Trials: Under the Gun

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Nineteen days after Negro Nihilist H. Rap Brown, 24, married Lynne Doswell, 22, a New York City schoolteacher, a federal judge gave the bridegroom five years in prison and a $2,000 fine.

The sentence resulted from a swing that Brown took last summer from New York to New Orleans and back again—toting a carbine. Maryland had just accused him of inciting a riot, and Brown was charged again under a rarely used U.S. law making it a crime to carry firearms across state lines while under indictment. In New Orleans federal court, a jury of three white men and nine women (six of them white) found him guilty for packing the gun back to New York but guiltless for taking it to New Orleans in the first place because he did not yet know he was indicted. When Brown, wearing rose-colored glasses, drew the maximum term, his attorneys announced an appeal.