3 December 2014 - 10:34 AM
The Assassination of Fred Hampton 45 Years Later
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“You can kill a revolutionary but you can never kill the revolution.”

Fred Hampton. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

In the early hours of December 4, 1969, a dozen Chicago Police Department officers stormed into the ground floor apartment of Black Panther Party (BPP) Chairman Fred Hampton, and fired between 82 and 99 shots killing Hampton, 21 years old, and BPP member Mark Clark, while they slept. The seven survivors of the raid were arrested on charges for attempted murder. The police, led by Cook County State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan, claimed it had been a “shootout,” and that they had to storm the apartment because the Panthers had been firing on the police officers.

In the wake of this police shooting, the Minister of Defense for the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party, Bobby Rush, stood in front of the bullet-riddled apartment building and asserted that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were behind the raid and the murders. In an interview with the media he said, “This was no shootout. Nobody in the apartment had a chance to fire a gun and we can prove it by the fact that there are no bullet holes outside in the hallways or outside, just big gaping holes in Fred’s bedroom where they fired on him.”

In the days after the assault, hundreds of people from the Black community passed through the apartment, to pay their respects and to witness the spent bullets and bloodied walls.

The Black Panther for Self Defense was founded in 1966, in Oakland, California, by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, in response to the police occupation and violence in their neighborhoods. Seale has said about the original impetus for the creation of the BPP, “What we were and what I was designing in the Black Panther Party was a political organization — a political revolutionary organization. Revolution was not about the need for violence. Revolution was about a need to re-evolve more political, economic, ecological and social justice empowerment back into the hands of the people.”

In the next couple of years, the party rapidly expanded across the nation. The popularity of the BPP was mainly due to their 10-point program and platform, which demanded basic human rights such housing and the right to a fair trial by peers. It created community programs such as the Free Breakfast for Children Program, which served free, hot meals to urban children before school, and offered free testing for sickle cell anemia and other forms of preventative medicine.

Hampton wrote, "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.” To this effect Hampton organized in coalition with groups that were inspired by the work of the BPP and were struggling against state violence in their own communities, such as the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican political organization, and the Young Patriots, a political group comprised of whites from the Appalachia region. In Chicago, the Panthers were working also to politicize the city's largest black street gangs.

A history of the BPP, Black Against Empire, explains that, “What made the stories of Panther repression so compelling to many young blacks in Chicago was not how unusual they were but how common. The summer had been filled with violence, and many young blacks had died in conflicts with the Chicago police.”

Hampton said, “We’re being harassed constantly by the pigs, and they’re arresting us as fast as they can on any kind of charge, such as traffic violations, smoking on buses, carrying concealed weapons, just anything.”

That summer of 1969, J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI had said publicly, “The Black Panther Party, without question, represents the greatest threat to internal security of the country,” and he declared that 1969 would be the final year of the existence of the BPP.

Years later, when the FBI files were made public, Hoover said that it was not the guns that were the threat to the U.S.'s internal security, it was the Free Children's Breakfast Program. In the files he describes the breakfast program as a form of “infiltration,” because it generated a following in certain parts of the Black community.

Forty-five years after Fred Hampton's assassination by the police, Black communities are still struggling against police violence in their communities. Every 28 hours a Black person is killed by a police or security officer in the U.S. Black communities live under a state, in which many believe that the police can act as judge, jury and executioner, and do so with very little accountability.

Hampton foretold his own assassination by the police, “I believe I'm going to die doing the things I was born to do. I believe I'm going to die high off the people. I believe I'm going to die a revolutionary in the international revolutionary proletarian struggle.”

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