4.4.24 Black Radicalism and Government Repression.pptx
1. Black Radicalism and Government Repression
“A young man peeks from behind a door at a Black Panther Party meeting space in Chicago on August 5, 1969, days after police blasted
the building with gunfire. Party leader Fred Hampton was killed by Chicago police just months later.” (Bettmann/Getty Images)
2. The Counterintelligence Program
(COINTELPRO)
“The purpose of this new counterintelligence program endeavor is to
expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the
activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings,
their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters, and to
counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder.”
--FBI Memo, 1967
3. “When Hoover identified the Black Panther
Party as the number one threat to the national
security of the United States at a time when
they are fighting in Vietnam, of course that was
crazy, but it was politically very effective. It
says to law enforcement at the local level, ‘we
can take the gloves off now. We don’t have to
respect civil liberties and we can go after them
with everything we’ve got.’”
--historian Clayborne Carson
4. Fred Hampton, chair of the Illinois Chapter of
the BPP, was a dynamic young leader in
Chicago who emphasized the importance and
utility of coalition politics—working to forge
common cause with other groups fighting
shared oppression. In his view, class
oppression united large segments of the U.S.
that nonetheless remained deeply divided by
racial tension and animosity. In April 1969,
Hampton led the Chicago BPP in joining with
Puerto Rican and Latinx activists in the Young
Lords and white Southerners of the Young
Patriots Organization to form a “Rainbow
Coalition.” Though often vilified as anti-
white, the Black Panther Party targeted their
message and their community programs
toward poor and working class people of all
races and ethnicities. Historians argue that this
effort to build interracial class solidarity, more
than their early police patrols, made the
Panthers the focus of Hoover’s FBI.
“You can kill a revolutionary
but you can’t kill a revolution.”
--Fred Hampton
5. Fred Hampton and Mark Clark of the
Chicago Panthers were murdered by
Chicago Police using information from
an FBI informant acting as Hampton’s
bodyguard (4 Dec 1969). Their
apartment was ambushed in the middle
of the night. Hampton was while killed
while sleeping next to his girlfriend,
who was eight months pregnant.
6. At left, a floor map of the apartment
where Hampton was killed, created with
intelligence shared by FBI informant
William O’Neal. O’Neal became an
informant to avoid prison time for car
theft. He was paid of a bonus of $300 for
the info he provided leading to
Hampton’s murder.
7. In 1971, the American public learned of the FBI’s
extensive counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO),
which aimed to monitor, infiltrate, and discredit
subversive domestic political organizations. Revelations
pointed to the near-obsession of FBI director
J. Edgar Hoover with silencing dissent, ranging from
alleged members of the Communist Party to King and
the SCLC, the Nation of Islam, SNCC, and the Black
Panther Party. Of these, Hoover declared the Panthers to
be “the greatest threat to the internal security of the
country.” News of the illegal tactics used to gather
information seeking to “expose, disrupt, misdirect,
discredit, or otherwise neutralize” organizations and
individuals deemed subversive called into question the
motives and tactics of COINTELPRO, which was
officially discontinued once its existence became public.
Hoover, the FBI, and COINTELPRO
8.
9. Angela Davis
In 1969, less than two months after being
fired from her teaching position at UCLA
by the University Regents at the urging of
Governor Ronald Reagan, radical
feminist, Black Panther affiliate, and
Communist Party member Angela Davis
was arrested on charges of first-degree
murder. As the owner of guns used in the
murder of a judge, a juror, and a
prosecutor, she was eligible for the death
penalty. She was acquitted in 1972, after
serving sixteen months as a political
prisoner.
10. The Senate Church Committee Report (1976)
A 1971 burglary of FBI offices in Philadelphia exposed documented evidence of
COINTELPRO and the agency’s years-long program of surveilling private citizens,
leading to a Senate investigation of FBI practices.
“The Committee’s fundamental conclusion is that intelligence activities have
undermined the constitutional rights of citizens and that they have done so primarily
because checks and balances designed by the framers of the Constitution to assure
accountability have not been applied…
Our findings and the detailed reports which supplement this volume set forth a
massive record of intelligence abuses over the years. Through a vast network of
informants and through the uncontrolled or illegal use of intrusive techniques—
ranging from simple theft to sophisticated electronic surveillance—the Government
has collected, and then used improperly, huge amounts of information about the
private lives, political beliefs and associations of numerous Americans.”
