Chicago
never an enlightened city
has declared itself a sanctuary city
to blunt federal
predatory immigration policy
and shrieks of a tweeter-in-chief
inciting his base’s hatred
of The Other
Even with its new-found dignity
a “reform” mayor
Mexican Independence paraded down 26th
King Drive Bud Bilikin pageantry,
our immigrant city has yet to square
a notorious racist past
Chicago
never an enlightened city
where in a Dec. 4, 1969
predawn West Side raid
at 2337 W. Monroe
fourteen cops in cahoots
with, we now know, the FBI
blasted their way Capone-style
ninety-nine flying bullets
into a Black Panther apartment
to a single outgoing shot
killing party member Mark Clark
(shot through his heart) and
Illinois party chairman Fred Hampton
(twice shot at close range in the head)
This in the middle of
our military napalming Vietnamese,
Nixon’s law and order crackdown on cities,
J. Edgar Hoover declaring
the Black Power movement
America’s #1 public enemy,
FBI agents ordered to
“prevent the rise of a messiah
who could unify or electrify
the militant black nationalist movement”
A community activist
turned militant revolutionary
born in the shadow
of the Argo Corn Products plant
off Archer Road in Summit, Illinois
(where his parents worked
alongside Emmett Till’s father)
Fred Hampton solid-bodied
with a shy big-dimpled grin
was an orator par excellence
and fearless
the king of signifying
able to rouse feet-stomping crowds
to join him with shouts of
“I am a revolutionary!”
While west coast Panthers
stormed the Sacramento state house
toting guns in berets
wraparound sunglasses
leather jackets
demanding an end to
police brutality
Fred was organizing a
west suburban NAACP youth group
demanding black faculty
and administration hires
at his Proviso East High School
marching for open housing
in Marquette Park
with Dr. King
Once inside the apartment
operating from a floor plan
hand-drawn by an FBI informant
(actually Hampton’s bodyguard)
a cop emptied his machine gun
along a hallway wall
into the bedroom
where he knew Chairman Fred
(probably drugged)
slept
At that moment
Fred’s fiancé Deborah Johnson
pregnant with his child
was straddling Fred’s back
the bed (she said) violently
shaking from bullets
whizzing through the thin
wall into the mattress
Two cops stormed in
flung her from the room
then went back in
where she heard
the pop pop of a handgun
a woman screaming
one cop saying
“He’s good and dead now”
Filmmaker Mike Gray’s
grisly documentary
The Murder of Fred Hampton
staggers the imagination
We Serve and Suspect
cops following orders
can and will
barge into your house
shoot to kill
you dead in your bed
brag about it
lie about it
argue its merits
period
full stop
Gray was tracking
the 21-year-old’s dynamism
at party headquarters
a people’s court trying Fred
lively downtown speeches in Daley Plaza
the People’s Church on Ashland
free school kid breakfasts
Panther-run health clinics
but needed an ending
until he got the call
Fred is dead
come to 2337 W. Monroe
bring your camera
It’s shocking
black & white images
show Fred’s shot-up
blood-soaked mattress
bullet holes in doors walls woodwork
bloody floors
lines of sober-faced neighbors
braving the cold
Panther tour guides pointing
“This is where our chairman
got his brains blown out”
stepping thru the trashed hellish site
left open arrogantly
abandoned by police
like the dangling
burnt and mutilated
black carcasses
of long-ago Southern lynchings
There’s a chilling
Black-and-white photo
of a group of cops
carrying out Fred Hampton in a body bag
smirks on their faces lit by the flash
leather jackets and pie hats
fading into the predawn dark
proud as punch of their hunting booty
a job well done.
A “blatant act of legitimized murder”
claimed white Maywood councilman Tom Streeter
adding “and in the context of militant
acts against militant blacks
in recent months suggests
a systemic act of repression”
as FBI COINTELPRO surveyed
Panthers were
gunned down and jailed
across the country
At the Fred Hampton Pool
in Maywood west of the city
there’s a front-lawn bust of Fred
on a marble block
the significance
of this water-filled hole
in-the-ground memorial
cannot be overlooked
Fred’s push
for a pool and rec center
for Maywood’s black kids
led to his arrest by Maywood police
then making the FBI’s
Key Agitator Index of activists
the rest is history
While Panthers recognized
their oppression
in liberation struggles
of colonized Third World
peoples in China,
Cuba, Vietnam,
Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau
Fred’s ultimate sin
in the eyes of the police state
was forging Chicago’s
original Rainbow Coalition
Panthers aligning
with poor white racist
“dislocated hillbilly”
Young Patriots in Uptown
with Cha Cha Jimenez’s Young Lords
Puerto Rican street gang of Lincoln Park
Daley’s cops let off the leash
to split riffraff heads
in the way of gentrification
Folks forget in the 1960s
blacks were under
nationwide siege by police
folks forget point # one
of the Panthers’ 10-point plan
“Freedom to determine
the destiny of the black community”
Panthers arming themselves
with calls to “off the pigs”
in essence to police the police
menaced only terrorist cops
haunting black neighborhoods
Chicago’s heart beats
blood power control
from the Haymarket riot (1887)
to cops ordered
to shoot to kill or maim arsonists
cripple looters in the King Riots (April 1968)
to the whole world’s watching
Democratic Convention police riot (August 1968)
to Chairman Fred’s targeted murder a year later
to Laquan McDonald shot 16 times (2014)
(the police-killing video
suppressed for 13 months)
the Panthers at least challenged
as best they could
what a recent report calls
a culture of “excessive violence”
within the Chicago Police Department
the beat goes on
Chicago
never an enlightened city
with shoot-’em-up weekends
school kids escorted down safe corridors
crushing poverty
Mag Mile mammon
Panthers a faded tattoo
a bruise beneath the skin
that never heals
a sanctuary city
in search of its humanity
So here’s to Fred Hampton
fifty years out
a true people’s radical
dared speak truth to power
seek justice and parity
across racial class ethnic divides
paid the ultimate price
Sources:
The Murder of Fred Hampton (film documentary), The Film Group (Chicago) 1971, Mike Gray, producer
The Assassination of Fred Hampton, by Jeffery Haas, Chicago Review Press, 2009
Hillbilly nationalists, urban race rebels, and black power: community organizing in radical times, by Amy Sonnie, Melville House, Brooklyn, 2011.
Gary Johnson is an Oak Park resident.
