To Black Americans in the 1960s who were targeted and harassed by the police, 21-year-old Fred Hampton was an empowering figure.
To the FBI and its director, J. Edgar Hoover, Hampton, the chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, was a radical threat.
Hampton was killed by Chicago police officers early on the morning of 4 December, 1969, during a raid on his West Side apartment, which was a block south of the Black Panther Party’s Chicago headquarters. The ambush, and the months of FBI surveillance of Hampton and the Panthers that preceded it, are dramatized in Shaka King’s film Judas and the Black Messiah, which began streaming Friday on HBO Max.
Here is a guide to the real-life people, groups and events that feature in Judas and the Black Messiah. Be warned, there are spoilers, if such a thing is possible when speaking of history.
Who were the Black Panthers?
The Black Panther Party was founded in 1966 in Oakland, California, by a pair of Black college students, Bobby Seale and Huey P Newton, to oppose police brutality and racism in local neighbourhoods. The Panthers, who were known for their military-style black berets, leather jackets and raised-fist salute, believed in removing abusive officers from communities by any means necessary, including armed resistance.
The FBI viewed the Panthers as a radical group capable of galvanising a militant Black nationalist movement. (Hoover, the bureau’s first director, called the Black Panther Party “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country”). But the Panthers also launched a number of social initiatives: Members ran medical clinics, provided free transportation to prisons for family members of inmates, and started a free breakfast program that fed thousands of schoolchildren.
Who was Fred Hampton?
The charismatic community organiser enjoyed a meteoric rise that took him from campaigning for an integrated community pool and recreational centre in his hometown, Maywood, Illinois, to preaching to thousands as the chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party.
In 1969, a few months after helping to found the party’s Illinois chapter, the 20-year-old Hampton brokered an alliance he called the Rainbow Coalition, which united the Black Panthers, the Young Patriots (Southern white leftists) and the Young Lords (a Puerto Rican civil and human rights organisation) in an effort to combat poverty and racism in their Chicago communities.
Hampton’s rapid ascent through the ranks of the Black Panther Party landed him in the cross hairs of a secret FBI counterintelligence program, known as Cointelpro, that Hoover formed to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralise the activities of Black nationalist, hate-type organisations.” Targets included both the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr and the Ku Klux Klan. Hoover declared in an internal memo that he sought to prevent the “rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify and electrify the militant Black nationalist movement.”
Who was William O’Neal?
At 17, O’Neal (Lakeith Stanfield in the movie) already had a criminal record when the FBI agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons) tracked him down after he stole a car in 1966. But O’Neal soon took on a new role: FBI informant. Given the choice between facing felony charges or agreeing to infiltrate the Panthers, he opted for the latter: as a security captain in the Illinois Black Panther Party, he infiltrated Hampton’s inner circle.
In 1969, O’Neal sketched a floor plan of Hampton’s West Side apartment, including where everyone slept, which the FBI then shared with the Chicago Police Department, the agency that conducted the fatal raid. But unlike the character in Judas and the Black Messiah, the real O’Neal did not see his actions as a betrayal of Hampton or the Panthers. “I had no allegiance to the Panthers,” he recalled in an interview for the PBS docuseries Eyes on the Prize, which chronicled the history of the civil rights movement in the United States.
What happened the morning Fred Hampton was killed?
Fourteen Chicago police officers showed up before dawn on 4 December, 1969, at Hampton’s apartment, acting on the orders of Edward V Hanrahan, the Cook County state’s attorney. Over the course of about 10 minutes, more than 80 shots were fired. When the smoke cleared, Hampton, 21, and another party leader, Mark Clark, 22, were dead, and four other Panthers and two police officers were wounded.
At first, the police claimed they killed Hampton in self-defence after people in the apartment began firing shotguns at them as they tried to execute a search warrant for illegal weapons. But ballistics experts determined that only one of the bullets was probably discharged from a weapon belonging to an occupant of the apartment. A federal grand jury investigation also revealed that the “bullet holes” in the apartment’s front door, which officers had cited as evidence that the Panthers had shot at them, were in fact nail holes created by police.
Though the Chicago Police Department had led the raid, the grand jury concluded that it had been coordinated by the FBI as part of Hoover’s mission to cripple the Black Panther Party — and an FBI memo later revealed that the bureau had authorised a bonus payment to O’Neal.
Judas and the Black Messiah releases in theatres on 5 March.
Sarah Bahr c.2021 The New York Times Company
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