April 2, 2003

Loaded images

Dead heroes, living lessons, Black Panthers, and The Murder of Fred Hampton. By J.H. Tompkins

You can kill a revolutionary, but you can't kill the revolution.

Fred Hampton

I DEEPLY ADMIRED Fred Hampton during the late 1960s, when he was a charismatic Black Panther leader from Chicago. A brilliant speaker, he could transform an unruly crowd into a rapt congregation with the turn of a phrase. Or so it was said; I never met him, but he was my age, and from the sound of things, as streetwise and tough as I was not. The 2,000 miles between Oakland and Chicago only enhanced a presence I'd fashioned from news clippings, photos, rumors, and stories. When the Chicago police murdered Hampton years before the Panthers self-destructed, they spared him and me the complications of the future – dead heroes won't let you down.

Filmmaker-writer Mike Gray was making a documentary about Hampton, and during 1969 he spent considerable time filming the quick-witted, camera-friendly young man. The project was still a work in progress when Chicago police suddenly called it a wrap and gave The Murder of Fred Hampton its name. On Dec. 4, 1969, at 6:30 in the morning, 15 heavily armed cops stormed a South Side apartment, murdering Mark Clark and a sleeping Hampton, who had been drugged the night before by his bodyguard – a moonlighting FBI informant. Gray arrived with his camera shortly after a quartet of grinning cops carried Hampton's body away. He left with horrifying footage of smashed doors, bullet holes, and a mattress saturated with blood and used it to undermine an official story that smelled worse each time it was aired. The film, released in 1971, brings Hampton into focus and helped force the indictment of 14 people, including Chicago district attorney Vincent Hanrahan, on charges of criminal conspiracy in connection with the murder.

That was then

The Black Panther Party, led by Huey P. Newton, was founded in Oakland in 1966. The Panthers redefined the so-called black militant in the public imagination by arming themselves and patrolling Oakland police as they patrolled Oakland. The Panthers wore leather jackets and black berets and declared themselves to be for multinational unity and Mao Tse-tung. Black youths lined up to join, and Panther support became a barometer of commitment for the largely white "movement," a gut check measured by one's willingness to "pick up the gun."

Street smarts were heavy, school smarts weren't, and white radicals left campus looking for trouble. They found it – at least I did – staring down the barrel of an FBI revolver one day at home and then at an all-night vigil inside Richmond Panther headquarters, armed, reckless, and scared, waiting for a rumored police raid. When the shooting, jailing, beating, and threatening became routine, when friends and classmates stayed in Vietnam after their bodies flew home, the most important rule of the game became clear: the Yankees played hardball.

There's plenty of hardball in The Murder of Fred Hampton, but the film is about more than guns and death. Despite scratchy sound and bombastic sloganeering, the film offers a telling glimpse of the '60s – of hope, frustration, grandstanding, and revenge. The Panthers' mouths were on the offensive, but their weapons were used in self-defense – and the police-Panther body count tilted heavily in favor of the law.

Despite international prominence and many thousands of supporters, the Panthers began to self-destruct at the turn of the decade. The police stepped back and let the Panthers shoot themselves, metaphorically and sometimes literally. The ugly personal failures of leaders like Party founder Newton became a generic societal exhibit A used to prove, somehow, the futility of dreaming.

Attacking the 1960s has been a national sport for 30-some years. Even hoary "'60s people" want the decade to go away. To this day those years provide the negative point of reference for the born-again shock troops – the families Bush and Cheney, Kenneth Starr, Richard Perle, and Marvin Olasky – standing guard over America's moral character.

A web of information

Hampton's short life has passed into the netherworld of memory, but his murder by criminal conspiracy has an echo today, as the euphemistically named coalition forces ravish Iraq. The ill wind that long ago whipped through Chicago was generated by conditions unique to that moment, but it bore the same too-familiar odor hanging in the air today. Uncle Sugar is on the warpath, his message brutally clear: defy me and suffer the consequences.

Corporate media are doing P.R. for the Pentagon – they've got no time for the news. When Panthers walked the earth, the media was less centralized and powerful than it is today, but it played a similar role. The stranglehold was challenged by hundreds of underground newspapers and newsletters; by word of mouth, flyers, and photos; and by a handful of important films, including The Murder of Fred Hampton. In 1969 I kept my bearings by reading The Black Panther and the Berkeley Tribe. They captured the spirit of the day, if not always its substance.

Today the Internet gives activists a weapon unlike any they've had. The promises and possibilities of cyberspace have profoundly influenced the style and character of today's resistance. Digital technology came out as a rebel political weapon in 1999 at the anti-World Trade Organization Battle of Seattle. Strategy and tactics were developed to emphasize individual responsibility, and without centralized leadership, the mass of protesters was not a regimented army but a constantly evolving protoplasm. They honed hit-and-run tactics, took over the downtown streets, and – exploring the democratic possibilities of digital technology and cyberspace – broadcast news of their victories to the world.

Jesse Drew, a lifelong activist and currently associate director of technocultural studies at UC Davis, is passionate on the subject. "What's important here," he explains, "is that everyone's a broadcaster as well as a receiver. That's what democratic communication is all about."

Promoting the Panthers

Although Gray made The Murder of Fred Hampton as part of the Film Group, if you ask '60s activists about radical filmmaking in those days, they'll tell you about Newsreel Film. A loosely organized collective of activist filmmakers, Newsreel was founded in New York in 1967, expanded to San Francisco in 1968, and within a few years had produced a body of films that reflected the excitement, challenge, confusion, and chaos of the times.

"We made films down and dirty," remembers Richmond resident Jeff Marchant, who was an San Francisco State University film student in 1968 when he joined San Francisco Newsreel. "And the purpose of the films was to help the movement, and we were part of that movement."

San Francisco Newsreel made two films about the Panthers, 1968's "Black Panther (a.k.a. Off the Pig)" and 1969's "Mayday!" "We were very conscious of what we were doing," Marchant says, but not without pointing out that these are his opinions of a group that had a lot of them. "We wanted to help promote the Panthers. The first film was shown around the country at a time when people were looking for a model, and then here was this powerful image, with Huey in the chair, the berets and black leather coats. It frightened the powers that be and was important to promoting the Panthers."

Don't follow leaders

Eight months after Hampton's death, Newton – imprisoned for killing an Oakland cop – was granted a new trial. He went to jail when the Panthers were still a fledgling organization, provided them with the "Free Huey" campaign they rode into the spotlight, and emerged an international celebrity who would soon be declared the Supreme Servant of the People. He moved into a Lake Merritt penthouse, introduced Marxist-Leninist-Pantherist thought, and debated William F. Buckley on national television, not necessarily a mistake, but an odd coming-out party nevertheless. The movement mushroomed while Newton was in jail, and good luck to anyone waiting for the old Huey to come back – he didn't exist in the first place. When a Panther faction headed by Eldridge Cleaver clashed with Newton, you could hear a death rattle in the distance. As the decade pushed on, most Panthers quit the party, as did all but the most sycophantic of Newton's white followers.

The years have added depth to Gray's film, and new questions that are more complicated and, in some ways, more troubling than murderous police. It's about bombastic, provocative rhetoric, about individuals and groups, leaders and the led. It's about anyone – me included – who got to know and love Newton while he was behind bars, and how we really didn't get to know him at all.

"I have the pleasure now to introduce who I believe is one of the baddest motherfuckers in the world." That's Hampton talking in The Murder of Fred Hampton, about to bring Black Panther Party chair Bobby Seale to an audience of supporters. "We love the Black Panther Party, and we love chairman Bobby Seale.... We say we're drawing a line somewhere, saying, 'If you cross the line, motherfuckers, if you gonna try to bash us, we'll blow your brains out.' "

Hopefully today's activists have seen enough to know better. After a generation of fallen walls and fallen heroes; after the Gang of Four and the Soviet Bloc; after turncoats, sellouts, and mistake-ridden, fallible humans, there's no market for heroes. For many activists, that means decisions by consensus, and principled decentralized democracy – for me, it means contemplating the relationship of individual biography to the biography of groups. I wonder if the United States can someday become – in some fabulous conjoining of technology, wisdom, patience, and principle – a nation of 200 million stories. Can we uproot the myths lying deep in our unconscious, the shared instincts and impulses that bind individuals into the powerful "us" where, whether we like it or not, unity becomes strength and strength becomes power. Can we move forward as individuals with no one speaking for us, until there is no more us, except each and everyone of us? Can we live in a world without the safety and security of bad motherfuckers like Hampton?

Pop history

Recently, while speaking to a class of college sophomores, I referred to the Panthers, and a young woman said, "Oh, yeah, with the afros and fists in the air." I began to correct her – I was there, after all, and knew her description added nothing but misinformation. But she remembered her history and was just telling me what she'd learned: black militancy in the 1960s as a series of images featuring large afros and the "power salute."

History in the United States is delivered in a blur of visual and aural information shaped to enhance its potential as a vehicle for commerce. In the voracious jaws of popular culture, the years during which many Americans battled racism in the South and murder abroad has been reduced to an array of symbols that warp self-sacrifice and courage in ahistorical parody. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech (rights to which were sold for commercial use to Alcatel) has become not an moving chapter in the struggle for civil rights, but the whole wrenching movement all by itself. As far as popular culture is concerned, the Panthers have been passed down as if they were characters from a Bruce Lee martial arts movie. '60s antiwar activists – save bitter turncoats like David Horowitz and Todd Gitlin – are slumming rich kids like Patty Hearst or confused, blundering guerrilla wanna-bes like Sara Jane Olsen.

An expatriate Russian writer named Svetlana Boym, marveling in half horror, wrote in her book The Future of Nostalgia that "unless you are a hopelessly romantic foreigner, you cannot even long for anything outside of pop culture." Which is to say, who cares how things happened once upon a time, and what does it matter anyway?

The rest of the story

The Black Panthers Party was founded by Newton and Seale, two young men from West Oakland. They'd taken what they could take and decided to give something back in return – and no doubt it's possible to fix a time, a date, and a place to the moment the idea started to roll. But when other people came around the party – in late 1967; in 1970, the day Newton was freed; in 1974, when he was accused of killing a 17-year-old girl; or in 1989, when he died on that West Oakland sidewalk (dust to dust, Huey) – once everyone got involved, the story morphed in countless ways.

I cheered in 1967 when I read how the Panthers marched into the floor of the state assembly in Sacramento, and I began dreaming Panther dreams. I saw the Panthers standing in tight formation and invented my own private Panthers; so, too, did everyone else – the filmmakers from Newsreel; those who saw the films; activists who fought to free Newton, who recoiled in dismay to see him with his swagger stick; and those of us, like me, who, when we heard he had been killed, stood silent for a moment, to honor the man we wanted him to be.

The Murder of Fred Hampton twisted me up like a pretzel, even as it demanded I step back and sort through a thicket of feelings and ideas. "The Black Panthers 1968: Photographs by Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones," an exhibit at the UC Berkeley Art Museum, is a collection of Panther photos taken in Oakland. The images show young black men and women, seemingly proud and definitely empowered, or so it seems to me. If the sight of dozens of identically dressed black youths – some of them brandishing weapons – bothers you, it's time to sort through a few things.

The experience is all part of the Panthers' legacy, felt in Oakland like nowhere else. Popular culture was essential to how the Black Panther Party grew. Nearly 40 years later, it clearly has played a role in convincing some corners of the world that the questions of yesterday have been answered. If you share that perception, go to Oakland, the party's birthplace, and drop in on one of the high schools. Or drive out East 14th Street past 73rd Avenue. Some things haven't changed a bit; some have gotten worse. Newton, Seale, and the Panthers made mistakes, but by refusing to back down, they exposed America's ugly racial inequities. When Newton and Seale founded the party, black men from West Oakland weren't supposed to work anywhere but the Post Office on Seventh Street. Instead, a handful of youths went out, defied authority, and made international news.