-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.

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  • xor@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    5·
    4 days ago

    in bakersfield california, they have an informal “most violent cop” award where they sew fake blood onto stuffed animal baby seals as the trophy….

    among hitchhikers it’s well known that the cops there will take your gear, shave your head, and abandon you at the edge of town….

    i did doubt the annual shooting of a headstone one, just because it would be too easy to catch them. although cops may have done it once.
    i think this also coincided with the series about hampton and the fbi informant bodyguard… who killed himself shortly after the series came out….

    • kerntucky@infosec.pubEnglish
      4·
      4 days ago

      in bakersfield california, they have an informal “most violent cop” award where they sew fake blood onto stuffed animal baby seals as the trophy….

      I wouldn’t be surprised if that were true but do you have a source that can confirm it?

      In related news:

      In Kern County, California, cops kill 1.5 people per 100,000 residents—prompting an investigation by The Guardian, but not by state or federal overseers.

      …

      While attempting to track every police killing in the United States during 2015, journalists at The Guardian discovered that cops in Kern County aren’t just the deadliest force in the state relative to the population, they are the deadliest in the nation. “In all, 13 people have been killed so far this year by law enforcement officers in Kern County, which has a population of just under 875,000,” the newspaper has just reported. “During the same period, nine people were killed by the NYPD across the five counties of New York City, where almost 10 times as many people live and about 23 times as many sworn law-enforcement officers patrol.”