Fifty five years ago, on this day, December 4th, 1969, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were murdered.
In December 1969, Hampton was drugged,[7][8] then shot and killed in his bed during a predawn raid at his Chicago apartment by a tactical unit of the Cook County State’s Attorney‘s Office, who received aid from the Chicago Police Department and the FBI leading up to the attack. Law enforcement sprayed more than 100 gunshots throughout the apartment; the occupants fired once.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 324ppm. As of 2024 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that some Black Panthers were running around waving guns, and that made them ultimately unimportant. Fred Hampton was smarter than that, and knew that all the imagery and rhetoric wouldn’t help build community networks. And he was really the FBI’s worst nightmare. A smart, dedicated black man who was capable of building links with other groups across racial lines. So of course, they had to whack him. And that’s what they did.
What we learn is that the most dangerous radicals are the ones who you can’t easily dismiss.
What happened next? The FBI had to patyo out a load of cash, but would not admit that they whacked Hampton, and others. COINTELPRO at its finest, eh?
In 1982, the City of Chicago, Cook County, and the federal government agreed to a settlement in which each would pay $616,333 (equivalent to $1.95 million per payee in 2023) to a group of nine plaintiffs, including the mothers of Hampton and Clark.[81] The $1.85 million settlement (equivalent to $5.84 million in 2023) was believed to be the largest ever in a civil rights case.[81] G. Flint Taylor, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs, said, “The settlement is an admission of the conspiracy that existed between the FBI and Hanrahan’s men to murder Fred Hampton.”[82] Assistant United States Attorney Robert Gruenberg said the settlement was intended to avoid another costly trial and was not an admission of guilt or responsibility by any of the defendants.[82]
Fun fact: Hampton’s assassination was the final impetus for the Weather Underground to want to bomb shit. But instead, they blew themselves up in March of 1970, next door to Dustin Hoffman.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
Also on this day:
December 4, 1989 – first anti-climate action economic “modelling” released in Australia