The Murder of Fred Hampton

Fred Hampton, founder of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, was assassinated by a special unit of the Chicago Police Department on December 4th, 1969 as he lay face down in bed. He was 21 years old when he was murdered. The police fired 99 unanswered shots into his apartment, wounding Fred as he slept. Apparently drugged by an informant, Hampton was unable to awaken. After the raid the police put two more shots into Hampton's head and said "Now he's good and dead."

This film follows the last year or so of Fred's life and the investigation immediately following his murder.

The first part of the film shows Fred speaking and organizing and provides a brief glimpse into the Panther community programs such as free breakfasts for school children, as well as a fairly good portrayal of Hampton's dynamic speaking abilities, vast depth of knowledge for someone so young, and his passion for the revolutionary struggle of all oppressed people worldwide regardless of race.

The remainder of the film focuses on Fred's murder including footage of the crime scene. The attacking police unit was so secret that the local precinct was not notified to clean things up after the bodies were removed. As a result the Panthers and their attorneys filmed and collected a vast amount of evidence which proved the police and states' attorneys were lying. The police and government arguments are given, interspersed with contradictory proof by the Panthers and their attorneys proving that this was not a raid gone sour, but rather a carefully planned assassination. The photo of the police smiling joyously as they carry Hampton's body out of the apartment is ominous.

This film was made right after Fred Hampton was murdered, and before the Panthers were aware that one of their own - William O'Neal - was actually an FBI informant who provided the police with the map of Fred Hampton's apartment. It was also filmed years before the information about the FBI's COINTELPRO campaign was made public. It is a great piece of history which gives a rare fair treatment to the Black Panther Party.

This documentary was released just a year and half after Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton and his colleague Mark Clark were killed in a raid by Chicago policeman, who were there ostensibly to serve a warrant at a pre-dawn hour. It's an operation that is now widely considered to have been a brutal political assassination for Hampton's revolutionary views, and because of that, the interviews, press clips, and speeches assembled here are incredibly important, and still chilling 51 years later.

The first half of the documentary show the political movement Hampton was a part of without sugar-coating it, which I thought was important, even as I wished it had been pared down (especially that fictional "People's Court") and narration provided to better frame the context. Through speeches and discussions, though, we see that the movement was one that advocated an overthrow of the oppressive, capitalist system that had exploited the common man and people of color for centuries, in order to advance to the "utopia of the communist state" of being. It advocated for blacks arming themselves and then killing policeman who "bother the people." It acknowledged cases where revolution had led to the revolutionary becoming an oppressor himself, like François "Papa Doc" Duvalier in Haiti, and yet still held out hope for the communist systems in Cuba and China, and indeed there are posters of Mao Zedong on walls. That's certainly not something that's aged well, but can you blame people for searching for an alternative when they're in a system that brutalizes them? And this quote early on is one that eerily rings true today:

"...racist, decadent, capitalist, imperialist America is a phony state. That a phony state exists here and that these pigs are doing nothing but protecting the avaricious businessman and the demagogic politicians, protecting the exploitative system that they got going. That, in fact, we are tired of it, we are sick of it. You've been brutalizing black people. You've been murdering and lynching them. Black people are tired of it!"

We also see the movement trying to provide for the community, e.g. Setting up medical care that's more concerned with public health that it is about profit, something which has gotten far worse all these decades later. They were for education, and standing up for their legal rights in a system that was trampling them. They were also dead on in their assessment that oppressed people had been successfully turned against one another by their oppressor, e.g. Poor white people against black people, something remarkably still true today. It's also important to note that they were young - Hampton was just 21 - and look at the arc of his colleague Bobby Rush, who was 23 here, and who would go on to serve in Congress for 30 years, announcing his retirement just this year.

Whatever you believe about the political views and lyrics to songs being chanted about killing policemen, no one should be executed over them, least of all in a country that prides itself on its freedom and democracy. You also have to understand where these views come from, and I wish the documentary had provided a little bit more by way of that.

Where it delivers best, however, is in its second half. There's something spine tingling about hearing Fred Hampton telling those in the audience to say "I am a revolutionary" before going to bed at night in case they don't wake up, and then seeing soundless footage of his dead body being carried out on a stretcher and all the blood at his apartment. From there the cutting back and forth to the establishment's version of events, given by police officers and Cook County State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan, and those who were in the apartment under a hailstorm of bullets and those who examined the scene afterwards, is as mesmerizing as it is disturbing. The inconsistencies in the State's story, the horrifying actions by the police, and the depraved indifference to both life and the truth are all outrageous. The fact that the documentary was made, bearing witness to what happened, is important, and it's one I wish was included in U. S. history curriculums. Sadly, that may be illegal now in some states, which is also outrageous.

Much better than the film makers' previous "American Rev. 2" because it is more focused on a single unjust incident and its terrible reverberations than the earlier work which took its sweet time to get to the point, namely that poor whites and blacks should forge a common bond, with way too much time spent on extraneous stuff like the anti war protests in Chicago in '68. Not that this documentary is all that concise! The first hour is basically a series of Fred Hampton speeches in which he makes some cogent points, like the need for affordable healthcare and the alliance between racism and capitalism, as well as some, like an admiration for the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti and the virtues of Chairman Mao, that show why it's a good thing that the Panthers were doomed to failure.

However, once we get to the eponymous slaying and see the clumsy machinations of the corrupt Chicago justice system, personified by DA Ed Hanrahan who looks and sounds like a character right out of Ben Hecht, the film's pace considerably picks up and we are riveted. Whereas I periodically stopped to check the time during the first hour there were no such signs of impatience and ennui during the second. Give it a B.

PS...One wonders if, had he lived, Hampton would have morphed into Bobby Rush, his number two guy, who is now a reliably corporate Democratic member of Congress or if he would have stayed true to his extreme left wing beliefs. We'll never know but his fervency, as opposed to Rush's more measured tones, perhaps provides us with a clue.

I saw this movie when i was a journalism student at NYU in the '70's. the organization that I belonged to-The Revolutionary Student Brigade-took the movie around to different collages and also showed it in Newark at a Project where a young boy-Charles Sutton-had been shot. The movie is an eye opener. There is no doubt in your mind as to why Fred Hampton was killed. It's a great job of investigative reporting. If your stomach is not already turned by what is currently called "news" this will do it for you. It will also make you mad to see what we were once, what we could have done-what we did do and how our potential was destroyed by the powers that be. We can all get along-we can doanything as long as we recognize who the enemy really is. The people united will never be defeated.

If you lived through the 60s, or if you are a student of political movements and truth, you will find this fascinating.

The facts are simple enough: The US had an overtly racist political system, working differently in big northern cities than backwards southern towns. Although the major sweep of protest was a noble, steady stand for simple justice, some hotheads took a violent stand. One of these was the Black Panthers, and a stronghold was Chicago.

Chicago was famously corrupt in the sense of an inbred political establishment, including the police. Loyalty to the establishment was the game and the truth was expendable, malleable, inventable. Well, that is an old story.

The interesting element is the Panthers. We have this film as consisting of footage from before and after the murder. The Panthers are possibly honest but probably not so. They surely are passionate, and committed to "the people." The striking thing is how utterly stupid the politics is: a combination of plain unrealistic Marxism, uneducated rhetoric and logic and earnest but goofy metaphors. These guys are basically well-meaning, frustrated nitwits with guns, who had a genuinely honest complaint and a lucked into an adversary that was incompetent at lying.

The second half of this film was produced by the Panthers (and their white lawyers) as detectivework to show the lies of the Chicago police. There is no controversy about what happened and it is instructive to compare it to today's obsession with terrorists.

There is a frustrated people who take up an armed struggle. They mix their aggressiveness with service programs for an underserved society on whom they depend for support. In this case, it was breakfast and "education" programs. This is the model for Al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah. A large establishment opposes them, fears about safety abound. There is a threat of overthrow, destruction. Each side vilifies the other. But one side has governmental stability and organized forces. So they do what they believe is necessary, constitution be damned.

No one listening to the news actually believed the police story, neither white nor black. Whites fabulated a story to explain away the discrepancies from the truth. This differs from today where torture is openly supported rather than lied about. But otherwise this film does what the best of history can do: give us insight into ourselves.

Yes, the filmmakers, presenters and detectives are not admirable. Yes, you would not want to sign up for their childish politics. Unless you are grasping for a manufactured ethnic identity, the language and means of expression grate, embarrass. But they were fighting a great lie, a great lie in front of a great injustice.

And the footage is real. So this matters.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.