-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
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.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present you the land of the free and the bold, and it’s beautiful history.
Sigh…
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.
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.
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.
We can only hope to live lives that leave fascists seething for generations after we die. Rest in power.
I’d rather lead a life that leaves fascists dead after I die. But I’ll take seething as a consolation prize.
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.
Jfc that’s dark. Fred Hampton was a badass who was murdered by the state. But that’s not enough and they shoot his fucking tombstone? Get the fuck over it! You already killed our guy to suppress a movement. You don’t have to be aggrieved any longer, you fucking pussies.
He was murdered by cops who have since retired, this is being done by newer pigs who want to show their loyalty to the boot.
He was born with the wrong name - Fred Hampton sounds like a door to door vacuum cleaner salesman.
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.
I aspire
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…
Oh, how high he would have flown
The rest of the story from Wikipedia:
During the raid, Panther Mark Clark was also killed and several others were seriously wounded. In January 1970, the Cook County Coroner held an inquest; the coroner’s jury concluded that Hampton’s and Clark’s deaths were justifiable homicides.[14][15][16][17]
A civil lawsuit for wrongful death was later filed on behalf of the survivors and the relatives of Hampton and Clark.[18] It was resolved in 1982 by a settlement of $1.85 million (equivalent to $6.03 million in 2024); the U.S. federal government, Cook County, and the City of Chicago each paid one-third to a group of nine plaintiffs. Given revelations about the illegal COINTELPRO program and documents associated with the killings, many scholars now consider Hampton’s death, at age 21, a deliberate assassination at the FBI’s initiative. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton
Funny I just read that a bit ago, some of their sources cited appear to no longer work.
Link decay is actually a pretty serious problem that no one seems to have an answer to and it will only get worse.
It’s also part of the rewriting of history. AI is going to make the mutation of facts even easier as more people feel comfortable asking AI questions. They can program it to vomit out whatever misinformation they want.
its very easily solvable from a technical standpoint. the reason we cant is entirely because of copyright laws.
archive.org page mirrors could be used instead of direct links, the problem is that archive.org is in danger of being sued for hosting those mirrors.
that would still leave a single point of failure, but if you implemented a bittorrent style version of archive.org you could easily archive any webpage and media forever.
everything structurally bad about the internet is bad because of copyright laws.
I remember growing up people saying “Once, it’s on the internet. It’s there forever”. Turns out, the Internet is subjected the power of entropy like everything else.
Huge swathes of the internet being shut down via overzealous copyright enforcement isn’t entropy.
Like everything else that’s killing or at the very least making worse all the best qualities of the internet, it’s enshittification to maximize profits and corporate ownership of every aspect of life they can possibly get their greedily grasping hands on.
The FBI assassination part seems to be corroborated by this National Archive page https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/individuals/fred-hampton. I guess NARA being an official USA agency, they would not make a claim against the FBI without being certain.
Yes thats 100% true, Fred was drugged, moved to a different room, and killed while unconscious.
However all other aspects of the raid are inconsistent among various witnesses: who shot first, where the gunman in the first room was killed, how the police presented themselves, etc. The agents responsible deserved to face time for the wrongful killing of Fred, but the raid on the compound in itself is an expected outcome of the Black Panther’s actions. Their ideology created this outcome, using them as some sort of icon now 60 years later is disingenuous and pointless.
ACAB
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.
I guess the way the idea police tradition theory has taken hold so well is because it’s so plausible.
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….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.”
KCSO deputies have been caught rewarding colleagues for aggressive use of batons with a “baby seal” prize for the best clubbing. Others have modified their patrol cars with decals declaring “We’ll kick your ass”.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/04/the-county-kern-county-california-deputies-tactics
Thanks!
no problem… i actually heard about it before they were caught.
them fucking up traveling kids is pretty well known. apparently it’s a big train stop for hobos, and a crossroads for hitchhikers…
so i’ve avoided it at all costs.
plus it’s hot as fuck so, fuck that…
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Still horrible, but thank you for adding important context.
