Forty-nine years ago, the Chicago Police Department (CPD),
in cooperation with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), raided the home
of twenty-one-year-old Black Panther Party leader, Fred Hampton, just before
dawn. Also killed in that raid was
organizer, Mark Clark.
I was eighteen years old when I began independently researching the murder of Fred Hampton.
This was ten years ago when I learned how the FBI planted an operative
close to Hampton, a coward by the name of William O’Neal, who, on the night of
the raid, drugged Fred Hampton so that he wouldn’t wake up when the police
busted down door. As a result Fred Hampton was shot in his bed next to his pregnant fiance, Deborah Johnson.
The photo evidence is a Google search away. The documentary goes into more depth
regarding the depravity and planning of the government agents that murdered
Fred Hampton in his sleep. I hate seeing
the body of Fred Hampton laying across the bottom of his bedroom threshold, but
I really hate the smug face of the cops that took Fred Hampton’s body out of
his house, and every single person involved with the repression, harassment,
and murder of Civil Rights and revolutionary Black organizers.
At eighteen I understood the potential of State violence and their willingness to use it without remorse, and in the next ten years, I haven’t
found a damn piece of evidence to counter this perspective. It was Martin Luther King Jr. that called the
United States government “the greatest purveyor of violence” in the world in
1967, and it still holds true today in the seventeenth year of the invasion of
Afghanistan. The State (by that I mean
the Federal, State and municipal governments, bureaucracy, court systems,
police, and military) is not a peaceful entity, but rather a self-serving
leviathan of invested individuals dedicated to maintaining this current (unequal,
violent, and polluting) organization of the world.
How dedicated to maintaining control to the wealth and power
in the USA? Enough to target and kill a
twenty-one year old in his bed because the head of the FBI declared the Black
Panther Party “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” The function of the State (and really any
institution) is to maintain its existence, legitimacy, and control over wealth
and power in an area. The United States
is pretty efficient at maintaining control and legitimacy, so much so that we
can drop two atomic bombs in 1945 and then use the hypothetical existence of atomic
bombs to invade another country (Iraq in 2003).
Coming from a peace and justice perspective, it doesn’t take
long to notice a trend: the pattern of violence, corruption, debauchery, and
hate that has driven foreign and domestic policy since the founding of this nation. On the flip side, it is equally apparent how
much USAmericans and especially those at the top of the capitalist pyramid
scheme, have to lose: material comforts, financial stability, excess, new items
for consumption and dopamine spikes, and the rest of the manufactured and
imported goods that are threatened by the necessary solutions to global climate
change.
But this isn’t about climate change, this is about realizing
the potential for depravity and violence that the boys in blue possess. This is about my inability to forgive the
police for the murder of Fred Hampton, and for harassing, targeting, imprisoning, and repressing so many other Civil
Rights leaders during the sixties, including Martin Luther King Jr.
Once you have this kind of knowledge on the nature law
enforcement in the USA, there is no way in hell they can ever legitimize
themselves again. Not that they’re
trying very hard. The shooting of
Emantic Bradford Jr. in the Alabama mall on Thanksgiving is being
exposed, and it looks like the cops shot the twenty-one year old in the back as
he directed shoppers to safety holding a firearm he was legally allowed to carry
in public.
Cops can plan out and execute a charismatic and promising twenty-one-year-old leader of a revolutionary Black organization while he sleeps, or they can gun
down a twenty-one-year old in the back while he directs panicked people to safety. For both instances, the boys in blue were
threatened by someone with a gun because as I mentioned above, the function of
the State is to maintain control by any means necessary. And an institution with those kind of
operating instructions, and with that amount of firepower, and with that much
invested in the unequal distribution of wealth and power, well that institution
is illegitimate and must be abolished.
