Forty one years ago today, the FBI gunned down young Fred Hampton

[EFerrari]

along with the Chicago police. And our government lied about that and tried to cover it up for many years. He was shot twice in the head at point blank range. They said it was a shoot out.



Fred Hampton (August 30, 1948 – December 4, 1969) was an African-American activist and deputy chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP). He was killed as he lay in bed in his apartment by a tactical unit of the Cook County, Illinois State's Attorney's Office (SAO), in conjunction with the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Hampton's death was chronicled in the 1971 documentary film The Murder of Fred Hampton, as well as an episode of the critically acclaimed documentary series Eyes on the Prize.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton


He was all of twenty-one and a born leader. This is a five minute piece Amy did last year.

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/12/4/the_assassination_of_fred_hampton_how



"We always say in the Black Panther Party that they can do anything they want to to us. We might not be back. I might be in jail. I might be anywhere. But when I leave, you’ll remember I said, with the last words on my lips, that I am a revolutionary. And you’re going to have to keep on saying that. You’re going to have to say that I am a proletariat, I am the people."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtORI3ZlPeg&feature=related

[villager]

1. Yup. Yet many are still in denial about the extent of our domestic assassinations...

n/t

[EFerrari]

2. When I listen to him speaking, it seems impossible that he was so young.

And even so, he had a baby on the way, a boy, born two weeks after the assassination.

[Blue_Tires]

20. +1000

[ConsAreLiars]

3. And many more. "I am a proletariat."

I wonder how many here among the enlightened on DU know that that means something real and describes them as accurately as him.

[abq e streeter]

4. Thanks for the reminder; had been thinking about the anniversary coming up, but forgot today

And as usual, they got away with it. They fucking got away with it...... Cold blooded murder by the government against its own citizens.

[EFerrari]

5. You have to know it was in all those young brothers' minds

because they all said something like the quotation of Hampton's that I posted. Dr. King did. Malcolm did. A whole generation of black men that had to learn to live with the expectation of their violent death, had to learn how to tell the story of their own death to themselves and to their families so it would make sense.

[avaistheone1]

6. All power to the people.

It's the people's power.

RIP Fred Hampton

k&r

[truedelphi]

7. Notes I put inside my journal:

Dec 1969: During a 4:45 in the morning raid, Chicago police stormed the apartment where Fred Hampton, and Deborah Johnson, Blair Anderson, Doc Satchell, Harold Bell, Verlina Brewer, Louis Truelock, Brenda Harris, and Mark Clark were sleeping. Prior to the raid, Hampton had been given a drink laced with a barbituate and that had apparently knocked him out cold.

So the cops storm the apartment. Mark Clark, who had been in a front room with a shotgun in his lap, was killed instantly after firing off a single round; the only shot the Panthers fired. The automatic gunfire converged at the head of the bedroom where Hampton slept. (Hundreds of shots were fired, and over the next week, the news media reported them as justification of the police activity. Years later, it would come out that the hundreds of shots fired all were fired by the police.)

Two officers found Hampton wounded in the shoulder, and fellow Black Panther Harold Bell reported that he heard the following exchange:

"That's Fred Hampton."
"Is he dead?... Bring him out."
"He's barely alive; he'll make it."
Two shots were heard, which it was later discovered were fired point blank in Hampton's head. According to Deborah Johnson, one officer then said:

"He's good and dead now."<7>

### ### ### ###

I had a huge love for the Black Panthers. They worked hard in whatever areas of Chicago where they were needed to help bring about change. They saw to it that day care centers sprang up. They formed local neighborhood watch groups, economic organizing, and other valuable contributions to society. (I think they even had a bakery.) When I visited my friends who lived in bad neighborhoods, often a Black Panther would be stationed at the bottom of the stairs near the Elevated platform, and he would escort me, a young white kid, to the front door of my friends.

The Chicago Sun Times had this story about the police raid as their Big Headline.

I was sick at heart reading it. I knew it was a massacre, and I knew in my heart of hearts that the alleged hundreds of rounds of bullets did not come from the Panthers.

I have never forgotten them. And just like the people now living on the reservation near Wounded Knee, Dakota, who have been prosecuted for growing hemp, even as it helps push away poverty by employing people and paying the bills, so too the attack by the police on the Panthers shows how our organized pecking order of a society will not allow people to bring about solutions of their own to tranform their lives.

That is one real threat to our society - how the forces of darkness within our society use legal means or worse to keep people attempting to transform their situation stuck in the situation.

[EFerrari]

9. Way out here in CA, all I knew was the stuff on teevee

and the Panthers were portrayed as scary violent thugs. That's what I thought I knew in 1969. I was 13.

[truedelphi]

15. You'd have gotten along great with my mother.

Some of what I loved about the Panthers was that all I had to do was mention them, and it would tweak her beyond repair for an hour or two.

<Sigh> Now I regret being like that. But you know how rebellious seventeen yr olds can be.

[EFerrari]

17. My impression was that of a kid soaking up media images.

I don't recall having a single conversation about the Panthers or the Civil Rights Movement until I was in college in the mid-seventies.

We lived in the then still segregated, white suburban Silicon Valley. The movement seemed like it was occurring on a different planet. Sadly, that's what it was like in the valley in those days. A bubble.

[Odin2005]

24. How do you think "gun control" became an issue? The Black Panthers scared the racist fucks

heaven forbid that inner-city minorities arm themselves!

[NOLALady]

26. I admired the Panthers also.

I was never afraid of them. But I was deathly afraid of LEOs. I was also afraid to die.

The NOPD also attempted to massacre the New Orleans Chapter in 1975. There was a big shootout but I don't believe anyone was killed.

[EFerrari]

31. I didn't know that. n/t

[truedelphi]

33. I only got to NO for one Mardi Gras, in 1969.

Drove down there with a boyfriend.
Very huge awakening for both of us on how the South treated people of color.
We saw little black school kids trudging along the country road to walk to their school, while the white kids rode in school buses. (I imagine the black kids came from families that could not afford the bus subscription.)

We had one black guy hitch hike home with us from the NO central police headquarters, where he had been held on some bogus charge forr three or four days. He wasn't at all upset, he said he often got thrown in jail for nothing. He saw it as part of life.
But he was also very aware of the fact that America needed to go throw a lot more changes, and he was willing to work for them.

The people of NO were so gracious and I had so much fun during my six day stay. But the experiences of seeing NO and the South through the eyes of blacks, as opposed to the notions of democracy that I had soaked up as lily white suburban child - that jarring new information gave me nightmares for a long time.

[eridani]

28. What I remember about him was that poor white Appalachian people from Uptown--

--had contacted him a few weeks before he died for advice about setting up breakfast programs for kids in their neighborhood. Talented black leaders with serious class-based crossover appeal seem to have particularly short lifespans. Sad.

[Raine]

8. THANKS for the reminder

what a disgraceful episode and things still haven't changed much in 41 years.

[ConsAreLiars]

10. Rec, of course, (nt)

[EFerrari]

11. The Black Commentator has this narrative up on Fred Hampton:

NARRATIVE ESSAY:

To members of Chicago's African American community in the late 1960s, no leader was more inspiring, more articulate, or more effective than Fred Hampton. He organized food pantries, educational programs, and recreational outlets for impoverished children, and he helped bring about a peaceful coexistence among the city's rival street gangs. To civic leaders in Chicago, the FBI, and many others, however, he was a dangerous revolutionary leader, committed to the violent overthrow of the white-dominated system. Hampton was killed in a 1969 raid on the headquarters of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther party, in what was almost certainly a planned assassination orchestrated by Federal agents and city leaders, who feared that Hampton's influence could lead to an all-out armed uprising by the city's most disenfranchised residents.

Hampton was born in 1948 in Chicago, and grew up in Maywood, a suburb just to the west of the city. His parents had moved north from Louisiana, and both held jobs at the Argo Starch Company. As a youth, Hampton was gifted both in the classroom and on the athletic field. To those who knew him, he seemed a likely candidate to escape the ghetto and "make it" in the white-dominated world outside. At Proviso East High School in Maywood, Hampton earned three varsity letters and won a Junior Achievement Award. He graduated with honors in 1966.

Following his graduation, Hampton enrolled at Triton Junior College in nearby River Grove, Illinois, majoring in pre-law. He also became active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), assuming leadership of the Youth Council of the organization's West Suburban Branch. In his capacity as an NAACP youth organizer, Hampton began to show signs of his natural leadership ability. From a community of 27,000, he was able to muster a youth group 500-members strong, an impressive size even for a constituency twice as large. Hampton considered it his mission to create a better environment for the development of young African Americans. He worked to get more and better recreational facilities established in the neighborhoods, and to improve educational resources for Maywood's African American community. Through his involvement with the NAACP, Hampton hoped to achieve social change through nonviolent activism and community organizing.

At about the same time that Hampton was successfully organizing young African Americans for the NAACP, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense started rising to national prominence. Hampton was quickly attracted to the Black Panther approach, which was based on a ten-point program of African American self-determination. Hampton joined the Black Panther Party and relocated to downtown Chicago, where he launched the party's Illinois chapter in November of 1968.

more:

http://www.blackcommentator.com/67/67_hampton.html

[Greyhound]

12. Thank you for helping to keep his memory alive. n/t

[Solly Mack]

13. K&R

[EFerrari]

14. .

[burrowowl]

16. K&R

[TBF]

18. Hoover described the Panthers as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country"

... and in November 1968 ordered the FBI to employ "hard-hitting counter-intelligence measures to cripple the Black Panthers".

More here: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USApantherB.htm

[H2O Man]

19. Thanks, and recommended.

Fred Hampton had the potential to become one of the best progressive leaders of that era. His death was the result of a coordinated effort of several levels of law enforcement.

[NOLALady]

21. As Stevie said to Big Brother,

"You've killed all our leaders,
I don't even have to do nothin' to you
You'll cause your own country to fall"

[Starry Messenger]

22. k&r

[Odin2005]

23. K&R. The Government is NOT your friend.

[malaise]

25. Do you have any idea how many of the people's real

leaders were gunned down by governments across the globe.
How else do you think we ended up where we are today.
The Democratic project is over unless we fight like hell to return to democracy.

[EFerrari]

30. Yes, we got here by way of a lot of bloodshed, word. n/t

[Stuart G]

27. I worked three and a half blocks from where Hampton was shot, saw the crime scene..

The police had not closed off the apartment.
The Panther Party was giving tours of where he was shot in his bed. I was working at Crane H.S. nearby in my second year of teaching. A couple of students offered to walk me to the apartment and show me what had happened. It was really ugly.. The cops took him out, and tours were being given of the bed it took place in.
Cops that worked at Crane H.S. said it was inside job, State's Attorneys Police did it, not the locals,..locals knew nothing about it..
Riots started at Crane shortly thereafter..shit...41.. years ago..

[EFerrari]

29. Can you stream video, Stuart G? There's an excellent BookTV segment

on the book, The Assassination of Fred Hampton.

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/FredH

[Catherina]

32. Rec'd. A warning to Assange and all other malcontents with the empire. n/t