40+ Years after the FBI Killed a Black Panther

This past weekend marked the 41st anniversary of the murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton.  Mr. Hampton, age 21, was shot by FBI agents while he slept in a Chicago house where the police later found weapons.  Hampton was considered a highly charismatic leader.  This 3-minute video provides a quick sense of Hampton’s leadership style [caution: includes explicit crime-scene photos]:

The video includes three notable clips.  No doubt these events drew FBI attention at the time. In one speech, the audience repeats Hampton’s slogans:  “We say all power to all people…we say white power to white people…brown power to brown people…yellow power to yellow people…black power to black people.” In a statement to a journalist, Hampton talks about the right of armed self-defense.  At a rally, he proclaims, “So we say as we always did in the Black Panther Party that they can do the things they want to us.  We might not be back.  I might be in jail.  I might be anywhere.  But when I leave, you can remember I said -- the last words on my lips were -- ‘I am a revolutionary,’ and you are going to have to keep on saying that.”

One of the Panthers' community campaigns was against poverty and hunger.  If 41 years seems like a long time ago, consider that both the absolute number and relative percentage of people living below the poverty line is greater today than it was then (see Census data here).

The subsequent FBI cover-up of its involvement in the Hampton murder is detailed by attorney Fred Haas in his book The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther (Lawrence Hill Books, 2009).  Haas represented the Hampton family and successfully proved that Hampton had been shot deliberately by law enforcement officers as part of an assassination attempt. 

For some of the documents now declassified by the FBI, see here and here. 

I can't help but wonder what sorts of activities the FBI is engaged in today that we will have to wait years to discover.

Comments

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Bridget,

Thank you for the memorial post.

Permit me to attempt to put this in a wider historical, socio-economic, and political context (perhaps it helps that I’m probably older than most Lounge readers: when I was around 12 yrs. old, I fancied myself having founded a ‘white’ chapter—with two members—of the Party in the San Fernando Valley!).

The FBI (and not a few other law enforcement agencies across the country at the time) was hell-bent on destroying the Black Panther Party. An indispensable book, which no doubt could be updated with access to new documents, is Kenneth O’Reilly’s The FBI’s Secret Files on Black America, 1960-1972 (1989). See too Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall’s Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (1990).

Among historical surveys, I’m fond of Manning Marable’s Black American Politics: From the Washington Marches to Jesse Jackson (1985), and Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945-1990 (2nd ed., 1991).

By way of an introduction to the Black Panthers, one might begin with Philip S. Foner, ed., The Black Panthers Speak (1995 ed. (1970)). For a recent study of the Party, I recommend Curtis J. Austin’s Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party (2006), which contains an excellent bibliography.

For a “taste” of the period, please see Gerald Horne’s Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (1997).

And for a sense of what young black men, as activist intellectuals, were up against and how they evidenced an incredible capacity to morally, psychologically, and politically develop in response to their experiences in an often unremittingly hostile socio-economic and political environment, I (have the temerity to) recommend Eugene Victor Wolfenstein’s (psychobiography) The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black Revolution (1989), and James H. Cone’s Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare (1991). For a sense of what similarly situated (at least in some respects) black women of the period experienced as intellectuals and activist leaders, see Charles M. Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (1995).

No doubt this is a somewhat idiosyncratic collection of titles but folks are free to come up with their own lists (indeed, it would be nice if others offered their favorite works on these topics).

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Addendum: Although I've yet to read it, a book I'm adding to my "mass media" bibliography because the previews and reviews suggest it is quite good, is Christian Davenport's Media Bias, Perspective, and State Repression: The Black Panther Party. Cambridge, UK: CUP, 2010.