2d ago

"his grave is annually shot by local police"

-Fred Hampton was a black activist from Chicago -- an extraordinary speaker, youth organizer for the NAACP.
-He joined the Black Panthers and shone so brightly that he was made chair of the Chicago chapter when he was only 20.
-He founded the Rainbow Coalition, which brought together Black and Latino activists and radical anti-poverty Catholics. He forged an alliance among major Chicago street gangs to help them make peace and work for social change.
-In 1967, when he was just 19, Hampton was identified by the FBI as a “radical threat.” The FBI tried to subvert his activities in Chicago, sowing disinformation to get the groups he’d drawn together to distrust each other, and getting an FBI plant next to him as a bodyguard.
-(This is part of an illegal FBI program called COINTELPRO, which aimed to paint black civil rights activists (among others) as violent and threatening. If you’ve only seen pictures of the Black Panthers as armed and dangerous revolutionaries, and never heard of their children’s breakfast program, their community health clinics, or their “copwatch” patrols, this is why. It’s because COINTELPRO was a highly successful work of political propaganda.)
-On December 3, 1969, Hampton taught a political education course at a local church, and then several Panthers gathered at his apartment for a late dinner. One of them was the FBI plant bodyguard, who drugged Hampton.
-At 4:45 AM on December 4, a squad of Chicago Police officers and FBI agents with a warrant to search for weapons stormed the apartment. Investigations later showed they fired between 90 and 99 times. The Panther on security detail, Mark Clark, was holding a shotgun. He was shot, and the gun went off into the ceiling. This was the only shot fired by the Panthers.
-Fred Hampton, in another room, didn’t awaken. He was shot in his bed. Twice, in the head, at point-blank range. He was 21.
-Four weeks after witnessing Hampton's death, his finance Deborah Johnson gave birth to their son, Fred Hampton Jr. That’s him in the photograph, visiting the grave of a father who died before he was born. A resting place riddled with bullets.

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2d ago

"his grave is annually shot by local police"

248 comments

RIP Fred Hampton

Oh, how high he would have flown

Is the Black Panther party still around? Seems like it could be worth a revival.
- While I agree, with the current administration, it would immediately be marked as a terrorist organization and members would be arrested. I believe we need something new that they can't immediately spin-off as a threat.
  
  the US admin is accusing far right MAGA republicans of being radical leftists if they so much as hesitate on a vote. there's no tasteful rebrand that will satisfy without becoming an ineffectual fascist yourself

I bet he would have been proud of this :)
We should crowd-source a new one every year and an ever-growing donation to an appropriate charity every time it needs replacing

You got me wondering where the FBI agents involved in this ended up. It wasn't that long ago, some of them could still be around.
I stumbled on this article in the Jacobin that mentioned this:
Mitchell’s file, released in December 2020 after a Freedom of Information request by the author, runs nearly nine hundred pages.
Which is interesting, because I had another tab open of agent Mitchell's records and it is 208 pages, not 'nearly nine hundred pages'.
Internet archive only has one snapshot, it's recent (March 2025) and also only 208 pages.
Got me feeling a little tin foil hatty, but I suppose that's normal when reading about a literal conspiracy like COINTELPRO. I wonder if the dogebags scrubbed some of his file tho...
- i hate what they’ve done to the word “doge”…
  it’s the least important thing they’ve done, but my dog is no longer a “good doge”, and it breaks my heart….
- Oh you sound real tin foil hatty.
  
  Did you not read the post?

Even in death, they fear what he stood for. That kind of legacy tells you everything about the system and who it’s built to silence.

You have no enemies, you say? Alas! my friend, the boast is poor; He who has mingled in the fray Of duty, that the brave endure, Must have made foes! If you have none, Small is the work that you have done. You've hit no traitor on the hip, You've dashed no cup from perjured lip, You've never turned the wrong to right, You've been a coward in the fight
What a brilliant young man. I hope his son takes pride in it. As absolutely disrespectful as it is, each bullet is them saying "we remember you, and we still fear you." Keep them afraid.

Can we..... Replace his headstone?
Hear me out. If we replace it with something that is known to reflect small arms fire, there's a nontrivial chance that the next time some asshole shows up to shoot the headstone and piss on his grave (probably), there would be a non-zero chance that person would shoot their own dick off by way of a ricochet.
Stone, while it looks nice and lasts a really long time (when it's not being shot), is great.... But maybe this one time?
- Or just camp around there, wait for a shot to go off and then unload on the cop car. Who’s to say the cop wasn’t shooting at you when they’re unlawfully shooting out of their windows?
  Murdering a cop would also go a long way in showing support lol
  
  Who’s to say the cop wasn’t shooting at you
  The judge, numerous other cop "witnesses", a jury of your peers...
  
  Self defense you mean, not murdering a cop, standyourgrounding a cop.
  
  You see.... I'm mainly focused on making it so that they hurt themselves. I'm focused on this because booby traps are illegal, and straight up shooting them rarely ends well.
  I don't want anyone to get in trouble for their actions. I want the officer(s) to hurt themselves so they get ridiculed for being stupid; both, by their peers and by the public.
  Hell, I'd setup a trail camera type situation to keep an eye on things so I can post it to YouTube and/or rejig the situation so that the likelihood of them harming themselves from doing this thing is maximized.
  By simply using materials that frequently ricochet bullets.... Nothing illegal has been done. It's not an active trap and it's not a problem, legally, to use the materials. The entire thing is passive, there's nothing that could even be considered a "trap" of any kind, and plausible deniability is easily proven by simply "I replaced it with this because the headstone kept getting damaged, I didn't think anyone would shoot it and hurt themselves your honour"
  The only evidence that it was done maliciously would be if someone who was in a position to make it happen, commented here saying that they were intending to do this. If any such person exists and is considering it, I am not a lawyer, but I would advise that person to do so without getting involved in the discussion here at all. That would provide plausible deniability to the action being malicious. All you need is to inspire enough doubt that you can't be convicted.
  Anyways I'm well into the weeds here.
  I also agree with you that it is not illegal to kill cops (any more than it is illegal to kill anyone else), and defending yourself from the police in a situation where you are justified in using the force you are using, should not be punishable nor a crime, but you and I both know that reality is very divorced from the law and what's legal on this one. Even if you're legally allowed to defend yourself in the situation, the police will shoot and kill you, then walk on "qualified immunity" after they investigate themselves and find no wrongdoing.
  Defund the police.

Disgusting shit bags. Hampton never harmed anyone and they wanted him dead.
- They wanted him dead because they want us divided. The divided states of Musk & Thiel.
  
  I mean, this whole thing happened before Musk was even born, but the point still stands. Divide and rule.
  
  The White government wouldn't allow black people to integrate or create their own society. They wanted to keep black people subjugated.
  Now that race isn't as much of an issue as it was (still is a big issue please nobody be a pedantic bitch), it's clear that white and black has really been a fight of rich and poor the whole time.
  
  That goes without saying.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present you the land of the free and the bold, and it's beautiful history.
Sigh...

In a real country those cops would get fired for discharging their firearms in a public place in an unsafe manner
- I feel like the point blank execution is a little more than "discharging a firearm in a public place in an unsafe manner".
  
  Grave stone is not alive.

ACAB

Thanks for this post. The police propaganda was so successful that even i have seen the black panthers as a violent gang, without realising it. Thanks for spreading knowledge about people who have fought for their rights and the rights of others even in the eyes of horrible oppression and death. May we be blessed with more people like him.
- The Government wouldn't let black people create their own state and wouldn't let them integrate into white society. What other option is there besides the threat of violence to defend ones own community at that point?
  
  These days, there are options like being kidnapped by the cops and sent for life imprisonment in El Salvador.

Nobody actually knows who shot the headstone, it was discovered damaged in 2016:
Flint Taylor — one of the lawyers for Hampton’s family — recently journeyed to Haynesville to eulogize Fred Hampton’s mother, Iberia, a devoted mother and courageous activist who passed away in October 2016. He discovered this desecration of Hampton’s grave at that time.
As far as I can tell the notion that it's a police tradition seems to originate from a possibly sarcastic post on r/stupidpol on that other site.
But he was definitely assassinated by the police and the FBI, which is probably much worse.
- Still horrible, but thank you for adding important context.
- I guess the way the idea police tradition theory has taken hold so well is because it's so plausible.
  
  Yeah, but it hurts to have 'myths' like this perpetuated. My line of thinking is that if you wanna hate cops, there's plenty of actually true things to use against them. If you float a story like this it hurts because someone that is happy with the police will point out that this might not be true and now you're arguing about whether this is true vs. the disgusting behavior of US police.
  I agree it has the air of plausibility, but it feels like hearsay to me. If it meets others' threshold of "truthiness", I can't fully disagree, but for me this isn't over that threshold. I'll choose one of the few hundred other police abuses just this year to criticize them.
  
  in bakersfield california, they have an informal “most violent cop” award where they sew fake blood onto stuffed animal baby seals as the trophy….
  among hitchhikers it’s well known that the cops there will take your gear, shave your head, and abandon you at the edge of town….
  i did doubt the annual shooting of a headstone one, just because it would be too easy to catch them. although cops may have done it once.
  i think this also coincided with the series about hampton and the fbi informant bodyguard… who killed himself shortly after the series came out….
  
  Eh, I think at least for the past few decades it isn't actually too plausible.
  Any known discharge of a firearm by police requires some sort of review. While they may be super lax and claim all sorts of false rationalizations for shooting a living person, I think even they would be unable to come up with a rationalization for discharging at a headstone in a public area.
  Now if it is "take a whack at the headstone with a crowbar", I could believe that, but I don't think they'd risk shooting a headstone out of the blue.

Everything about this is terrible

If it weren’t for the Black Panthers there wouldn’t be meal programs in public schools. The BP “Free Breakfast for Children” program was so popular and so effective at raising awareness and popularity for the BP party that the government became paranoid that they were constructing an effective “fifth column”. All of the sudden states started passing laws creating food programs for public schools in order to undermine their message.
Nothing good happens in this country unless the rich are scared. The same thing applied to the New Deal.
- Nothing good happens in this country unless the rich are scared
- And recently with the actions of Mario’s brother (horrible “death panel” decisions were put on hold, etc.)
  
  You are allowed to say Luigi here. We're not Reddit
- Meanwhile half of lemmy will get mad at you for thinking that holding signs over some sidewalk won't do more good than making the rich scared.

He was portrayed a few times briefly in the movie Trial of the Chicago 7, played by Kelvin Harrison, Jr.
- Judas and the Black Messiah had him portrayed by Daniel Kaluuya.
  Won an Oscar for it, no less.

If anyone you know loves comedy, you can listen to 2 white guy comedians recount this story:
https://www.google.com/search?q=fred-hampton+dollop
While they can make even this story hilarious, America really lost a lot when this man was murdered...

If all you know about Fred Hampton is that decades after his death, cops still fear him this much, you know what a great man he was.
- I understand what you mean but I don't think this comes from a place of "fear."
  
  I think it does. Cops were terrified of Hampton. They had to have him drugged before they were brave enough to storm in and murder him in his sleep. Remember how scared Dorner made cops?
  
  Hate comes from fear.
  
  He obviously still has a hold over them mentally. If that isn't power I don't know what is.
  
  Yea. Why would they fear him? He's a dead man, not an acorn.

The only time republicans were for gun control. When black people took up arms in self defense.
- The first time I heard about the Tulsa race riots it blew my mind that it wasn’t common teaching in schools.
  White folk told black people to gtfo and go build their own town, so they did and it prospered while the white towns went to shit. So of course the racists are like “we gotta kill all the black folk and burn their town, cause they’re doing better than us!”
  
  *Tulsa race massacre.
  It was not a riot. It was a targeted organized attack to kill black people.
  
  And this is still the underlying cancer in America. We're here today because Obama broke their brain.
  Popular, two -term, erudite, black man as president with no scandals.
- Pretty much sums up the right wing perfectly. Zero ideology, just reactionary stupidity.
- True story! This is the exact reason that California has such strict gun control laws

police can't even stop murdering black people when they're dead

ACAB

We can only hope to live lives that leave fascists seething for generations after we die. Rest in power.
- I'd rather lead a life that leaves fascists dead after I die. But I'll take seething as a consolation prize.

Jesus. This story needs to come with a stiff drink. RIP.

The rest of the story from Wikipedia:
During the raid, Panther Mark Clark was also killed and several others were seriously wounded. In January 1970, the Cook County Coroner held an inquest; the coroner's jury concluded that Hampton's and Clark's deaths were justifiable homicides.[14][15][16][17]
A civil lawsuit for wrongful death was later filed on behalf of the survivors and the relatives of Hampton and Clark.[18] It was resolved in 1982 by a settlement of $1.85 million (equivalent to $6.03 million in 2024); the U.S. federal government, Cook County, and the City of Chicago each paid one-third to a group of nine plaintiffs. Given revelations about the illegal COINTELPRO program and documents associated with the killings, many scholars now consider Hampton's death, at age 21, a deliberate assassination at the FBI's initiative. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton
- Funny I just read that a bit ago, some of their sources cited appear to no longer work.
  
  Link decay is actually a pretty serious problem that no one seems to have an answer to and it will only get worse.
  
  The FBI assassination part seems to be corroborated by this National Archive page https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/individuals/fred-hampton. I guess NARA being an official USA agency, they would not make a claim against the FBI without being certain.

Should make the headstone out of metal so it risks ricocheting onto the shooter.
- Tungsten gravestone!
  
  Wouldn't it shatter?

I'm fucking speechless.

Jfc that’s dark. Fred Hampton was a badass who was murdered by the state. But that’s not enough and they shoot his fucking tombstone? Get the fuck over it! You already killed our guy to suppress a movement. You don’t have to be aggrieved any longer, you fucking pussies.
- He was murdered by cops who have since retired, this is being done by newer pigs who want to show their loyalty to the boot.

Still live in cops heads rent free
- He still working on them from the grave

ACAB. That cannot be said enough.
As a proud father of two young men, this absolutely breaks my heart while simultaneously pisses me the fuck off to no end.
The people in power are good for nothing cowards. “In God We Trust?” Yeah, if this is what your God allows, then fuck Him and fuck you too. I hope everybody involved in this murder rots in whatever wasteland of Hell they believe in.
Goddamnit.
- Anyone who can find any reason to shoot at the grave of a young respected political activist who worked against the side of hate deserves denial of peace in the afterlife as well.

Is there a fund or organization working to get this man a new headstone? It can be replaced annually, sp needs some organization behind it.
- Honestly, every bullet chipped hole is a badge of honor. ACAB
- I lazaliy asked chatgpt
  It appears there was but it concluded
  Instead it suggests helping preserve his childhood home
  https://www.gofundme.com/f/SaveTheHamptonHouse51
  Edit: verify how legit it is on your own. I put in very little effort on my end.
  
  Do less next time
  
  chatgpt isn't a source, stop making the internet worse.
  
  Thank you
  
  You have angered the luddites

Gil Scott Heron has a song about Fred Hampton called No Knock. Too bad Heron's work is still relevant. When all those rich fuckers bought their way into space I listened to Whitey on The Moon on repeat for like a week.
- A rat done bit my sister Nell...

ACAB

I know of Hampton because of a lyric in a Propagandhi song
Shooting someone's grave is fucked up.
Sometimes the ties that bind are strange: no justice shines upon the cemetery plots marked Hampton, Weaver or Anna-Mae
- Fucked up is putting it mildly. Imagine being so mentally unstable that shooting at someone "between 90 and 99 times" wasn't enough so you had to return annually to shoot at a rock with their name on it to feel better

How petty do you have to be to vandalize a tombstone..
Law and order, but only if the white cops are above everyone else 🤡
- Vandalizing tombstones is fine. For example shitting on Reagan's grave is a wholesome family activity.
  The issue is the people doing it are racist murderers who are vandalizing the grave of a freedom fighter to celebrate their racist murder.
  
  Shitting on fascist's headstones needs to be enshrined as a right in the Constitution.
- I would absolutely vandalise a nazi tombstone tho

FTP forever, all coppers are fucking trash. The government lets all these white power groups fucking thrive in America but any socialists they fucking gun down in murder
- That’s because the government doesn’t actually care about you.
  They care about remaining in power so they can grift and take your money without having to put in any work in.
  People need to wake up to this insight instead of wondering why the government keeps consistency doing things against your best interests.
  
  I wish people would stop saying "the government". It's the people in charge, the government is a tool they are using. This should be making people angry that their govt is being manipulated into a tool to be used against them. Saying "the government" makes it this big imposing organization and stops reminding you that the people behind the problems are soft meat sacks just like the rest of us.
  Nothing against your points, your comment only reminded me of this. People are more scared of "the government" than they are of other people
  
  You’re preaching to the choir

We need armed guards at this site. They shoot, we shoot back. Oh no, fat little piggy took one in the neck trying to act tough? Oh well.
- Do you think a government that is okay bombing civilian in other countries would have issue sending drones or bombing a place regardless of who is there in US soil?
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_MOVE_bombing
  
  And that's not even a hypothetical question...
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_MOVE_bombing
- You’re on first shift duty

There's a great movie that goes over all this called Judas and The Black Messiah. It's definitely worth a watch
- After watching this movie, and researching Fred Hampton afterwards, I became a member of the peaceful off-shoot of the Black Panther Party, now called The Collective Black People Movement. They do good work with local unions and political activism. Consider supporting them.
  
  Can you join if you're not black?
- It's a little too dramatized to call it a documentary, but it's a fairly accurate retelling of an important American story. Better than half of the movies I ever watched in history class as a kid.
  This is a movie that US citizens should watch. Not because it's a good film (it is, though), but because it's an important story in our (very recent) history.

be me, proud boy or something
gonna stand for my values!
let's go to DC and invade the Capitol! Actually that sounds a bit scary
oh I know I will beat up some ecoactivists! Wait these guys are ripped, they spend so much time climbing in trees, that might be dangerous
ah yes, I will cyberbully Greta Thunberg! No no I might get in trouble
yes I know I will gather the bro cops and we will shoot at a tombstone of a black man
PROUD BOYS!!!

yup and they're about to do it again
- They never stopped

Fight fire with water

Living, "Join or Die," and then they kill you. Words/ acronyms that are "bad": DEI, cosmopolitanism, human rights, communism, socialism, Palestine, Armenia, Myanmar, panic, fosscad, eat the...
Fuck them and the capitalist system they protect.
Have we ever talked about the fact that there's a self defeatist term for backing down from a fight when you're subjugated in nearly every language? "Whatever shall be shall be?", "shikata ga nai" , "it is what it is". The number of mental justifications for the subjugation we witness around us is insane. I hope everyone out there is okay.

Quite the legacy. Never let the memory of this man die. Fight the power!

Suddenly remembering those youtube videos about that super bouncy metal toy with a stainless steel ball...
- This one?
  (Joke is, he made every sound in this song with bouncing metal ball bearings on stuff.)

I aspire

The kids on XHS would love this post

ok so cute story, but why do people shoot the grave?

He was born with the wrong name - Fred Hampton sounds like a door to door vacuum cleaner salesman.

It's neat that the wikipedia article about him seems to lack proper citations for the circumstances of his death, citing an archived court document that is no longer being hosted on archivedotorg.
Every news story from the time and the police themselves claim the panthers shot first, and they police did have a warrant to search the premises for illegal firearms.
I tend to treat the Black Panthers as a terrorist organization after reading about how they murdered their own secretary after she whistleblew some of their financial crimes. Yes, black people are victims in the USA. Yes, there is still to this day a strong bias against them and a structural inequality. Is that reason to support people who threaten violence, who reject the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr, and who have been manipulated into violence by the federal agencies in the past? No, fuck the black panthers.
- Whole lotta words there when "I like the taste of boots" would suffice.
  
  Black Panthers wear boots. How do those taste?
- Found the poster who deepthroated COINTELPRO.
  
  COINTELPRO was highly illegal which is why the 9 plaintiffs won their wrongful death court case over 20 years after the events.
- How many bullet holes are yours?

248 comments