Cherry Pie

Hubert Geroid Brown was once a Boy Scout in his native Louisiana. At Baton Rouge's Southern University, he majored in sociology for three years, then dropped out in 1962 before graduating to devote his energies to civil rights work, eventually for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. By the time he took over as S.N.C.C.'s national chairman from Stokely Carmichael in 1967, he had become H. Rap Brown, an intractable militant in the Afro hair style, sunglasses and denims that became his uniform. "You'll be happy to have me back when you hear from him," Carmichael joked to reporters. "He's a bad man."

In a matter of months, Brown established himself as a firebrand of the black movement. "We must wage guerrilla warfare on the honky white man," he preached in Jersey City. A week later in Cambridge, Md., amid racial tension, he declared: "If America doesn't come around, then black people are going to burn it down." After parts of Cambridge did indeed burn down that July of 1967, Brown was charged with inciting to riot and arson. He vanished in March 1970 while out on $10,000 bail, shortly after a bomb blast killed two of his associates while they were driving in Bel Air, Md.--where pretrial hearings for Brown were being held.

Last week, after 17 months on the FBI's Most Wanted list, Brown, 28, reappeared. The dramatic episode was a bitter elaboration on his mordant dictum: "Violence is as American as cherry pie."

About 2:30 one morning, four black men, heavily armed, robbed a black after hours bar called the Red Carpet Lounge on Manhattan's upper West Side. They ordered about 25 customers to lie on the floor, assaulted some of them, took their wallets and laid down a barrage of fire as they left. As the robbers were scattering outside, they were pursued by six carloads of police who had been alerted by the bar's lookout men. In a running gun battle, two cops were wounded, one of them by a shotgun blast. A patrolman chased one robber to a nearby rooftop and shot him twice in the abdomen. Identified by fingerprints, police said, the wounded man was H. Rap Brown, and he was holding a .357 Magnum revolver when hit. At week's end, he lay in fair condition in a New York hospital.

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