By Sean Yoes, Baltimore AFRO Editor, syoes@afro.com
“Enemies all around me
One mistake and they’ll down me…
I said the enemies all around you
One mistake and they’ll down you”
-Ghostface Killah (“Enemies All Around Me”)
Fred Hampton, the revolutionary chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party would have been 70-years-old on Aug. 30 if he were still alive.
Fred Hampton (Courtesy Photo)
Hampton and Mark Clark, his colleague with the Panthers, were brutally murdered in Chicago by a cowardly mélange of a tactical unit operating under the auspices of the Cook County, Illinois State’s Attorney’s Office, the Chicago Police Department and the FBI. Hampton’s bedroom was riddled with bullets as he slept next to his pregnant girlfriend and later he was shot twice in the head at point blank range.
In 1970, the coroner ruled the deaths of Clark and Hampton “justifiable homicides,” although in 1982, survivors and relatives of Clark and Hampton were paid $1.85 million by the City of Chicago, Cook County and the federal government in a civil lawsuit.
Many chroniclers of the Black American liberation movement argue Hampton and Clark, and so many others, were ultimately victims of the effort known as COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program), a series of covert, often illegal operations, conducted by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, to disrupt and decimate groups Hoover deemed a threat. COINTELPRO “officially” operated between 1956 and 1971. In 1969, it focused on the Black Panther Party and specifically, the charismatic Hampton, who worked to augment the ranks and influence of the BPP by crafting an alliance between his group and a Southside Chicago street gang with thousands of members, which would have doubled the size of the national Black Panther Party.
Simultaneously, Hampton led efforts to unite Black, White and Hispanic community organizers, a prospect which scared the hell out of Hoover and his milieu and compelled them to destroy the Panthers.
Baltimore’s Marshall “Eddie” Conway, another iconic figure of the Black Panther Party and Black liberation movement, was also a victim of COINTELPRO. In 1971, Conway was convicted in the murder of a Baltimore police officer in a dubious trial. Conway consistently maintained his innocence, yet he was jailed for decades until he was released on parole in 2014, after an appellate court ruled his jury was given improper instructions.
Thank God we still have him with us. Conway today works for the Real News Network here in Baltimore.
As we honor the legacy and the work of Hampton, Conway and other soldiers in the Black liberation movement, in 2018, members of Baltimore’s Black advocacy community should heed the lessons derived from their plight.
The night Hampton was murdered he was drugged with a sleep agent by William O’Neal, a member of the BPP turned FBI informant.
According to a report by the Chicago Reader posted in January 1990, O’Neal, who was in charge of Hampton’s security and held keys to Panthers’ headquarters and safe houses, provided the FBI the floor plan to Hampton’s apartment where he and Clark were ultimately murdered. After his cover was blown, O’Neal, fled to California under the alias of William Hart and entered the federal witness program.
He secretly returned to Chicago in 1984, but eventually committed suicide on MLK Day 1990.
The point is, the specter of COINTELPRO, if not the official government apparatus is very real in the minds of some within Baltimore’s Black advocacy community; the tactics of murder and mayhem wielded in the 1960’s and 1970’s have been eschewed by infinitely more subtle tools. In 2018, we have witnessed the emergence of shadowy online groups, who hurl anonymous accusations and attacks. Those who question their motives or their identities are tarred and feathered on social media, or worse.
Ultimately, the result is the same, chaos and confusion sown within groups that are doing work in Baltimore that has prevented the city from being torn asunder at one of the most precarious times in Baltimore’s history. Individuals who have worked on behalf of disenfranchised communities have been ostracized an accused of protecting bullies and criminals, by digital hobgoblins.
The message to the city’s Black advocacy and activist community is simple; stop flailing and focus, every Brother ain’t a Brother and every Sister ain’t a Sister.
“Enemies all around me
One mistake and they’ll down me…
I said the enemies all around you
Sean Yoes (Courtesy Photo)
One mistake and they’ll down you”
Sean Yoes is the Baltimore Editor of the AFRO and author of Baltimore After Freddie Gray: Real Stories From One of America’s Great Imperiled Cities.
