Remembering a Prince and the Ones Who Took Him From Us

When Lawrence Hill Books sent me a copy of The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther by Jeffrey Haas, I was excited to receive it, but wondered how in the world I was going to find the time to read it in a timely manner at the end of a semester. The book came out, after all, the first of November and technically, this review should have appeared weeks ago. But I didn't finish reading it until last Sunday night and, though it's perfectly kosher to write the review before you finish the book, I couldn't bring myself to do it. The memory of Fred Hampton, a revolutionary Black Panther leader who was brutally cut down even as his star ascended, deserves better. Jeffrey Haas, a European-American civil rights lawyer who cut his legal teeth representing Black Panthers and ultimately helped to win $1.85 million for the survivors of the infamous police raid in Chicago that killed two young Black leaders, deserves better, as well. And anyway, I didn't want to jump ahead to find out how it ended. I wanted to savor every word. It's that kind of book.

The Revolutionary Love of Fred Hampton, Sr.

In the wee hours of the morning on this day in 1969, Fred Hampton, Sr., was assassinated by a coalition of law enforcement officers representing city, county and federal agencies in Chicago, Illinois. These lines, taken from some of his speeches, as presented in the movie, "The Murder of Fred Hampton," are why:

"I was born in a bourgeois community and had some of the better things in life, but I found that there were more people starving than there were people eating, more people that didn’t have clothes than did have clothes, and I just happened to be one of the few. So I decided that I wouldn’t stop doing what I’m doing until all those people are free.

"We’re gonna have to do more than talk. We're gonna have to do more than listen. We're gonna have to do more than learn. We’re gonna have to start practicing and that’s very hard. We’re gonna have to start getting out there with the people and that’s difficult. Sometimes we think we’re better than the people so it’s gonna take a lot of hard work.

"You don’t fight fire with fire. You fight fire with water. We’re gonna fight racism with solidarity. We're not gonna fight capitalism with Black capitalism. We’re gonna fight capitalism with socialism. Socialism is the people. If you’re afraid of socialism, you’re afraid of yourself.

"Without education, people will accept anything. Without education, what you’ll have is neo-colonialism instead of the colonialism like you have now. Without education, people don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing, you know what I mean? You might get people caught up in an emotionalist movement, might get them because they’re poor and they want something and then if they’re not educated, they’ll want more and before you know it, we’ll have Negro imperialism.

"You have to understand that people have to pay the price for peace. If you dare to struggle, you dare to win. If you dare not struggle, then you don’t deserve to win. Let me say ‘Peace’ to you, if you’re willing to fight for it.

"Nothing is more important than stopping fascism because fascism will stop us all. We don’t hate White people. We hate the oppressor, whether they be White, Black, Brown or Yellow. We will work with anybody, coalesce with anybody that has revolution on their mind. But anybody that comes into our community and sets up anything that does not meet the needs of the masses, I will grab him by the neck and beat that man to death with a Black Panther paper.

"I’m going to do my job and I believe that I was born not to die in a car wreck. I don’t believe I’m going to die slipping on a piece of ice. I don’t believe I was born to die because of a bad heart. I don’t believe I was born to die of lung cancer. I believe I’m going to be able to do what I came to do. I believe that I’m going to be able to die high off the people. I believe that I will be able to die as a revolutionary in the international revolutionary proletariat struggle. And I hope that each one of you will be able to live in it. I think that struggles are going to come. Why don’t you live for the people? Why don’t you live for the struggle? Why don’t you die for the struggle?

"If you ain’t gonna do no revolutionary act, forget about me. I don’t want myself on your mind if you’re not gonna work for the people.

"I might not be back. I might be in jail. I might be anywhere. But you can believe that the last words on my lips were ‘I am a revolutionary.’

"You can kill a revolutionary, but you can’t kill the revolution."

Happy Birthday to Fred Hampton, Sr.

Sixty years ago today, a baby boy was born in Chicago, Illinois, to a young couple from Louisiana who had migrated north to work in the factories there and raise a family. They called their son "Fred" -- Fred Hampton. Fred grew up in the suburbs, graduated with honors from high school and started attending the local community college on his way to becoming a lawyer. When he joined the N.A.A.C.P. as an organizer, he was so charismatic, he rapidly managed to recruit 500 other young people as new members in a community of only 27,000 residents. Then, he started hearing about the Black Panther Party's ten-point plan of self-determination. And that was all she wrote.

Joining first the national organization and then the newly formed Illinois chapter of the BPP, Hampton shortly drew the attention of the Powers-That-Be all the way to Washington. The FBI's file on the young leader amassed more than 4000 pages over the remaining two years of his life. And they illegally tapped his mother's telephone, too. But that didn't stop Hampton from making his commitment or doing his work.

The first order of business was to successfully broker a non-aggression pact between the most powerful street gangs in Chicago, a notorious seat of such activity. In fact, one of those gangs, the Young Lords, formed an alliance with Hampton's group and a group of anti-racist Appalachian kids -- White no less -- now living in the city, too. The three organizations (pre-dating Jesse's use of the term by decades) called themselves the "Rainbow Coalition." No wonder the FBI was so nerved out!

Late in 1968, the FBI got an agent provocateur named William O'Neal to worm his way into the Chicago-based BPP Chapter, ultimately becoming Hampton's bodyguard and official Judas. He not only passed information, but worked diligently to foment divisions, instigate violence where nobody wanted or needed it, and eventually set up his supposed leader to be murdered by officers of the Chicago Police Department.

After Hampton was prosecuted, convicted and sentenced in the spring of 1969 to two to five years for commandeering a bunch of ice cream bars for the kids in a poor neighborhood, the local gendarmes moved quickly to attack his underlings. They raided the office, destroying as much as they could and beating up any BPP members they could capture. Then Hampton was unexpectedly released on appeal in August, complicating the plan already in motion to decimate his organization while he was incarcerated. It was only a matter of weeks before Hampton had been officially promoted to the Black Panther Party Central Committee and named Chief of Staff as a major spokesperson.

When two police officers were ambushed and murdered in November, only a couple of weeks after another illegal and brutal raid on the BPP, the authorities decided -- without bothering to use a court of law -- that it was the Panthers who were responsible. Two weeks after that, in the pre-dawn hours of December 4th, while Hampton lay in bed with his pregnant girlfriend, sleeping off the secobarbitol slipped into his drink by William O'Neal, Chicago Police Officers stormed their way into the apartment, shooting Fred Hampton to death along with another Panther, Mark Clark. Witnesses -- and there were a goodly number of them -- heard one officer say Hampton was still alive, though barely. Two subsequent shots were fired and the voice was heard to say, "He's good and dead now."

There was, needless to say, never an indictment of any kind related to these crimes, despite the fact that an independent Commission found that the officers murdered the two men without justification or provocation and despite the fact that the City of Chicago did have to pay the families of Hampton and Clark nearly two million dollars a decade later.

This is a horrible story, of course. But you can't really get the full flavor of it all unless you watch "The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther," the Democracy Now video I'm embedding in this post. Hampton was far more than an effective organizer or firebrand charismatic speaker. He was a full tilt boogie revolutionary who believed in and worked to form a class conscious, multi-racial alliance in the interest of the workers of the United States of America.

This film will answer lots of questions you may have had from time to time and a few you might not have considered yet. It reminded me of things I thought I had forgotten and after I watched it a couple of months ago, I did some homework toward this day, so I could celebrate Fred Hampton's birth and life, work and example.

It's interesting to note that Fred Hampton, Jr., now in his late thirties, who was still inside his mother when she watched the police shoot his 21-year-old father to death before her very eyes, has, it would appear, carried on his father's legacy. Why am I not surprised?

"The Murder of Fred Hampton" - Part 1

"The Murder of Fred Hampton" - Part 2

"The Murder of Fred Hampton" - Part 3