June 11, 2007

The Murder of Fred Hampton

Can't Murder Freedom Fighting

"Say it before you go to sleep, in case you don't wake up... Say it: 'I am a revolutionary.'" One morning, the man who spoke those words, twenty-one year old Fred Hampton -- Chicago Black Panther Party chairman, expectant father, and practicing socialist revolutionary -- never woke up. Soon as these resonant, amplified words are spoken, cut to silence. Now see the trail of blood left after Hampton's bullet-ridden body was drug from a bloody mattress by one of the Chicago policemen who had burst into his apartment and killed him and another Panther Party member, Mark Clark.

This is the defining sequence of The Murder of Fred Hampton, the 1971 film re-released this week on DVD by Facets Multimedia. It was filmed at roughly 10 AM on the morning of December 4, 1969, only six hours after Hampton's death. Mike Gray and the Film Group had been documenting Hampton and the Chicago chapter Panther Party for the previous nine months. Called to the apartment scene by the Panthers and their lawyers, Gray and his team found their film now bound to a new responsibility: making the case that Hampton's death hadn't been the result of a Panther/Police "shootout" following an attempted search of a Panther apartment, as the Chicago establishment claimed, but rather a cold-blooded, premeditated murder.

"Say it: 'I am a revolutionary.'" One wonders whether Fred Hampton whispered those words his last night alive. Then again, it doesn't matter; he needn't have said these words because he practiced them, he embodied them. The Murder of Fred Hampton is not only about a murder: it's about the day to day work that made Hampton and the Panthers such a danger to the authorities. Most the film is Hampton talking and lecturing publicly -- he's an electric speaker, powerful and confident. But the best moments of the film, in my mind, capture Hampton and the Panthers privately, doing the sort of day-to-day organizing that grounded their rhetoric, making it a real threat. Here we see Hampton negotiating with another Black Power group, and are given tours of Panther service programs, like free breakfast for children and a free health clinic.

"We're going to have to do more than talk...," Hampton tells an audience. "We're going to have to do more than listen... We're going to have to more than learn. We're going to have to start practicing, and that's a very hard thing to do." Practicing revolution: a hard thing to do, but Hampton could do it, and do it well. And in the State's eyes, that's why he had to die.

The Murder of Fred Hampton was a historical necessity: the Panthers and their allies had to make a case, because the State was busy making theirs. One function of the State, writes Jonathon Jackson, Jr., is to "oversimplify and minimize immoral events in order to legitimize history and the state's very existence." Within days of Hampton's killing, the State was at work oversimplifying and minimizing. The police and State's Attorney provided endless newspaper reports and press conferences describing the event as a "shoot-out." Police even conducted their very own reenactment of their raid on local television, complete with a soundstage reconstruction of the Panther's apartment.

For all their effort, from the start the cops' case was weak. The Murder of Fred Hampton documents the conflicts between the cops' accounts and the actual evidence at the scene of the raid, and the vast discrepancies between the cops' own accounts. We hear from Panthers who were at the scene: from "Doc" Satchell, shot five times in the raid; and from Deborah Johnson, eight-and-a-half months pregnant at the time with Hampton's son, who was sleeping next to Fred as he was shot, and who later overheard the police gloat, "He's good and dead now."

Following independent analysis, it was revealed that of the one hundred bullets that could be accounted for, ninety-nine were fired by the police; only one came from the Panthers, probably fired by Mark Clark in the throes of death. This is possibly shocking to an uninformed viewer -- according to the DVD cover, Roger Ebert called the film "political dynamite" -- but none of it came as a surprise to the Panthers. It merely confirmed what they already well knew: the Chicago PD was out for blood. One sequence captures the nervous energy of a long night at the barricaded Panther headquarters, after rumors were heard of a possible police raid. The night goes without incident, but a police raid did eventually come, and the Panther's headquarters burned into a hollow shell.

What was striking to me, as a young radical myself, was how cognizant the Panther's were of their struggle as one of life and death. A common thread throughout Hampton's excerpted speeches is a stress on the unimportance of himself as an individual -- that he could be jailed, dead or anywhere, but that the revolution would continue. This could possibly be an editing strategy on the part of the filmmakers -- decided following Hampton's death to make a political point about the need for revolution -- but I doubt it.

What the Panther's sensed then, and what has since been revealed, is that the U.S. government -- particularly Hoover's FBI -- had a counter-intelligence program to eliminate the Panthers and other militant black groups, known as COINTELPRO for. Since The Murder of Fred Hampton was completed in 1971, court cases and Freedom of Information Act requests have revealed that Hampton's murder was far more pre-meditated then was previously thought. Hampton's bodyguard, it turned out, was an FBI informant who had provided the Chicago P.D. with a map of the Panther apartment, including a giant X on the bed where Hampton slept.

Many of these new details are provided in a supplementary booklet provided by Facets Multimedia that comes with the DVD. Unfortunately, Facets has a reputation for bare bones DVDs, and The Murder of Fred Hampton is no exception. Were you to rent the DVD from a store or from Netflix, you would never get the proper context for the film given in the booklet because none of it has been included on the DVD itself. Overall Facets has done everyone a favor: the urgent beauty of The Murder of Fred Hampton is the beauty of film itself, to capture history as it happens. But a single film is not enough to go on -- outside knowledge is required to get the full picture -- and the DVD leaves it up to the viewer to hunt down those details.