- cross-posted to:
- InflectionPointUSA@lemm.ee
- cross-posted to:
- InflectionPointUSA@lemm.ee
-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.
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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.
He obviously still has a hold over them mentally. If that isn’t power I don’t know what is.
Hate comes from fear.
Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.
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
Is the Black Panther party still around? Seems like it could be worth a revival.
While I agree, with the current administration, it would immediately be marked as a terrorist organization and members would be arrested. I believe we need something new that they can’t immediately spin-off as a threat.
the US admin is accusing far right MAGA republicans of being radical leftists if they so much as hesitate on a vote. there’s no tasteful rebrand that will satisfy without becoming an ineffectual fascist yourself
Even in death, they fear what he stood for. That kind of legacy tells you everything about the system and who it’s built to silence.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for this post. The police propaganda was so successful that even i have seen the black panthers as a violent gang, without realising it. Thanks for spreading knowledge about people who have fought for their rights and the rights of others even in the eyes of horrible oppression and death. May we be blessed with more people like him.
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.
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.
I bet he would have been proud of this :)
We should crowd-source a new one every year and an ever-growing donation to an appropriate charity every time it needs replacing
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
Pretty much sums up the right wing perfectly. Zero ideology, just reactionary stupidity.
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.
You got me wondering where the FBI agents involved in this ended up. It wasn’t that long ago, some of them could still be around.
I stumbled on this article in the Jacobin that mentioned this:
Mitchell’s file, released in December 2020 after a Freedom of Information request by the author, runs nearly nine hundred pages.
Which is interesting, because I had another tab open of agent Mitchell’s records and it is 208 pages, not ‘nearly nine hundred pages’.
Internet archive only has one snapshot, it’s recent (March 2025) and also only 208 pages.
Got me feeling a little tin foil hatty, but I suppose that’s normal when reading about a literal conspiracy like COINTELPRO. I wonder if the dogebags scrubbed some of his file tho…
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
Oh, how high he would have flown
You have no enemies, you say? Alas! my friend, the boast is poor; He who has mingled in the fray Of duty, that the brave endure, Must have made foes! If you have none, Small is the work that you have done. You’ve hit no traitor on the hip, You’ve dashed no cup from perjured lip, You’ve never turned the wrong to right, You’ve been a coward in the fight
What a brilliant young man. I hope his son takes pride in it. As absolutely disrespectful as it is, each bullet is them saying “we remember you, and we still fear you.” Keep them afraid.
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.
