Are terrorists. We all know that. It is part of our history.

Look no farther than the Black Panthers. And examine how the Chicago police attempted to eliminate the movement. (I'm not sure that it ever recovered.)

In Dec 1969, during a 4:45 in the morning raid, Chicago police stormed the apartment where Fred Hampton, and Deborah Johnson, Blair Anderson, Doc Satchell, Harold Bell, Verlina Brewer, Louis Truelock, Brenda Harris, and Mark Clark were sleeping. Prior to the raid, Hampton had been given a drink laced with a barbituate and that had knocked him out cold.

So cops storm the apartment. Mark Clark, who had been in a front room with a shotgun in his lap, was killed instantly after firing off a single round; the only shot the Panthers fired. The automatic gunfire converged at the head of the bedroom where Hampton slept. (Hundreds of shots were fired, and over the next week, the news media reported them as justification of the police activity. Years later, it would come out that the hundreds of shots fired were all from the police.)

Two officers found Hampton wounded in the shoulder, and fellow Black Panther Harold Bell reported that he heard the following exchange:

"That's Fred Hampton."
"Is he dead?... Bring him out."
"He's barely alive; he'll make it."
Two shots were heard, which it was later discovered were fired point blank in Hampton's head. According to Deborah Johnson, one officer then said:

"He's good and dead now."<7>

Much of the above is from Wikipedia entry on Fred Hampton.

This incident resonated with me in the same gut wrenching manner that My Lai would later resound. When people tell me what a brilliant man Mayor Daley was, this is one of the incidents that I think of. I usually cannot even reply as to why I disapproved of 'da Mayor' so much.

The thoughts of what went on in that apartment, the camaraderie that these young people must have shared, the discussion about the evils of the society, and the need to stop the war in Vietnam, also the discourse of how one should live in a way that real change would manifest - all those were topics my friends of the time shared with me.

But we didn't go down in a hail of bullets. We hadn't succeeded in setting up community food programs, or day care centers, or neighborhood safety squads. We weren't effective. They were, and they had the nerve to be black, and they were eliminated.





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