By Walter L. Hilliard III –
“We expected about twenty Panthers to be in the apartment when the police raided the place. Only two of those Black niggers were killed, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.” FBI Special Agent Gregg York. Fred Hampton killed December 4th, 1969.
And to think many of these people – the FBI, police, the District Attorney’s Office – and the people they trained, as well as the culture of their organizations, are still alive and thriving. And the people they killed — 21-year-old Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton and 22-year-old Mark Clark — also have families, they wanted to raise children, they had mothers, friends and associates. This is what White America seems not to understand: Institutional and individual racism in America is pervasive and far-reaching; racism is among us, weaved into our souls. These law enforcement people that killed Hampton and Clark are the type of people that beat Rodney King; they are the people that murdered Sean Bell, and killed Trayvon Martin.
What brought on my aforementioned inspiration to write about the Black Panther Party?
I was making one of my occasional pit stops at Al Sharpton’s bogus “Political ‘Obama’ Nation” show (I can’t bear to watch it all the time) on MSNBC, the network that let’s Blacks have a show if they’re willing to play the role of coons for the gay agenda like Sharpton and Melissa Harris-Perry, when I happened to come across information on my laptop about the Black Panther Party’s (BPP) Fred Hampton, one of the party’s leaders who was assassinated by the Chicago Police, Chicago State Attorney’s Office and the FBI in 1969 while he was sleeping.
So Sharpton’s rapping on and on about the Obama’s buying a new dog for their daughters, Malia and Sasha, while I’m reading about Hampton, trying to resolve the dichotomy, even though I know it’s a dog story and other presidents have had dogs . . . but I wondered why couldn’t that time be filled with something about the dire condition of our people, a story that may not get told, otherwise? To put it quite simply, Sharpton has lost his way; if he’s not talking about silly topics like dogs, he’s talking about what Obama’s political enemies are doing to him.
But to go on and on about a dog?
Cute. How so very cute. Really, really cute.
As the minutes flew by, I gradually tuned Sharpton out and focused on Hampton’s story, only 21-years-old when the American Nazi Chicago Police and FBI Klan killed him, and how he, when alive, was able to forge a non-aggression pact between Chicago’s worst gangs, a “rainbow coalition,” Hampton called it. This “rainbow” designation was later used by Jesse Jackson in naming his Rainbow/Push organization. It should also be mentioned that Mark Clark was the other Panther leader killed with Hampton, and there were four other Panthers in the house who were also shot during the raid but they survived. The police fired a total of 99 shots into the building when they were outside of it and the rest of the shots once they made their way inside. Only one bullet from a Panther’s gun was fired, an errant shot that’s believed to be from Clark’s gun as he was falling after being shot in the heart, according to Panther and witness Brenda Harris.
I was also fascinated when learning about Hampton’s great organizational skills and his work putting groups together to watch the police to protect Blacks from police brutality. In fact, he was being groomed to move into a national leadership position among the Black Panthers, but his tremendous skills also caught the attention of J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI Cointelpro program, whose mission it was to prevent the rise of any Black messiahs. Not to mention the FBI’s involvement in the deaths of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.
Hampton was set up to be killed by a Black Panther who was really an undercover FBI agent/informant named William O’Neal, who was also a felon, forced to infiltrate Hampton’s Chicago Black Panther Party by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. O’Neal left the house after he cooked for the Panthers and allegedly put a sleeping drug in Hampton’s drink. When the FBI came into the house they killed a Panther guarding the door, then moved on to Hampton’s room and shot him point blank in the head while he was sleeping with his pregnant girlfriend. This same agent that set Hampton up also instigated a fights between the Panthers and some of the gangs in Chicago – all this being a part of Hoover’s plan of dismantle yet another Black organization fighting racism. O’Neal later committed suicide by running out into traffic. He was in the FBI’s witness protection program and had been moved to California because his cover had been blown in 1973. At the time of his death in 1984, he had secretly returned to Chicago.
I want to know why Fred Hampton and others weren’t listed in my history books as heroes when I was in school? I also want to know why J. Edgar Hoover wasn’t executed, and why he’s portrayed as some sort of hero in our history books.
And if you can’t understand the value, the greatness of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, and all those young men who were willing to die for their people, well, there’s something wrong with you.
A UNIVERSAL SOUL POWER SOUL MUZAK BREAK
