-Fred Hampton was a black activist from Chicago – an extraordinary speaker, youth organizer for the NAACP.
-He joined the Black Panthers and shone so brightly that he was made chair of the Chicago chapter when he was only 20.
-He founded the Rainbow Coalition, which brought together Black and Latino activists and radical anti-poverty Catholics. He forged an alliance among major Chicago street gangs to help them make peace and work for social change.
-In 1967, when he was just 19, Hampton was identified by the FBI as a “radical threat.” The FBI tried to subvert his activities in Chicago, sowing disinformation to get the groups he’d drawn together to distrust each other, and getting an FBI plant next to him as a bodyguard.
-(This is part of an illegal FBI program called COINTELPRO, which aimed to paint black civil rights activists (among others) as violent and threatening. If you’ve only seen pictures of the Black Panthers as armed and dangerous revolutionaries, and never heard of their children’s breakfast program, their community health clinics, or their “copwatch” patrols, this is why. It’s because COINTELPRO was a highly successful work of political propaganda.)
-On December 3, 1969, Hampton taught a political education course at a local church, and then several Panthers gathered at his apartment for a late dinner. One of them was the FBI plant bodyguard, who drugged Hampton.
-At 4:45 AM on December 4, a squad of Chicago Police officers and FBI agents with a warrant to search for weapons stormed the apartment. Investigations later showed they fired between 90 and 99 times. The Panther on security detail, Mark Clark, was holding a shotgun. He was shot, and the gun went off into the ceiling. This was the only shot fired by the Panthers.
-Fred Hampton, in another room, didn’t awaken. He was shot in his bed. Twice, in the head, at point-blank range. He was 21.
-Four weeks after witnessing Hampton’s death, his finance Deborah Johnson gave birth to their son, Fred Hampton Jr. That’s him in the photograph, visiting the grave of a father who died before he was born. A resting place riddled with bullets.
There’s a great movie that goes over all this called Judas and The Black Messiah. It’s definitely worth a watch
After watching this movie, and researching Fred Hampton afterwards, I became a member of the peaceful off-shoot of the Black Panther Party, now called The Collective Black People Movement. They do good work with local unions and political activism. Consider supporting them.
Can you join if you’re not black?
Absolutely! Fred Hampton was all about building a rainbow coalition
Hell yeah!
It’s a little too dramatized to call it a documentary, but it’s a fairly accurate retelling of an important American story. Better than half of the movies I ever watched in history class as a kid.
This is a movie that US citizens should watch. Not because it’s a good film (it is, though), but because it’s an important story in our (very recent) history.
The only time republicans were for gun control. When black people took up arms in self defense.
Pretty much sums up the right wing perfectly. Zero ideology, just reactionary stupidity.
True story! This is the exact reason that California has such strict gun control laws
The first time I heard about the Tulsa race riots it blew my mind that it wasn’t common teaching in schools.
White folk told black people to gtfo and go build their own town, so they did and it prospered while the white towns went to shit. So of course the racists are like “we gotta kill all the black folk and burn their town, cause they’re doing better than us!”
*Tulsa race massacre.
It was not a riot. It was a targeted organized attack to kill black people.
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No non-mustard/tan suit related scandals you mean!
Pretty bold of you to say obama had no scandals.
How petty do you have to be to vandalize a tombstone…
Law and order, but only if the white cops are above everyone else 🤡
Vandalizing tombstones is fine. For example shitting on Reagan’s grave is a wholesome family activity.
The issue is the people doing it are racist murderers who are vandalizing the grave of a freedom fighter to celebrate their racist murder.
Shitting on fascist’s headstones needs to be enshrined as a right in the Constitution.
I have been personally invited by two brits and an Irishman to piss on Margaret Thatcher’s grave, and in turn I invited them to so the same to Reagan and any confederate they can find.
If unlimited corporate corruption of the political process is speech, so is planting some corn at the demagogue receptacle.
I would absolutely vandalise a nazi tombstone tho
Suddenly remembering those youtube videos about that super bouncy metal toy with a stainless steel ball…
(Joke is, he made every sound in this song with bouncing metal ball bearings on stuff.)
It’s neat that the wikipedia article about him seems to lack proper citations for the circumstances of his death, citing an archived court document that is no longer being hosted on archivedotorg.
Every news story from the time and the police themselves claim the panthers shot first, and they police did have a warrant to search the premises for illegal firearms.
I tend to treat the Black Panthers as a terrorist organization after reading about how they murdered their own secretary after she whistleblew some of their financial crimes. Yes, black people are victims in the USA. Yes, there is still to this day a strong bias against them and a structural inequality. Is that reason to support people who threaten violence, who reject the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr, and who have been manipulated into violence by the federal agencies in the past? No, fuck the black panthers.
Whole lotta words there when “I like the taste of boots” would suffice.
Black Panthers wear boots. How do those taste?
Hahahaha
Oh, you’re REAL fucking stupid, ain’t ya?
So when I do something it’s stupid, when you do the exact same thing it’s smart?
Yes.
Because I’m not fucking stupid.
Hope that clears that up for you.
No I’m in agreement with them. You’re fucking stupid. You strike me as a weak-willed liberal without any constitution.
How many bullet holes are yours?
Found the poster who deepthroated COINTELPRO.
COINTELPRO was highly illegal which is why the 9 plaintiffs won their wrongful death court case over 20 years after the events.
Being illegal is irrelevant when it is successful and nobody was held accountable.
Sure, a few people out of the millions who were and still are impacted to this day got some monetary compensation. It still has ripple effects like morons who think the Black Panthers are terrorists spreading the lies to this day.
Are you going to sit there and tell me that Black Panthers have not and will not encourage the use of violence to achieve political goals? The entire reason the police got away with this murder is because the Black Panthers were in a compound filled with young men with guns, including the shotgun that they fired into the ceiling during the raid.
Can you elaborate on what’s illegal about young men having guns? How does this differ from any rural bar in the country?
Your opinions here are ridiculous as every aspect of your argument was fed to you by the very same people who did the murdering here and you even acknowledge that the government lost the civil case yet still think the Panthers are guilty of the crimes alleged in the very same civil case.
Any rural bar in the country with private membership stockpiling weapons better have a permit for each and every one of those weapons and they should get searched/raided frequently by the police. If those rural club members are holding shotguns and being confrontational I wouldn’t blame the police for killing two injuring multiple in a rural bar.
If a Nazi Skinhead was drugged and shot while unconscious I wouldn’t mourn him one bit.
The laws as written don’t stop applying just because of your skin color. That era should be far behind us. And we have the power to keep it that way, unless we do something stupid and reject the system used to make our ideal future a reality.
Since when are you required to have a permit for every firearm you own? You’re just making shit up here.
“Holding shotguns and being confrontational” according to whom exactly, the police who murdered this man?
If a Nazi Skinhead was drugged and shot while unconscious I wouldn’t mourn him one bit.
What does this have to do with the Black Panthers?
The laws as written don’t stop applying just because of your skin color.
Doesn’t this directly contradict your previous statement about “Nazi Skinheads?” You’re all over the place trying to dig yourself out of the hole you’ve created here.
unless we do something stupid and reject the system used to make our ideal future a reality.
What fucking system is that exactly? You speak like you’ve never stepped foot in the US.
That’s a much lower bar than being terrorists. In the 20th century, loads of people used violence to achieve the political goal of not being oppressed by Nazis, and no reasonable person would claim everyone who supported that was a terrorist.
Do you really think the Nazis would have paid the victims families in a wrongful death suit? The Black Panthers aren’t freedom fighters, they’re just a different group with plans for their own regime.
There are plenty of successful black politicians and activists who do not promote violence.
Oh, are they not allowed to use weapons to defend themselves like white people?
Can’t imagine why they would expect armed intruders with all those police keeping an eye on the building!
When white people collect guns and form a compound they get raided, too. Here is a random example: Branch Davidians
Forming a military compound is not self defence. People looking to protect themselves don’t do that.
Nobody actually knows who shot the headstone, it was discovered damaged in 2016:
Flint Taylor — one of the lawyers for Hampton’s family — recently journeyed to Haynesville to eulogize Fred Hampton’s mother, Iberia, a devoted mother and courageous activist who passed away in October 2016. He discovered this desecration of Hampton’s grave at that time.
As far as I can tell the notion that it’s a police tradition seems to originate from a possibly sarcastic post on r/stupidpol on that other site.
But he was definitely assassinated by the police and the FBI, which is probably much worse.
I guess the way the idea police tradition theory has taken hold so well is because it’s so plausible.
in bakersfield california, they have an informal “most violent cop” award where they sew fake blood onto stuffed animal baby seals as the trophy….
among hitchhikers it’s well known that the cops there will take your gear, shave your head, and abandon you at the edge of town….
i did doubt the annual shooting of a headstone one, just because it would be too easy to catch them. although cops may have done it once.
i think this also coincided with the series about hampton and the fbi informant bodyguard… who killed himself shortly after the series came out….in bakersfield california, they have an informal “most violent cop” award where they sew fake blood onto stuffed animal baby seals as the trophy….
I wouldn’t be surprised if that were true but do you have a source that can confirm it?
In related news:
In Kern County, California, cops kill 1.5 people per 100,000 residents—prompting an investigation by The Guardian, but not by state or federal overseers.
…
While attempting to track every police killing in the United States during 2015, journalists at The Guardian discovered that cops in Kern County aren’t just the deadliest force in the state relative to the population, they are the deadliest in the nation. “In all, 13 people have been killed so far this year by law enforcement officers in Kern County, which has a population of just under 875,000,” the newspaper has just reported. “During the same period, nine people were killed by the NYPD across the five counties of New York City, where almost 10 times as many people live and about 23 times as many sworn law-enforcement officers patrol.”
KCSO deputies have been caught rewarding colleagues for aggressive use of batons with a “baby seal” prize for the best clubbing. Others have modified their patrol cars with decals declaring “We’ll kick your ass”.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/04/the-county-kern-county-california-deputies-tactics
Thanks!
no problem… i actually heard about it before they were caught.
them fucking up traveling kids is pretty well known. apparently it’s a big train stop for hobos, and a crossroads for hitchhikers…
so i’ve avoided it at all costs.
plus it’s hot as fuck so, fuck that…
Yeah, but it hurts to have ‘myths’ like this perpetuated. My line of thinking is that if you wanna hate cops, there’s plenty of actually true things to use against them. If you float a story like this it hurts because someone that is happy with the police will point out that this might not be true and now you’re arguing about whether this is true vs. the disgusting behavior of US police.
I agree it has the air of plausibility, but it feels like hearsay to me. If it meets others’ threshold of “truthiness”, I can’t fully disagree, but for me this isn’t over that threshold. I’ll choose one of the few hundred other police abuses just this year to criticize them.
Yeah, I get you, and I agree entirely. There’s no shortage of genuine shit to throw at the police. Inventing stuff just casts doubt on the genuine shit. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that cops were behind this but all we have is speculation.
Eh, I think at least for the past few decades it isn’t actually too plausible.
Any known discharge of a firearm by police requires some sort of review. While they may be super lax and claim all sorts of false rationalizations for shooting a living person, I think even they would be unable to come up with a rationalization for discharging at a headstone in a public area.
Now if it is “take a whack at the headstone with a crowbar”, I could believe that, but I don’t think they’d risk shooting a headstone out of the blue.
Any known discharge of a firearm by police requires some sort of review.
I think “known” is the operative keyword here. If a police revolver goes off without a citizen to hear it, did it still make a sound?
Revolvers aren’t exactly known for being stealth… It’s just too much risk to desecrate a grave of someone who was dead before most of those officers were even born that most folks have never even heard of. At this point even the oldest on the force would be a generation removed from any officers that were working in 1969.
Still horrible, but thank you for adding important context.
Fight fire with water
ACAB. That cannot be said enough.
As a proud father of two young men, this absolutely breaks my heart while simultaneously pisses me the fuck off to no end.
The people in power are good for nothing cowards. “In God We Trust?” Yeah, if this is what your God allows, then fuck Him and fuck you too. I hope everybody involved in this murder rots in whatever wasteland of Hell they believe in.
Goddamnit.
I know of Hampton because of a lyric in a Propagandhi song
Shooting someone’s grave is fucked up.
Sometimes the ties that bind are strange: no justice shines upon the cemetery plots marked Hampton, Weaver or Anna-Mae
Fucked up is putting it mildly. Imagine being so mentally unstable that shooting at someone “between 90 and 99 times” wasn’t enough so you had to return annually to shoot at a rock with their name on it to feel better
Living, “Join or Die,” and then they kill you. Words/ acronyms that are “bad”: DEI, cosmopolitanism, human rights, communism, socialism, Palestine, Armenia, Myanmar, panic, fosscad, eat the…
Fuck them and the capitalist system they protect.
Have we ever talked about the fact that there’s a self defeatist term for backing down from a fight when you’re subjugated in nearly every language? “Whatever shall be shall be?”, “shikata ga nai” , “it is what it is”. The number of mental justifications for the subjugation we witness around us is insane. I hope everyone out there is okay.
ACAB
I aspire
Jesus. This story needs to come with a stiff drink. RIP.
Disgusting shit bags. Hampton never harmed anyone and they wanted him dead.
They wanted him dead because they want us divided. The divided states of Musk & Thiel.
I mean, this whole thing happened before Musk was even born, but the point still stands. Divide and rule.
That goes without saying.
The White government wouldn’t allow black people to integrate or create their own society. They wanted to keep black people subjugated.
Now that race isn’t as much of an issue as it was (still is a big issue please nobody be a pedantic bitch), it’s clear that white and black has really been a fight of rich and poor the whole time.
Too much money to be had subjugating people apparently.
It’s class warfare. The rich want the poor divided, so that they don’t rise up against the rich.
And now they are trying to spin the narrative and create a new race war against anything non American.
They’re also punishing any institution that dares suggest there is racism in the USA, either now or in the past. The USA is run by the same kinds of people who would shoot up Fred Hampton’s grave.
I mean the current administration killed the first amendment already, is not surprising.
No. Your words aren’t the problem, your sentiment is.
Regardless of you trying to stave off criticism, it’s still off-putting to say “race isn’t as much of a problem” when white supremacists have taken over the government and are resegregating society. But okay, things are a little better now than in the 1960s.
But no, white and black has not “really” been rich and poor. This is divisive nonsense. White people have attempted to keep Black people subjugated for 400 years. Class warfare is on top of that, and pretending otherwise is racist.
History is littered with white activists who achieved their goals on the backs of Black people, then fucked off as soon as they got theirs. If we want to win the class war, whites need to stand in true solidarity with Blacks, not try to erase history.
Still live in cops heads rent free
He still working on them from the grave
