-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.

via

  • rational_lib@lemmy.world
    115·
    3 days ago

    Nobody actually knows who shot the headstone, it was discovered damaged in 2016:

    Flint Taylor — one of the lawyers for Hampton’s family — recently journeyed to Haynesville to eulogize Fred Hampton’s mother, Iberia, a devoted mother and courageous activist who passed away in October 2016. He discovered this desecration of Hampton’s grave at that time.

    As far as I can tell the notion that it’s a police tradition seems to originate from a possibly sarcastic post on r/stupidpol on that other site.

    But he was definitely assassinated by the police and the FBI, which is probably much worse.

      • yarr@feddit.nlEnglish
        22·
        3 days ago

        Yeah, but it hurts to have ‘myths’ like this perpetuated. My line of thinking is that if you wanna hate cops, there’s plenty of actually true things to use against them. If you float a story like this it hurts because someone that is happy with the police will point out that this might not be true and now you’re arguing about whether this is true vs. the disgusting behavior of US police.

        I agree it has the air of plausibility, but it feels like hearsay to me. If it meets others’ threshold of “truthiness”, I can’t fully disagree, but for me this isn’t over that threshold. I’ll choose one of the few hundred other police abuses just this year to criticize them.

        • Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world
          4·
          3 days ago

          Yeah, I get you, and I agree entirely. There’s no shortage of genuine shit to throw at the police. Inventing stuff just casts doubt on the genuine shit. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that cops were behind this but all we have is speculation.

      • xor@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        5·
        3 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·
          3 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.”

      • jj4211@lemmy.world
        42·
        3 days ago

        Eh, I think at least for the past few decades it isn’t actually too plausible.

        Any known discharge of a firearm by police requires some sort of review. While they may be super lax and claim all sorts of false rationalizations for shooting a living person, I think even they would be unable to come up with a rationalization for discharging at a headstone in a public area.

        Now if it is “take a whack at the headstone with a crowbar”, I could believe that, but I don’t think they’d risk shooting a headstone out of the blue.

        • yarr@feddit.nlEnglish
          7·
          3 days ago

          Any known discharge of a firearm by police requires some sort of review.

          I think “known” is the operative keyword here. If a police revolver goes off without a citizen to hear it, did it still make a sound?

          • jj4211@lemmy.world
            2·
            3 days ago

            Revolvers aren’t exactly known for being stealth… It’s just too much risk to desecrate a grave of someone who was dead before most of those officers were even born that most folks have never even heard of. At this point even the oldest on the force would be a generation removed from any officers that were working in 1969.