Fred Hampton Jr was days away from taking his first breath when his father was assassinated. Still in his mother’s womb, he would have sensed the shots fired by police into his parents’ bedroom at the back of 2337 Monroe Street, Chicago.
He would have absorbed the muffled screams, felt the adrenaline rushing through his mother’s veins, been jolted by her violent arrest. Could he also have somehow sensed the moment of his father’s death?
His dad was “Chairman” Fred Hampton, leader of the Illinois chapter and deputy chairman of the national Black Panther Party, who was sleeping beside his pregnant fiancee when 14 Chicago police officers burst into the apartment. They shot him in bed, striking him twice in the head. Hampton, who was 21, was killed on the spot.
The attack – up to 99 incoming gunshots and only one fired by the Panthers from inside – also claimed the life of Panther Mark Clark in what later emerged was a meticulously planned, FBI-backed operation.
Twenty-five days later, on 29 December 1969, Akua Njeri (then Deborah Johnson), gave birth to a baby boy. From that moment on, the child’s life was to be defined by the father whom he never met.
sometimes i wonder if the civil rights movement and socialism movements during the depression are the closest that this country will ever come to honoring the declaration of independence’s preamble, given that energy that sustained both historical movements have been so effectively co-opted and diminished by the center-right political party called the Democrats; that americans today are barely aware that they happened at all and even then only a w whitewashed version of MLK jr with next to nothing about malcom x or the black panthers.
watching bernie and aoc repeat this history in sapping this energy again while ushering voters back into the democratic party’s fold despite the democrats doing little more than token resistance to trump and our slide into fascism makes me pessimistic that we will ever reach a true state of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afeni_Shakur#Activism
The trial dragged on for eight months. The prosecution’s evidence consisted mainly of undercover cops who had infiltrated the Panthers and testified that they heard a lot of wild talk, much of it fueled by weed, about offing the pig and blowing things up.
Afeni cross-examined one of these detectives, Ralph White, and demolished his case. She asked him if he’d ever seen her carry a gun or kill anyone or bomb anything and he answered no, no, no. Then she asked if he’d seen her doing Panther organizing in a school and a hospital and on the streets and he answered, yes, yes, yes.
“In those 20 minutes,” wrote legendary reporter Murray Kempton in “The Briar Patch,” his 1973 book on the trial, “she had rescued herself and all the others.”
