-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.
RIP Fred Hampton
Oh, how high he would have flown
Is the Black Panther party still around? Seems like it could be worth a revival.
While I agree, with the current administration, it would immediately be marked as a terrorist organization and members would be arrested. I believe we need something new that they can’t immediately spin-off as a threat.
the US admin is accusing far right MAGA republicans of being radical leftists if they so much as hesitate on a vote. there’s no tasteful rebrand that will satisfy without becoming an ineffectual fascist yourself
I bet he would have been proud of this :)
We should crowd-source a new one every year and an ever-growing donation to an appropriate charity every time it needs replacing
ACAB
If anyone you know loves comedy, you can listen to 2 white guy comedians recount this story:
https://www.google.com/search?q=fred-hampton+dollop
While they can make even this story hilarious, America really lost a lot when this man was murdered…
You got me wondering where the FBI agents involved in this ended up. It wasn’t that long ago, some of them could still be around.
I stumbled on this article in the Jacobin that mentioned this:
Mitchell’s file, released in December 2020 after a Freedom of Information request by the author, runs nearly nine hundred pages.
Which is interesting, because I had another tab open of agent Mitchell’s records and it is 208 pages, not ‘nearly nine hundred pages’.
Internet archive only has one snapshot, it’s recent (March 2025) and also only 208 pages.
Got me feeling a little tin foil hatty, but I suppose that’s normal when reading about a literal conspiracy like COINTELPRO. I wonder if the dogebags scrubbed some of his file tho…
Oh you sound real tin foil hatty.
Did you not read the post?
i hate what they’ve done to the word “doge”…
it’s the least important thing they’ve done, but my dog is no longer a “good doge”, and it breaks my heart….
You have no enemies, you say? Alas! my friend, the boast is poor; He who has mingled in the fray Of duty, that the brave endure, Must have made foes! If you have none, Small is the work that you have done. You’ve hit no traitor on the hip, You’ve dashed no cup from perjured lip, You’ve never turned the wrong to right, You’ve been a coward in the fight
What a brilliant young man. I hope his son takes pride in it. As absolutely disrespectful as it is, each bullet is them saying “we remember you, and we still fear you.” Keep them afraid.
Can we… Replace his headstone?
Hear me out. If we replace it with something that is known to reflect small arms fire, there’s a nontrivial chance that the next time some asshole shows up to shoot the headstone and piss on his grave (probably), there would be a non-zero chance that person would shoot their own dick off by way of a ricochet.
Stone, while it looks nice and lasts a really long time (when it’s not being shot), is great… But maybe this one time?
Or just camp around there, wait for a shot to go off and then unload on the cop car. Who’s to say the cop wasn’t shooting at you when they’re unlawfully shooting out of their windows?
Murdering a cop would also go a long way in showing support lol
Self defense you mean, not murdering a cop, standyourgrounding a cop.
Who’s to say the cop wasn’t shooting at you
The judge, numerous other cop “witnesses”, a jury of your peers…
Even in death, they fear what he stood for. That kind of legacy tells you everything about the system and who it’s built to silence.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present you the land of the free and the bold, and it’s beautiful history.
Sigh…
In a real country those cops would get fired for discharging their firearms in a public place in an unsafe manner
I feel like the point blank execution is a little more than “discharging a firearm in a public place in an unsafe manner”.
Grave stone is not alive.
The other guy was referencing that the man in the grave was executed via two point-blank gunshots to the back of the head after he was drugged by the FBI
Ah yes, true.
Disgusting shit bags. Hampton never harmed anyone and they wanted him dead.
They wanted him dead because they want us divided. The divided states of Musk & Thiel.
I mean, this whole thing happened before Musk was even born, but the point still stands. Divide and rule.
That goes without saying.
The White government wouldn’t allow black people to integrate or create their own society. They wanted to keep black people subjugated.
Now that race isn’t as much of an issue as it was (still is a big issue please nobody be a pedantic bitch), it’s clear that white and black has really been a fight of rich and poor the whole time.
It’s class warfare. The rich want the poor divided, so that they don’t rise up against the rich.
No. Your words aren’t the problem, your sentiment is.
Regardless of you trying to stave off criticism, it’s still off-putting to say “race isn’t as much of a problem” when white supremacists have taken over the government and are resegregating society. But okay, things are a little better now than in the 1960s.
But no, white and black has not “really” been rich and poor. This is divisive nonsense. White people have attempted to keep Black people subjugated for 400 years. Class warfare is on top of that, and pretending otherwise is racist.
History is littered with white activists who achieved their goals on the backs of Black people, then fucked off as soon as they got theirs. If we want to win the class war, whites need to stand in true solidarity with Blacks, not try to erase history.
And now they are trying to spin the narrative and create a new race war against anything non American.
They’re also punishing any institution that dares suggest there is racism in the USA, either now or in the past. The USA is run by the same kinds of people who would shoot up Fred Hampton’s grave.
I mean the current administration killed the first amendment already, is not surprising.
He was portrayed a few times briefly in the movie Trial of the Chicago 7, played by Kelvin Harrison, Jr.
Judas and the Black Messiah had him portrayed by Daniel Kaluuya.
Won an Oscar for it, no less.
Jesus. This story needs to come with a stiff drink. RIP.
