"his grave is annually shot by local police"
"his grave is annually shot by local police"
-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.
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
If it weren’t for the Black Panthers there wouldn’t be meal programs in public schools. The BP “Free Breakfast for Children” program was so popular and so effective at raising awareness and popularity for the BP party that the government became paranoid that they were constructing an effective “fifth column”. All of the sudden states started passing laws creating food programs for public schools in order to undermine their message.
Nothing good happens in this country unless the rich are scared. The same thing applied to the New Deal.
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.
Jesus. This story needs to come with a stiff drink. RIP.
ACAB. That cannot be said enough.
As a proud father of two young men, this absolutely breaks my heart while simultaneously pisses me the fuck off to no end.
The people in power are good for nothing cowards. “In God We Trust?” Yeah, if this is what your God allows, then fuck Him and fuck you too. I hope everybody involved in this murder rots in whatever wasteland of Hell they believe in.
Goddamnit.
Thanks for this post. The police propaganda was so successful that even i have seen the black panthers as a violent gang, without realising it. Thanks for spreading knowledge about people who have fought for their rights and the rights of others even in the eyes of horrible oppression and death. May we be blessed with more people like him.
ACAB
police can't even stop murdering black people when they're dead
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.
Everything about this is terrible
ACAB
FTP forever, all coppers are fucking trash. The government lets all these white power groups fucking thrive in America but any socialists they fucking gun down in murder
There's a great movie that goes over all this called Judas and The Black Messiah. It's definitely worth a watch
Gil Scott Heron has a song about Fred Hampton called No Knock. Too bad Heron's work is still relevant. When all those rich fuckers bought their way into space I listened to Whitey on The Moon on repeat for like a week.
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...
In a real country those cops would get fired for discharging their firearms in a public place in an unsafe manner
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
be me, proud boy or something
gonna stand for my values!
let's go to DC and invade the Capitol! Actually that sounds a bit scary
oh I know I will beat up some ecoactivists! Wait these guys are ripped, they spend so much time climbing in trees, that might be dangerous
ah yes, I will cyberbully Greta Thunberg! No no I might get in trouble
yes I know I will gather the bro cops and we will shoot at a tombstone of a black man
PROUD BOYS!!!
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?
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.
Fight fire with water
Living, "Join or Die," and then they kill you. Words/ acronyms that are "bad": DEI, cosmopolitanism, human rights, communism, socialism, Palestine, Armenia, Myanmar, panic, fosscad, eat the...
Fuck them and the capitalist system they protect.
Have we ever talked about the fact that there's a self defeatist term for backing down from a fight when you're subjugated in nearly every language? "Whatever shall be shall be?", "shikata ga nai" , "it is what it is". The number of mental justifications for the subjugation we witness around us is insane. I hope everyone out there is okay.
Oh, how high he would have flown
RIP Fred Hampton
Quite the legacy. Never let the memory of this man die. Fight the power!
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...
Suddenly remembering those youtube videos about that super bouncy metal toy with a stainless steel ball...
I aspire
The kids on XHS would love this post