As the nation prepares to cope with a Donald Trump administration that’s nominating a Ku Klux Klan sympathizer as Attorney General (Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions), it’s wise to recall recent history so that it’s not repeated – and to recognize parallels that already exist.
Forty-seven years ago last month, a special unit of Chicago police officers in a pre-dawn raid, killed Peorian Mark Clark and Chicagoan Fred Hampton in an apartment where they and several other members of the Black Panther Party were sleeping.
Founded 50 years ago in Alabama as a bold follow-up to the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense first gained attention when armed members patrolled Oakland, Calif., to monitor police and demonstrated at the California legislature, openly carrying rifles.
“As we consider the similarities between the injustices of yesterday and today, it is important to understand that the Panthers were energized largely by young people, 25 and under, who started as a small group of actively engaged individuals that collectively became an international human-rights phenomenon,” said filmmaker Stanley Nelson, director of The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution. “The Black Panther Party emerged out of a love for their people and a devotion to empowering them.”
Eventually involving not only leaders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, but author Eldridge Cleaver, Civil Rights veteran Stokely Carmichael and activist Angela Davis, the Panthers were guests on TV programs including Mike Douglas’ afternoon series and William F. Buckley’s political talk show, and at fund raisers hosted by the likes of New York conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein.
As one Panther comments in The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, “We wanted the brother on the corner – the brother who’s getting his head banged in every weekend by the police. We wanted the brother who was going to jail, just snatched out of his car for a traffic ticket because he was black.”
“Their impact on American culture, from music to style to community organizing, continues to resonate today,” comments journalist Eric Arnold on his online radio special on “Making Contact.”
The Panthers sought a united front of coalitions, too, making alliances with groups ranging from the American Indian Movement, the Latino Brown Berets, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, the white community Rising Up Angry and the White Panther Party.
The Panthers foreshadowed Black Lives Matter, except the Panthers became involved in more violent confrontations and also were more ambitious, launching a breakfast program for school kids and an education arm called the Intercommunal Youth Institute.
The Panthers’ approach was to be armed but nonviolent, explained member Robert Williams, who said, “If you are confronted by a racist who believes himself superior, and you’re armed, he has to consider: Does he want to risk his ‘superior’ life to take your ‘inferior’ life? And if you have a gun, you can put him in that position. And nine times out of 10, he doesn’t, and that’s the end of the violence. So we believed self-defense was a way to put a reduction into violence.”
Nevertheless, the Panthers were labeled a threat to the United States by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
The Minister of Defense for the Illinois Black Panther Party, Bobby Rush – now a Congressman from the 1st District – days after Hampton’s killing said that the FBI and Hoover were behind the assassinations, and over an eight-year period, the conspiracy was exposed, from the plan for the armed assault in Chicago and the cover-up to the involvement of the FBI and its secret and occasionally criminal COINTELPRO (COunter INTELligence PROgram).
Besides Fred Hampton and Mark Clark – who’d been involved with the NAACP in Peoria — survivors of the police attack were arrested on trumped-up charges prosecuted by Cook County State’s Attorney Edward Hanrahan, who’d coordinated the raid.
Documents verifying the accusations came to light years later after anti-war activists broke in to an FBI office in Media, Pa., and retrieved records showing the extent of the FBI’s role.
“An honest Assistant U.S. Attorney produced an FBI memorandum that included a detailed floor plan of the interior of Fred Hampton’s apartment that specifically identified the bed on which Hampton slept,” according to Flint Taylor, one of the lawyers for the Hampton family. It “showed that the floor plan, together with other important information designed to be utilized in a police raid, was based on information communicated by a paid informant.”
Reportedly the longest trial in the history of the federal courts, the 18-month wrongful death lawsuit for civil damages against the officials who’d murdered Hampton and Clark ended with Judge Sam Perry dismissing all charges. Exonerating police, the FBI and the Department of Justice, Perry in 1979 was overturned by the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. A new trial was ordered, but an out-of-court settlement eventually was reached.
In 1976, Idaho Senator Frank Church’s Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations devoted a chapter to the “FBI’s Covert Action Plan to Destroy the Black Panther Party.” Decades later, Beyonce’s homage to the Panthers at this year’s Super Bowl 50 helped open up conversation and connections, which should continue.
The problems of racism, police misconduct and inequality “loom just as large today as they did 50 years ago,” commented Julia Felsenthal in Vogue.com.
Background material remains available online, from documentaries such as The Murder of Fred Hampton (an 88-minute film released in 1971), and The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (released last year and (directed by Stanley Nelson, the filmmaker who also did The Murder of Emmett Till) to a roundtable discussion on the news show “Democracy Now!” [democracynow.org] and a half-hour radio feature on “Making Contact”[www.radioproject.org ]. Also, see Community Word articles about Mark Clark, Sept. 2016: http://thecommunityword.com/online/blog/2016/08/31/fbi-breakfast-program-threatened-nation/ and Aug. 2016: http://thecommunityword.com/online/blog/2016/09/30/two-separate-shootings-linked-to-heidelberg-case/