-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.
ACAB
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.
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.
Fight fire with water
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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?
Yes, it’s fear-based. But the bullies do not feel fear or jealousy. That is a completely fabricated reason, made to comfort the bullied.
The bullies want to make others feel smaller. It has more to do with lack of empathy, and nothing to do with fear.
Why would the bullied feel self-reflection for being lied to by parents/teachers etc? I think you got it the other way around.
I do not expect them to self-reflect. I expect them to deflect. Which could be attributed to them laughing at explanations for why they are bullies.
Belief that they are laughing because they know it is false is not back up by the behavior profile.
For example, if someone told Trump he has narcissist personality disorder because his father refused him the lover and praise he craved as a child, if he stopped and pondered the accusation, it’s actually more likely to be false than if he explosively reflects the accusation.
There are well defined behavior patterns. These patterns are continuously being developers and reworked but the implication is that we are not these unique snowflakes.
We are actually incredibly predictable at an individual level and our true motivations are knowable even if we refuse to acknowledge it; especially when we emotionally reject acknowledgment.
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.
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?
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.
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
He was portrayed a few times briefly in the movie Trial of the Chicago 7, played by Kelvin Harrison, Jr.
Judas and the Black Messiah had him portrayed by Daniel Kaluuya.
Won an Oscar for it, no less.
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?
Absolutely! Fred Hampton was all about building a rainbow coalition
Hell yeah!
How petty do you have to be to vandalize a tombstone…
Law and order, but only if the white cops are above everyone else 🤡
I would absolutely vandalise a nazi tombstone tho
Vandalizing tombstones is fine. For example shitting on Reagan’s grave is a wholesome family activity.
The issue is the people doing it are racist murderers who are vandalizing the grave of a freedom fighter to celebrate 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.
Oh, how high he would have flown
He was born with the wrong name - Fred Hampton sounds like a door to door vacuum cleaner salesman.
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.
Nothing good happens in this country unless the rich are scared
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.
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.
The kids on XHS would love this post
The only time republicans were for gun control. When black people took up arms in self defense.
The first time I heard about the Tulsa race riots it blew my mind that it wasn’t common teaching in schools.
White folk told black people to gtfo and go build their own town, so they did and it prospered while the white towns went to shit. So of course the racists are like “we gotta kill all the black folk and burn their town, cause they’re doing better than us!”
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No non-mustard/tan suit related scandals you mean!
Pretty bold of you to say obama had no scandals.
*Tulsa race massacre.
It was not a riot. It was a targeted organized attack to kill black people.
Pretty much sums up the right wing perfectly. Zero ideology, just reactionary stupidity.
True story! This is the exact reason that California has such strict gun control laws
I’m fucking speechless.
