-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.
The only time republicans were for gun control. When black people took up arms in self defense.
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.
And this is still the underlying cancer in America. We’re here today because Obama broke their brain.
Popular, two -term, erudite, black man as president with no scandals.
No non-mustard/tan suit related scandals you mean!
Pretty bold of you to say obama had no scandals.
Pretty much sums up the right wing perfectly. Zero ideology, just reactionary stupidity.
Jfc that’s dark. Fred Hampton was a badass who was murdered by the state. But that’s not enough and they shoot his fucking tombstone? Get the fuck over it! You already killed our guy to suppress a movement. You don’t have to be aggrieved any longer, you fucking pussies.
He was murdered by cops who have since retired, this is being done by newer pigs who want to show their loyalty to the boot.
If it weren’t for the Black Panthers there wouldn’t be meal programs in public schools. The BP “Free Breakfast for Children” program was so popular and so effective at raising awareness and popularity for the BP party that the government became paranoid that they were constructing an effective “fifth column”. All of the sudden states started passing laws creating food programs for public schools in order to undermine their message.
Nothing good happens in this country unless the rich are scared. The same thing applied to the New Deal.
Nothing good happens in this country unless the rich are scared
And recently with the actions of Mario’s brother (horrible “death panel” decisions were put on hold, etc.)
You are allowed to say Luigi here. We’re not Reddit
There is some allure to indirect references I suppose.
Meanwhile half of lemmy will get mad at you for thinking that holding signs over some sidewalk won’t do more good than making the rich scared.
We can only hope to live lives that leave fascists seething for generations after we die. Rest in power.
I’d rather lead a life that leaves fascists dead after I die. But I’ll take seething as a consolation prize.
If all you know about Fred Hampton is that decades after his death, cops still fear him this much, you know what a great man he was.
I understand what you mean but I don’t think this comes from a place of “fear.”
I think it does. Cops were terrified of Hampton. They had to have him drugged before they were brave enough to storm in and murder him in his sleep. Remember how scared Dorner made cops?
Dorner was a soldier whereas Hampton was an activist.
Fred Hampton absolutely blurred the line between soldier and activist. Honestly, what is more scary: one soldier or an activist who is building an army?
The soldier when it comes to an actual fight.
Agree to disagree I guess.
Anybody can shoot a gun with relative accuracy at combat ranges. Don’t be ridiculous, we aren’t creating supersoldiers here.
There’s a difference between shooting at paper targets and targets that can move and return fire. Training on a range isn’t going to make you a good hunter either.
No one who shoots this today is thinking about any of that.
There is fear imprinted in their “cop DNA”.
Rofl. Yeah… that’s it, you’ve solved it.
Edit: You people understand their bullets mean waaaaay more than your online hot takes right?
You people understand their bullets mean waaaaay more than your online hot takes right?
Then go ahead, here’s your chance; inform us.
Oh you’re so edgy you might as well be emo.
Yea. Why would they fear him? He’s a dead man, not an acorn.
Fred Hampton is the acorn pigs fear most. the tree he grows will end their existence
He obviously still has a hold over them mentally. If that isn’t power I don’t know what is.
Hate comes from fear.
If we take what you’re saying as truth then that means people who suffer from anxiety are more likely to be hateful.
I don’t think that’s true. I think fear certainly plays a part but I can very safely say I hate people that I would never be afraid of.
Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.
Suffering is yet to come
Not really. It has more in common with disgust. I know it’s a common trope though.
I remember teachers trying to make us kids feel better when someone had gotten bullied. “He’s just jealous of you”. Even then it struck me as something incredibly forced and not true. Having heard bullies laugh about the sentiment afterwards gives me reason to think they weren’t jealous.
The same “lie” is being fed now, only in a different format. “They were afraid of him”. No, they really aren’t afraid.
Bullying is very much fear based. People while high self worth do not bully others. Bullying is always an internal weakness lashing out.
You may only remember jealousy as one reason but there are many reasons for bullying others but at its root it’s an internal fear of inferiority.
When you recall the bullied reacting to this asssessment, what do you imagine the response would be; immediate self reflection?
Yes, it’s fear-based. But the bullies do not feel fear or jealousy. That is a completely fabricated reason, made to comfort the bullied.
The bullies want to make others feel smaller. It has more to do with lack of empathy, and nothing to do with fear.
Why would the bullied feel self-reflection for being lied to by parents/teachers etc? I think you got it the other way around.
I do not expect them to self-reflect. I expect them to deflect. Which could be attributed to them laughing at explanations for why they are bullies.
Belief that they are laughing because they know it is false is not back up by the behavior profile.
For example, if someone told Trump he has narcissist personality disorder because his father refused him the lover and praise he craved as a child, if he stopped and pondered the accusation, it’s actually more likely to be false than if he explosively reflects the accusation.
There are well defined behavior patterns. These patterns are continuously being developers and reworked but the implication is that we are not these unique snowflakes.
We are actually incredibly predictable at an individual level and our true motivations are knowable even if we refuse to acknowledge it; especially when we emotionally reject acknowledgment.
I asked why the bullied would feel self-reflection, as if its their fault for being bullied?
What if i said that the bullies grew up in happy families, well adjusted. They just have/had a superiority complex and looked down on others. Not all fit the nice mold that you describe.
And it doesn’t take away the fact that kids are lied to, for comfort that doesn’t help in the slightest. Followed by the nonsense nowadays where every bully is described as “afraid”.
The rest of the story from Wikipedia:
During the raid, Panther Mark Clark was also killed and several others were seriously wounded. In January 1970, the Cook County Coroner held an inquest; the coroner’s jury concluded that Hampton’s and Clark’s deaths were justifiable homicides.[14][15][16][17]
A civil lawsuit for wrongful death was later filed on behalf of the survivors and the relatives of Hampton and Clark.[18] It was resolved in 1982 by a settlement of $1.85 million (equivalent to $6.03 million in 2024); the U.S. federal government, Cook County, and the City of Chicago each paid one-third to a group of nine plaintiffs. Given revelations about the illegal COINTELPRO program and documents associated with the killings, many scholars now consider Hampton’s death, at age 21, a deliberate assassination at the FBI’s initiative. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton
Funny I just read that a bit ago, some of their sources cited appear to no longer work.
The FBI assassination part seems to be corroborated by this National Archive page https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/individuals/fred-hampton. I guess NARA being an official USA agency, they would not make a claim against the FBI without being certain.
Yes thats 100% true, Fred was drugged, moved to a different room, and killed while unconscious.
However all other aspects of the raid are inconsistent among various witnesses: who shot first, where the gunman in the first room was killed, how the police presented themselves, etc. The agents responsible deserved to face time for the wrongful killing of Fred, but the raid on the compound in itself is an expected outcome of the Black Panther’s actions. Their ideology created this outcome, using them as some sort of icon now 60 years later is disingenuous and pointless.
Link decay is actually a pretty serious problem that no one seems to have an answer to and it will only get worse.
I remember growing up people saying “Once, it’s on the internet. It’s there forever”. Turns out, the Internet is subjected the power of entropy like everything else.
Huge swathes of the internet being shut down via overzealous copyright enforcement isn’t entropy.
Like everything else that’s killing or at the very least making worse all the best qualities of the internet, it’s enshittification to maximize profits and corporate ownership of every aspect of life they can possibly get their greedily grasping hands on.
its very easily solvable from a technical standpoint. the reason we cant is entirely because of copyright laws.
archive.org page mirrors could be used instead of direct links, the problem is that archive.org is in danger of being sued for hosting those mirrors.
that would still leave a single point of failure, but if you implemented a bittorrent style version of archive.org you could easily archive any webpage and media forever.
everything structurally bad about the internet is bad because of copyright laws.
It’s also part of the rewriting of history. AI is going to make the mutation of facts even easier as more people feel comfortable asking AI questions. They can program it to vomit out whatever misinformation they want.
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.
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.
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…
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.
yup and they’re about to do it again
They never stopped
I’m fucking speechless.
Fight fire with water
police can’t even stop murdering black people when they’re dead
Can we… Replace his headstone?
Hear me out. If we replace it with something that is known to reflect small arms fire, there’s a nontrivial chance that the next time some asshole shows up to shoot the headstone and piss on his grave (probably), there would be a non-zero chance that person would shoot their own dick off by way of a ricochet.
Stone, while it looks nice and lasts a really long time (when it’s not being shot), is great… But maybe this one time?
Or just camp around there, wait for a shot to go off and then unload on the cop car. Who’s to say the cop wasn’t shooting at you when they’re unlawfully shooting out of their windows?
Murdering a cop would also go a long way in showing support lol
You see… I’m mainly focused on making it so that they hurt themselves. I’m focused on this because booby traps are illegal, and straight up shooting them rarely ends well.
I don’t want anyone to get in trouble for their actions. I want the officer(s) to hurt themselves so they get ridiculed for being stupid; both, by their peers and by the public.
Hell, I’d setup a trail camera type situation to keep an eye on things so I can post it to YouTube and/or rejig the situation so that the likelihood of them harming themselves from doing this thing is maximized.
By simply using materials that frequently ricochet bullets… Nothing illegal has been done. It’s not an active trap and it’s not a problem, legally, to use the materials. The entire thing is passive, there’s nothing that could even be considered a “trap” of any kind, and plausible deniability is easily proven by simply “I replaced it with this because the headstone kept getting damaged, I didn’t think anyone would shoot it and hurt themselves your honour”
The only evidence that it was done maliciously would be if someone who was in a position to make it happen, commented here saying that they were intending to do this. If any such person exists and is considering it, I am not a lawyer, but I would advise that person to do so without getting involved in the discussion here at all. That would provide plausible deniability to the action being malicious. All you need is to inspire enough doubt that you can’t be convicted.
Anyways I’m well into the weeds here.
I also agree with you that it is not illegal to kill cops (any more than it is illegal to kill anyone else), and defending yourself from the police in a situation where you are justified in using the force you are using, should not be punishable nor a crime, but you and I both know that reality is very divorced from the law and what’s legal on this one. Even if you’re legally allowed to defend yourself in the situation, the police will shoot and kill you, then walk on “qualified immunity” after they investigate themselves and find no wrongdoing.
Defund the police.
Self defense you mean, not murdering a cop, standyourgrounding a cop.
Who’s to say the cop wasn’t shooting at you
The judge, numerous other cop “witnesses”, a jury of your peers…
be me, proud boy or something
gonna stand for my values!
let’s go to DC and invade the Capitol! Actually that sounds a bit scary
oh I know I will beat up some ecoactivists! Wait these guys are ripped, they spend so much time climbing in trees, that might be dangerous
ah yes, I will cyberbully Greta Thunberg! No no I might get in trouble
yes I know I will gather the bro cops and we will shoot at a tombstone of a black man
PROUD BOYS!!!
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.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present you the land of the free and the bold, and it’s beautiful history.
Sigh…
