded, but an astronaut-god piloting a spaceship.

It sounds ridiculous, but people bought into this [stuff]. Including me. In my defense, I was left unsupervised. Also, I was very young at the time. (See also.)

Over the next half century, he published over 40 more books, which were translated into some 30 languages, and though none of them offered much variation from his original themes or ideas — subsequent titles included “Gods From Outer Space,” “The Gods Were Astronauts” and “Arrival of the Gods” — they collectively sold more than 70 million copies.

Mr. von Däniken wrote his second book from prison. In 1970, a Swiss court convicted him of fraud, forgery and embezzlement, determining that, as a hotel manager, he had falsified financial records to subsidize what the court called a “playboy” lifestyle. He served about a third of a three-and-a-half-year sentence.
Critics pointed to Mr. von Däniken’s criminal history as proof of a penchant for deception. But Mr. von Däniken seemed unfazed, even comparing himself to Jesus. “People don’t ask if Christ was convicted of a crime,” he told Playboy in 1974. “What has that to do with the message Christ brought?”

Obit watch: January 2, 2026.

Friday, January 2nd, 2026

Back on the train.

Philip Schreier, director of the NRA Museums, passed away on Monday.

I never had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Schreier, but by all accounts he was a swell guy.

Throughout his career, Phil was a trusted and respected voice within the firearms community. He became the public face of the NRA through countless television appearances and public engagements, always warmly received wherever he went. Phil was not only an ambassador for the NRA but also a devoted advocate for the Second Amendment.

Ben Nighthorse Campbell, former senator from Colorado.

Irreverent, blunt and independent, the rough-hewed Mr. Campbell was a fiscal conservative and a social liberal who favored gun rights and abortion rights, billed himself as the champion of the average voter and refused to be bound by party lines. He switched allegiance from the Democrats to the Republicans in 1995.

From 1960 to 1964, Mr. Campbell studied Japanese and judo at a university in Japan. He won 48 of 50 tournament matches, earned a gold medal at the Pan American Games in 1963 and joined the United States judo team at the 1964 Olympics. (He tore a ligament, lost his first match and retired from active competition, ranked fourth in the world.)

Isiah Whitlock Jr., actor. Other credits include “Cocaine Bear”, “Law and Order”, “L&O: Criminal Intent”, “L&O: SVU”, and “Lightyear”.

Cecilia Giménez. You probably don’t recognize the name, but you may recognize this:

The group called her “a great painting enthusiast” and acknowledged Mrs. Giménez’s efforts to restore the nearly century-old fresco of Jesus. “Because of the poor state of conservation, Cecilia, with the best intentions, decided to repaint over the work,” it said.
But when Mrs. Giménez’s handiwork came to light in August 2012, the authorities initially suspected that the church had suffered an act of vandalism. The delicate misery on the face of Christ en route to the crucifixion had been replaced by a misshapen head.

But her artistic mishap created an economic boon for Borja, a town of 5,000 inhabitants.
Tourists flocked to see her efforts. Less than three years later, more than 150,000 visitors from Japan, Brazil, the United States and elsewhere had made a trip to Borja, paying one euro, about $1.20, to view her work under a protective clear cover.
Local officials told The Times in 2014 that the tourism spike had stabilized the town’s restaurant industry and helped the area’s institutions. The nearby Museo de la Colegiata, which houses religious medieval art, experienced a rise in annual visits to 70,000, from 7,000. Vineyards in the region squabbled over the rights to put Mrs. Giménez’s Christ on their labels. In 2016, two Americans even staged an opera about the affair in the same church.

Louis V. Gerstner, former IBM CEO.

Obit watch: December 22, 2025.

Monday, December 22nd, 2025

James Ransone, actor. NYT (archived). Other credits include “Oldboy” (the Spike Lee remake), the bad “Hawaii Five-0”, and “Law and Order”.

Theodor Pistek, artist. As the NYT notes, he won an Academy Award for costume design for “Amadeus”. He was also a racing driver, and did paintings inspired by racing. I find “Ecce Homo” (reproduced in the obit) particularly striking.

Obit watch: December 17, 2025.

Wednesday, December 17th, 2025

Gil Gerard, actor.

Other credits include “Airport ’77”, the good “Hawaii Five-0”, and “E.A.R.T.H. Force”.

Robert Samuelson, long time economics columnist for “Newsweek” and the Washington Post.

Norman Podhoretz, conservative political writer.

(Hattip on Mr. Gerard and Mr. Podhoretz to Lawrence.)

Edited to add: archived NYT obits for Mr. Gerard and Mr. Podhoretz.

Obit watch: December 16, 2025.

Tuesday, December 16th, 2025

Joe Ely, one of the great Texas musicians. Variety. NYT (wow!).

I’m generally a little cynical about Texas musicians, but even I have to acknowledge that he was one of the greats. And I could just post YouTube videos all day.

This isn’t an Ely original, but I prefer this to Robert Earl Keen. That is a controversial opinion, I know.

Lawrence describes this as the greatest song ever written about a fighting rooster. Can’t argue with that.

Interestingly, he was an early adopter: he had a BBS system, back in the day when BBS systems were a thing.

After the show, Mr. Strummer and Mr. Jones took the Ely band on a tour of London’s late-night demimonde, an eye-opening experience even for someone as well-traveled as Mr. Ely. He returned the favor when the Clash came through Texas on their first U.S. tour, in 1979. He took them around Lubbock, to sites including Buddy Holly’s grave, where they all got stoned on laughing gas and beer.

“I had teachers tell me I wouldn’t make it to 21 when I was going to high school, so I beat the odds, you know?” he told Lone Star Music magazine in 2011. “I’ve traveled millions of miles, zigging and zagging in every kind of vehicle known to man, trying to get from one place to another to create some more music.”

He was 78.

Anthony Geary, actor. Other credits include “UHF”, “Project U.F.O.”, “Shaft” (the TV series)…

…and “Mannix”. (“A Way to Dusty Death”, season 7, episode 2. He was “Eddie Decken”.)

Obit watch: December 15, 2025.

Monday, December 15th, 2025

Dave Ward, legendary Houston newscaster.

My family was a KPRC/Channel 2 family when I was growing up in Houston, but everyone was familiar with Dave Ward. Of course, this was back when there were only three channels…

For those in Houston, Ward was the chronicler of some of America’s most important history, including the space walk, the Vietnam and Middle East wars, and the “Luv Ya Blue” era of the Houston Oilers. He also interviewed five U.S. presidents.

Rob Reiner. I don’t know what to say about this: it seems to be a still breaking story, and the circumstances seem awful.

THR. IMDB. Roger Ebert’s review of “North”.

Obit watch: December 11, 2025.

Thursday, December 11th, 2025

Three obits today for people who aren’t as notable as usual, but who I find interesting for one reason or another.

Stephen Downing. He was a police officer with the LAPD. One day he picked up the phone at the precinct.

Jack Webb was on the other end of the line. He was looking for a technical advisor for “Adam-12”.

Mr. Downing — who had studied creative writing in the 1960s at what is now California State University, Los Angeles — got the job and quickly surmised that he could offer more than guidance on police policy and tactics. He wanted to write a script.
“Webb said, ‘It’s harder than it looks,’” Michael Downing said in an interview, recalling what his father told him. “My father went home, wrote the script over the weekend and sold it.”

He continued to write scripts (under pen names) while still working for the LAPD.

As Michael Donovan, he wrote 21 episodes of “Adam-12,” 11 of a “Dragnet” reboot in the late 1960s that starred Mr. Webb and Harry Morgan, and 13 of “Emergency!,” a show Mr. Webb produced in the 1970s about Los Angeles paramedics. Under the name Sean Baine, Mr. Downing’s writing credits included “Police Woman,” “The Streets of San Francisco,” “Kojak” and “Police Story.”

After retiring from the L.A.P.D. in 1980, he produced and wrote, under his own name, action series like “T.J. Hooker,” a police procedural set in Los Angeles that ran on ABC and then CBS from 1982 to 1986 and starred William Shatner, and for ABC’s “MacGyver,” with Richard Dean Anderson as an agent whose only weapon is a Swiss Army knife.

IMDB.

Donald McIntyre, opera singer.

The booming voice of Mr. McIntyre, a giant of a man who once seemed destined for a rugby career in his native New Zealand, rang out for more than five decades in the world’s major opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera, where he had 16 major roles from 1975 to 1996.
But “the highlight of my career,” as he put it in his 2019 autobiography, was his performance at Bayreuth as Wotan, the king of the gods, in “Das Rheingold,” “Die Walküre” and “Siegfried” in a groundbreaking 1976 production of Wagner’s four-opera “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” directed by Patrice Chéreau.

I don’t get to use my “Wagner” tag enough. But anyway:

By presenting the operas, based on Germanic mythology, as a neo-Marxist allegory of capitalist exploitation in the 19th century, Mr. Chéreau’s production — the so-called centenary “Ring,” marking the 100th anniversary of the tetralogy’s premiere at Bayreuth — shattered norms and set the stage for decades of updatings of canonical operas.
Audiences around the world were used to seeing Wagner gods and heroes holding spears and wearing pseudo-Norse winged helmets. While some postwar Bayreuth productions had emptied out the stage for radically spare visions of the classic works, putting Mr. McIntyre’s Wotan in an Edwardian frock coat and dressing the Rhinemaidens as cancan girls caused a near riot at the tradition-encrusted summer festival.
As Mr. McIntyre recalled in his memoir, an enraged older lady beat another spectator over the head with an umbrella; “howls of fury” greeted his entrance onstage in the frock coat; and the composer’s daughter-in-law, Winifred Wagner, a onetime confidant of Hitler’s, told Mr. McIntyre that if she came across Mr. Chéreau, she would “shoot him” for politicizing the “Ring.”
Over four years, however, with the production revived, revised and refined each summer, many holdouts eventually warmed to it, and at the final performances, in 1980, there was a 45-minute standing ovation. When Winifred Wagner and Mr. Chéreau finally met, she admitted that “many times I wanted to kill you,” but added, “After all, isn’t it better to be furious than bored?”

There’s something to be said for that.

George Altman, baseball player. He was one of only three people who played in the Negro Leagues, MLB, and in Japan. (Don Newcombe and Larry Doby are the other two.)

At Tennessee A&I State University (now Tennessee State University), he played basketball and baseball. After graduating in 1955 with a degree in physical education, he landed a tryout with the Kansas City Monarchs, a Negro Leagues team managed by Buck O’Neil.
Altman took batting practice with the Monarchs before one of their games.
“Evidently I must have impressed them a little bit because as I was getting comfortable on the bench, sitting back to just enjoy the game, Buck came up to me and said, ‘Boy, you’re in there,’” Altman wrote. “It almost scared me to death.”

After three months with the Monarchs, he signed with the Cubs and was assigned to the Burlington Bees, in Iowa, in the minor leagues. He was drafted into the Army in 1956, and then rejoined the Cubs organization in 1958. He was promoted to the major leagues the next year.
“The thing I like about Altman is the fact that he knows where the strike zone is,” [Ernie] Banks told The Sporting News in 1959. “That’s one thing most young ballplayers don’t know about. They swing at anything they can reach with the bat. Altman waits for his pitch.”
In need of pitching, the Cubs traded Altman to the Cardinals in 1962. St. Louis traded him to the Mets the next year, and the Mets traded him back to the Cubs before the 1965 season. By then, he was struggling with injuries, once joking that he played for Blue Cross.
After Altman hit just .111 in 15 games in 1967, his career in the majors was over. Unwilling to quit playing, he joined the Tokyo Orions in Japan. During seven seasons with the team, he hit 193 home runs, becoming a popular player for his slugging and willingness to learn Japanese phrases.

Baseball Reference.

Obit watch: December 5, 2025.

Friday, December 5th, 2025

Master Sergeant Charles Norman Shay (US Army – ret.) He was 101.

Mr. Shay, a member of the Penobscot Nation of Maine, was one of about 175 Native Americans among the 34,000 Allied troops who came ashore on [Omaha] beach, into the teeth of some of the bloodiest fighting of D-Day in the opening act of the liberation of France during World War II.
Mr. Shay was awarded the Silver Star for saving soldiers who had been cut down by heavy German machine-gun fire after disembarking from their landing craft into the waves. In 2007, he received France’s Legion of Honor for his actions that day.
“I saw there were many wounded men who were floundering in the water, who could not help themselves, and I knew that if nobody went to help them, they were doomed to die,” Mr. Shay recalled in a 2010 interview for the Library of Congress.
He continued: “I proceeded to get as many men as I could out of the water by turning them over on their backs and grabbing them under their shoulders. I don’t know where my strength came from, but they say once the adrenaline starts flowing in your body you can do unbelievable feats.”

From 2018 until his death, Mr. Shay lived in northwestern France, in the home of a caretaker, Marie-Pascale Legrand, not far from the beaches where the World War II invasion took place. Ms. Legrand, who met Mr. Shay at a commemoration ceremony in Normandy in 2016, said in an interview that he had been lonely living in Maine and was not getting adequate health care. After visiting him there, she invited him to move to Normandy.
For several years, Mr. Shay performed a sage-burning ceremony overlooking Omaha Beach in honor of the dead. He was one of a very few American veterans able to attend D-Day commemorations in Normandy in 2020 and 2021, during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Frank Gehry. THR. The Onion (by way of Lawrence). Previously on WCD.

“You go into architecture to make the world a better place,” Mr. Gehry said in 2012. “A better place to live, to work, whatever. You don’t go into it as an ego trip.”
He added: “That comes later, with the press and all that stuff. In the beginning, it’s pretty innocent.”

Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, actor. Other credits include “Thunder in Paradise”, “Renegade”, “Jake and the Fatman”, and a spin-off of a minor 1960s SF TV series.

Obit watch: November 26, 2025.

Wednesday, November 26th, 2025

NYT obit for Udo Kier.

Michael DeLano, actor. Other credits include “Cover Up“, “Hardcastle and McCormick”, and “Banacek”.

Obit watch: November 24, 2025.

Monday, November 24th, 2025

Udo Kier, actor. THR.

275 credits in IMDB, including “Iron Sky: The Coming Race”, “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot”, and “Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated”.

Jimmy Cliff. THR.

Mr. Cliff won two Grammy Awards over his decades-long career: best reggae recording in 1986 for “Cliff Hanger” and best reggae album in 2013 for “Rebirth.” But his breakthrough in the United States came when he starred as an actor in “The Harder They Come,” a 1972 movie about a struggling Jamaican musician who turns to crime.

That film became a cult favorite in the United States, running for years in midnight slots at theaters. It won Mr. Cliff a wide base of fans, many of whom bought the movie’s soundtrack, which included “You Can Get It If You Really Want” and “The Harder They Come” as well as Mr. Cliff’s “Many Rivers to Cross” and “Sitting in Limbo.”

Lee Tamahori, New Zealand director who went on to a Hollywood career. IMDB.

I never saw any of his Hollywood films. But I did see “Once Were Warriors” in a theater, and it blew me away. I highly recommend that, but be warned: it isn’t a light and happy movie.

Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, who was also known as H. Rap Brown.

Before converting to Islam and changing his name in the 1970s, Mr. Al-Amin was one of the most incendiary orators among the Black Power activists who emerged in the late 1960s to challenge the leadership and nonviolent strategy of the civil rights movement.
An admirer of the Cuban revolution, he preached armed resistance and separatism, declaring: “Violence is necessary. Violence is a part of America’s culture. It is as American as cherry pie.”
With his trademark black beret and sunglasses, dexterous mind and imposing 6-foot-5 inch frame — 7 feet, with his Afro — he was a persuasive and charismatic figure to many, adept at rallying Black audiences to his cause while alarming many white listeners.
Elected chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in May 1967, he made an immediate mark by getting the word “nonviolent” removed from its name, persuading the organization’s leaders to change it to the Student National Coordinating Committee.

He had a long history of “involvement”, so to speak, with law enforcement.

Enmeshed in court proceedings resulting from federal and state charges he faced in five cities, Mr. Al-Amin went into hiding in 1970 and spent 18 months on the F.B.I.’s Most Wanted list. He resurfaced in Manhattan on Oct. 16, 1971, in dramatic fashion — wounded in a shootout with the New York City police. The police said he and several accomplices had tried to hold up an uptown Manhattan tavern and exchanged gunfire with officers who were pursuing them.
Mr. Brown, who denied the charges, was convicted on charges of robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. He served five years of a five-to-15-year sentence at the Attica state prison in upstate New York.
By the time he was released on parole in 1976, he had converted to the Muslim Sunni sect known as Dar-ul Islam. By his account, he had become a new man with a new name. He moved to Atlanta, where his wife, Karina, had established a law practice, and publicly renounced the revolutionary ambitions of his youth.

He was convicted of shooting two sheriff’s deputies – killing one – in 2000, and died in a federal medical center.