-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.
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.
yup and they’re about to do it again
They never stopped
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.
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.
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, the issue is the people doing it are racist murderers who are celebrating their racist murder.
Shitting on fascist’s headstones needs to be enshrined as a right in the Constitution.
If unlimited corporate corruption of the political process is speech, so is planting some corn at the demagogue receptacle.
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.
I would absolutely vandalise a nazi tombstone tho
There’s a great movie that goes over all this called Judas and The Black Messiah. It’s definitely worth a watch
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.
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?
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.”
He obviously still has a hold over them mentally. If that isn’t power I don’t know what is.
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?
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.
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.
Hate comes from fear.
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?
Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.
Suffering is yet to come
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.
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
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.
Link decay is actually a pretty serious problem that no one seems to have an answer to and it will only get worse.
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.
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.
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.
FTP forever, all coppers are fucking trash. The government lets all these white power groups fucking thrive in America but any socialists they fucking gun down in murder
That’s because the government doesn’t actually care about you.
They care about remaining in power so they can grift and take your money without having to put in any work in.
People need to wake up to this insight instead of wondering why the government keeps consistency doing things against your best interests.
You’re preaching to the choir
I wish people would stop saying “the government”. It’s the people in charge, the government is a tool they are using. This should be making people angry that their govt is being manipulated into a tool to be used against them. Saying “the government” makes it this big imposing organization and stops reminding you that the people behind the problems are soft meat sacks just like the rest of us.
Nothing against your points, your comment only reminded me of this. People are more scared of “the government” than they are of other people
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Anyone who can find any reason to shoot at the grave of a young respected political activist who worked against the side of hate deserves denial of peace in the afterlife as well.
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
police can’t even stop murdering black people when they’re dead
ok so cute story, but why do people shoot the grave?
People? Cops…
Racism
Some folks who work forces…
