-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.

via

  • electric_nan@lemmy.ml
    403·
    26 days ago

    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.

  • _stranger_@lemmy.world
    217·
    26 days ago

    We can only hope to live lives that leave fascists seething for generations after we die. Rest in power.

    • Doctor_Satan@lemmy.world
      13·
      25 days ago

      I’d rather lead a life that leaves fascists dead after I die. But I’ll take seething as a consolation prize.

  • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
    151·
    26 days ago

    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

  • Gates9@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    124·
    25 days ago

    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.

  • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
    115·
    26 days ago

    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.

    • FordBeeblebrox@lemmy.world
      34·
      26 days ago

      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.

  • rational_lib@lemmy.world
    110·
    25 days ago

    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.

      • yarr@feddit.nlEnglish
        23·
        25 days ago

        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.

        • Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world
          4·
          25 days ago

          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.

      • jj4211@lemmy.world
        4·
        25 days ago

        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.

        • yarr@feddit.nlEnglish
          7·
          25 days ago

          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?

          • jj4211@lemmy.world
            2·
            25 days ago

            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.

  • dohpaz42@lemmy.worldEnglish
    82·
    26 days ago

    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.

    • sporkler@lemmy.world
      14·
      26 days ago

      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.

  • lowleekun@ani.social
    77·
    25 days ago

    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.

        • GraniteM@lemmy.world
          7·
          26 days ago

          It would not! In fact, if we use a tungsten alloy, it’ll be both cheaper and less likely to chip. Here’s a quick estimate:

          Estimate: Tungsten Heavy Alloy Gravestone (83,415 cm³)

          Gravestone Dimensions:

          • Height: 3 feet (91 cm)
          • Width: 2 feet (61 cm)
          • Depth: 0.5 feet (15 cm)
          • Volume: ~83,415 cm³
          • Estimated Weight: ~1,500 kg (using 18.0 g/cm³ tungsten heavy alloy)
          Item Estimated Cost (USD)
          Raw Materials (Tungsten Heavy Alloy) $48,000
          Machining & Shaping $11,000
          Engraving (laser or CNC) $750
          Freight Transport (special handling) $2,000
          Installation (crane + labor) $3,000
          Total Estimated Cost $64,750

          This cost reflects a bullet-resistant, nearly indestructible gravestone crafted from dense tungsten alloy—designed to last centuries with virtually no erosion or damage under normal conditions.

            • GraniteM@lemmy.world
              7·
              25 days ago

              Respect for… the hardworking people who list prices of tungsten alloy in dollars per gram? I’m just screwing around with a silly idea on the internet, man. Would it make you feel better if I had just invented a number off the top of my head?

              A hundred and fifty thousand dollars. That’s how much it would cost. I know that because my cousin works in tungsten alloy, and my brother makes headstones. No, wait, we can get it second hand, so actually it’ll only cost five hundred dollars. There, now I’ve created an original thought, and that’s much better than ballparking it with GPT.

              But honestly, man, I’m just trying to hang out and have a pretty low-stakes conversation, and you come out here and you type out seven words without capitalization or punctuation, and what you said, and the way you said it… it bummed me out.

              You don’t like that LLMs exist. I get it. You’re pissed off that they’re creating an endless cascade of slop, and that they’re already being used to unemploy people, and it’s just going to get worse. Hell, man, I was a theatre major in college. I wanted to do Shakespeare and Ionesco and shit. But you know, it turns out that it’s virtually impossible to do theatre and make enough money to live, seeing as how anyone can turn on their TV and see Olivier doing Hamlet, and if they don’t like that they can turn on YouTube and rewatch the sneezing panda video for the umpteenth time, so the demand for live theatre isn’t really what I thought it was when I was seventeen and I took out all those loans.

              So I got a series of jobs, and now I’m getting older, and I don’t do as much theatre as I wish that I could, but I’m trying. I’m trying to make the best of the hand that life dealt me. I’m trying to be a good person, and yeah, sometimes that means taking a shortcut, because I thought it would be fun to throw out some plausible numbers about the cost of tungsten. So I’m sorry. I’m sorry I upset you with that.

              But, man, maybe you could just take a moment to think about the fact that there’s a human being on the other side of this conversation. I’m not asking for permission to just burn the entirety of human creativity down. Fuck, the idea of how technology can devalue the arts is terrifying and enraging to me, too. But if you’re going to come at me over it, maybe you could try to treat me like a person, and not like an NPC that you can just lay into, you know?

              So anyway, I wrote all that myself. I hope that makes you happy.

              • 0ops@lemm.ee
                4·
                25 days ago

                At least disclose when you use it from here on out. When I see llm-speak without acknowledgement that that section of text is from an llm, frankly, I’m going to write you off as a bot.

              • Robert7301201@slrpnk.net
                2·
                25 days ago

                This is going to be harsh at first but bear with me. The reason you’re being treated like an NPC is because you’re acting like one. You copied that answer directly from ChatGPT, and from what I can tell didn’t put any original thought into it.

                You didn’t make that post, ChatGPT did and you let it use your name. I want to hear from YOU, the person who poured their effort into a post explaining themself and sharing their life experiences with us. It makes me happy that there’s other people I can connect and relate to about the struggles in life. That’s what I want from Lemmy. If I wanted pure information, I’d get an RSS reader. I want to hear how people’s thoughts and insights relate to their experiences.

                I don’t know what the role of AI should be. I recognize that AI often gets things right, but it also hallucinates with great confidence. I also have no way to prove if you or anybody else truly has a cousin that works in tungsten alloy. I do think there’s an inherent value in human anecdotes. They tell you about the person and can spark followup discussion. I could ask you about the tungsten alloy second hand market, and you might have an interesting story about how rich people love to flaunt giant blocks of tungsten, but then get bored and sell them. Those stories have value to me.

                I also recognize that AI can be a ton of fun to spit ideas with, but it’s not good on its own. Your ideas are what drives it. If you asked it for a estimate for if it was made of a titanium alloy as well, now you’ve added a bit of your own ideas to the discussion. We can build on that and discuss the merits of tungsten vs titanium. The questions you choose to ask is at least one way to express your individuality.

                The Lemmy community will gradually decide over time what the role of AI is. Right now, a lot of us fiercely attack any signs of AI in hopes of defending the human element. I’m sorry you were yelled at, and you don’t deserve to be treated like that. I respect your openness and the fact that you took time to write your reply.

                I hope you’ve found some value in my response and it connects to you on some level. I hope you continue to practice theater and it brings you joy.

            • GraniteM@lemmy.world
              5·
              25 days ago

              I did, I admit it. I haven’t the faintest idea how much a tungsten alloy gravestone would actually cost to craft and install. I’m sorry.

              • prole
                1·
                24 days ago

                Try asking it things that you do understand a few times. Maybe you’ll realize that it doesn’t know shit about shit and the only reason that you think it’s suitable for your comment is because its about something you don’t know enough about to question.

          • SabinStargem@lemmy.todayEnglish
            4·
            25 days ago

            We can recycle Confederate relics and property to pay for it. Trump’s golden toilet? Turn it into gold bricks, and finance the building of lasting monuments to genuine freedom like Fred Hampton’s tombstone.

        • Jerb322@lemmy.world
          3·
          25 days ago

          Ballistics High Speed did that. It was like a 10" cube (25 cm). It took a shape charge to break it. They shot it with a lot of different bullet sizes. Up to and including a 50BMG.

  • MNByChoice@midwest.social
    55·
    26 days ago

    Is there a fund or organization working to get this man a new headstone? It can be replaced annually, sp needs some organization behind it.

        • Aeao@lemmy.world
          5·
          26 days ago

          Then find an answer to a question but warn I haven’t researched enough to know how legit it was?

          No thanks. I’m fine with my effort on a 10 min break unpaid break. how much effort did you put in?

          Complaining is easy and pointless. At least my effort wasnt “none”. Where is your ten minutes?

          As for the concept “every bullet is a badge of honor” I disagree. If the stone is unreadable there’s nothing to look into. On the other side there is extreme power in “well rebuild, Everytime. We haven’t forgotten either”

          That’s just my view. Take it or leave it.

            • Aeao@lemmy.world
              2·
              25 days ago

              Give me one example btw? “Sometimes a lazy answer is worse than no answer”

              What are your examples? Lol. Complaining is useless. I provided answers.

              • Robert7301201@slrpnk.net
                8·
                25 days ago

                https://xkcd.com/978/ The problem is that a lazy answer builds credibility for a source or fact. You may try to disclaim that it’s unreliable, but the mere act of suggesting an answer implies your own support for it.

                “I’ve heard there’s studies that suggest vaccines cause autism.” is a lazy answer to the question of vaccine safety that ignores the complicated nature of academic research. What it does do is build consensus. Over time, that lazy answer repeated gets you to state where a lot of people doubt the safety of vaccines.

                I realize we all live busy lives and nobody has time to research things in great depth. Some people barely research major purchase decisions. What people are trying to communicate here is that an AI answer has very low credibility along the lines of “my uncle who works at Nintendo”.

                We don’t need you to act as a human interface for ChatGPT. If you want to use ChatGPT, use it as a starting point for your own research. Ask it questions like “Where could I find information on this topic?” and go from there. Of course, that’s a lot of work; but you can always choose not to post.

                If you have life experiences that give you insight into a topic, or you did research and found a good source; please comment and share your insights. They add value to the conversation and it’s why most of us are here.

                • Aeao@lemmy.world
                  2·
                  25 days ago

                  No one else has an answer. They were interested in having answer. I found found one.

                  Don’t compare me to someone speaking nonsense about vaccines. That’s crazy talk.

                  I was clear open and honest, I even suggested people find their own information. I just offered a jumping off point.

          • Nelots@lemm.eeEnglish
            11·
            25 days ago

            On one hand, I can appreciate you doing some work. On the other hand, an actual fundraiser was my first result upon googling “Fred Hampton gravestone fundraiser”, which is far quicker than asking ChatGPT would have been. You put in extra effort for worse results (your link has nothing to do with his grave, and instead seeks landmark status for his home). So I believe “do less next time” is a pretty apt response.

            Edit: I’ve emboldened a portion of this comment to emphasize it more. I was not intending to start a whole argument over this. It was meant to be a simple criticism of the method.

            • Aeao@lemmy.world
              3·
              25 days ago

              Your answer was wrong. Mine wasn’t. You provided a wrong answer with the same amount of work I put in to provide the correct answer. How is that better?

            • Aeao@lemmy.world
              2·
              25 days ago

              Again your charity link is useless and old now. It does nothing. The closest in maintaining his child hood home. I provided the correct answer. You were wrong and prideful because you wasted more time to find less. Congratulations.

              • Nelots@lemm.eeEnglish
                6·
                25 days ago

                Edit: I don’t actually care enough to have a full-blown argument over this. Especially not one seeping into mild personal attacks territory.

                (my original response)

                I promise I have no pride in my ability to google search four keywords. Conversely, you seem rather prideful in your ability to ask an LLM a question. Good job I guess?

                And how is yours the correct answer while mine is wrong? The link you provided about his childhood home is also an inactive fundraiser. That is to say, a completely unhelpful link. And you call me prideful lol. I would have at least linked the actual relevant old fundraiser unlike you.

                And again, I didn’t waste any more time googling four keywords and clicking the first link than you did opening ChatGPT and asking it an actual question.

                • Aeao@lemmy.world
                  1·
                  25 days ago

                  I’ve have no pride in my bones at all. I’ll admit wrong, I even said that it was a possibility in my edit

                  You claimed you found the better answer, an answer I already explained was wrong. no pride involved on my end. I was very very clear about my effort. You did worse. These are facts not pride.

        • Aeao@lemmy.world
          1·
          25 days ago

          Even if ignoring I provides the answer… It’s pretty silly that you think my one comment on lemmy effects the Internet as a whole. Grown-up.