zaraahmed:

“You can kill the revolutionary, but you can’t kill the revolution.” - Fred Hampton

Today, December 4th, Civil Rights activist and deputy chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, Fred Hampton, at just 21 years of age, was assassinated in his 2337 West Monroe Street apartment in Chicago in 1969 by a team of government officials conspiring from the FBI’s COINTELPRO unit, the Chicago Police Department, and Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office. Black Panther leader Mark Clark was also killed in the raid and four other members sustained critical gunshot injuries. After the firing of between 90 to 99 bullets by the government unit, Hampton’s 8-month pregnant fiancée, Deborah Johnson, was forced to flee the bedroom of the apartment where Hampton lay unconscious so that two of the officers could verify he was dead, shooting him twice in the head at point-blank range. Later, it was revealed that a paid FBI informant had delivered him the barbiturate Seconal so that he would remain unconscious during the planned raid.

The raid began at 4 am as 14 Chicago police officers and Cook County prosecutor Edward Hanrahan armed themselves with several shotguns, handguns, and a .45 caliber machine gun. The unit had previously obtained a warrant, in search of weapons, and publicly claimed after the attack that they were met with heavy fire from the Black Panther members. However, only 1 shot was delivered from the Panthers, coming from a shotgun held by Mark Clark, which investigators determined most likely occurred after Clark had been shot in the heart and fell to the ground.

A grand jury from Cook county indicted the seven surviving Black Panther members of the attack on charges of attempted murder, armed violence, and other weapons charges - each charge was later dropped. Edward Hanrahan and the 14 Chicago Police officers were exonerated from any official misconduct by the police Internal Investigations Division. The assassinations of Hampton and Clark were found as “justifiable homicides” by a coroner and after survivors of the attack and members of Clark and Hampton’s family filed suit, demanding an investigation as to whether or not their civil rights were violated, a federal grand jury issued no indictment. Following a dismissal, a criminal trial investigating charges of “conspiracy to obstruct justice” found each of the defendants in the government unit that killed Clark and Hampton not guilty. After a decade long legal battle, the petitioners of the initial civil suit, Hampton et al., were issued a settlement on February 28, 1983, receiving $1.85 million from the Chicago, Cook County, and federal governments. In the end, Edward Hanrahan and the 14 Chicago Police officers successfully got away with murder.

Hampton had been under investigation by the FBI since 1967. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover deemed a number of Civil Rights leaders, most especially those associated with the Black Panther Party, as “subversive” and “radical” revolutionary bodies capable of overthrowing the U.S. government. Hampton’s charisma and ability to effectively communicate with people from all walks of life marked him as a primary target. Jeffrey Haas, the attorney for the plaintiffs in the federal suit Hampton v. Hanrahan, said of him:

Fred Hampton, at twenty-one, was a tremendously charismatic and powerful figure in Chicago. He could talk to welfare mothers, gang kids, and he could talk to law students and college students. He had the ability to pull people together. But he made people believe in themselves. He made people feel powerful and that they could bring about change. And that was his real threat.

And so, we knew there was this program to prevent the rise of a messiah.

Out of the FBI’s war against the Civil Rights and Black Liberation movements, the Panthers were targeted the most intensely, accounting for 233 out of 295 documented attacks against such groups. Noam Chomsky, who said the December 4th incident was “the gravest domestic crime of the Nixon administration,” explained the FBI’s undue paranoia in his 1973 work COINTELPRO:

A top secret Special Report for the president in June 1970 gives some insight into the motivations for the actions undertaken by the government to destroy the Black Panther Party. The report describes the party as ‘the most active and dangerous black extremist group in the United States.’ Its ‘hard core members’ were estimated at 800, but ‘a recent poll indicates that approximately 25 percent of the black population has a great respect for the BPP, including 43 percent of blacks under 21 years of age.’ On the basis of such estimates of the potential of the party, the repressive apparatus of the state proceeded against it to ensure that it did not succeed in organizing as a substantial social or political force.

This incident was just one of many murders of not only Black Panther members but Black Liberation and Civil Rights leaders carried out by the FBI through COINTELPRO, the covert operations of which were successfully kept secret from the public until 1971 after the leftist activist group Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI raided an FBI office in Pennsylvania, exposing the incredible information they found to the media. Chomsky described Fred Hampton as one of the most promising members of the Black Panther Party and his influence has been appropriately credited with marking the independence of Black political leaders in Chicago. Even though he was killed at just 21 years of age, Hampton’s revolutionary wisdom and spirit continues to live on to this very day. He demonstrated this spirit:

We don’t think you fight fire with fire; we think you fight fire with water. We’re going to fight racism not with racism, but we’re going to fight with solidarity. We say we’re not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism. We’re still here to say we’re not going to fight reactionary pigs and reactionary state’s attorneys like this and reactionary state’s attorneys like Hanrahan with any other reactions on our part. We’re going to fight their reactions with all of us people getting together and having an international proletarian revolution.

Black people need some peace. White people need some peace. And we are going to have to fight. We’re going to have to struggle. We’re going to have to struggle relentlessly to bring about some peace, because the people that we’re asking for peace, they are a bunch of megalomaniac warmongers, and they don’t even understand what peace means. And we’ve got to fight them. We’ve got to struggle with them to make them understand what peace means.

And so he did. It is unclear what the alternate version of history could have been had Hampton not been assassinated but the remarkable significance of the impression he was able to leave on the world at such a young age is uncontested. The rarity of his character and his dedication toward promoting unfettered equality for all of humanity affirm him as a revolutionary figure not often seen.