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BOBBY SEALE: When our brother, Martin King, exhausted a means of nonviolence with his
life being taken by some racist, what is being done to us is what we hate, and what happened
to Martin Luther King is what we hate. You're darn right, we respect nonviolence. But to
sit and watch ourselves be slaughtered like our brother, we must defend ourselves, as
Malcolm X says, by any means necessary. WILLIAM O'NEAL: At this point, I question
the whole purpose of the Black Panther Party. In my thinking, they were necessary as a shock
treatment for white America to see black men running around with guns just like black men
saw the white man running around with guns. Yeah, that was a shock treatment. It was good
in that extent. But it got a lot of black people hurt.
ELAINE BROWN: There was no joke about what was going on, but we believed in our hearts
that we should defend ourselves. And there were so many that did do that.
NARRATOR: By 1968, the Black Panther Party was part of an increasingly volatile political
scene. That summer, the National Democratic Convention in Chicago was disrupted by violent
clashes between demonstrators and police. The war in Vietnam polarized the nation and
the political and racial upheaval at home soon became an issue in the presidential campaign.
PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON: This is a nation of laws and as Abraham Lincoln had said, no
one is above the law, no one is below the law, and we're going to enforce the law and
Americans should remember that if we're going to have law and order.
JERRIS LEONARD: I think it's fair to say that as the Nixon administration came into office,
as we came into office in 1969, there certainly was a strong perception of radicalization.NARRATOR:
In Chicago, and in other cities, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, expanded surveillance of
organizations in the black community, especially the Black Panther Party.
Directives issued by FBI headquarters a few weeks after the elections called for "imaginative
and hard hitting counterintelligence measures aimed at crippling the Black Panther Party."
On Chicago's west side, the Panthers had just opened their first office in Illinois.
Well, the thing that I really loved about the Black Panthers is that they refused to
be ignored. It was very easy to ignore black people back then because everybody figured,
"Well, it's just a lot of talk. They're not going to do anything, they'll just go on and
on and on moaning and groaning about how terrible everything is. And they at the best, they
just might get involved in some acts of nonviolence." But that's about it, and they just kind of
-- you know, business as usual. You couldn't have business as usual with the Black Panthers.
The Black Panthers were definitely going to be heard.
So we say, we always say in the Black Panther Party, that they can do anything they want
to us. We might not be back, I might be in jail, I might be anywhere. But when I leave,
you can come out there, with the last words on my lips, I am a revolutionary and you're
going to have to keep on saying that. You're going to have to say that I am a proletariat.
I am the people, I'm not the pig. You got to make a distinction. And the people are
going to have to attack the pigs. The people are going to have to stand up against the
pigs. That's what the Panthers is doing, that's what the Panthers are doing all over the world.
NARRATOR: Fred Hampton, a former NAACP youth organizer, became at age 20, chairman of the
Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. The Panther's programs drew mixed reactions
in Chicago's black community. MARION STAMPS: Many black people initially
was very, very afraid of the Black Panther Party.I understood where they were trying
to go politically and felt that they had to change things, and when I talk about fear,
I was afraid they weren't going to do it right. And I was always trying to cool them out and
say, "That's not the right way to go." They were too direct.
You could tell that this was a movement that was very meaningful to them. And none of them
were suicidal, so it wasn't like they were out there trying to figure out a way to get
killed. But they did honestly and truly believe in power to the people. I mean, that was their
slogan. Here you found some brothers and sisters saying
first, you know -- Look, the United States Constitution guarantees us the right to bear
arms and to protect ourselves. And we understand that we need protection in the black community
and it's our responsibility to protect black women and black children, not the police.
Because the police is not here to serve and protect us, only to continue to enslave us.
It is our responsibility to see to it that our people have a decent place to live, decent
food to eat, and quality health care, not the system. So that find a lot of people
-- I mean, they didn't think that it could happen, they didn't think that it was right.
FRED HAMPTON: People learn by example. I don't think anybody here has an argument with that.
I think that when Huey P. Newton said that people learn basically by observation and
participation, I think that everybody caught on to that. So what we're saying here simply
is they learn by observation and participation, then we need to do more acting than we need
to do writing. And I think the Black Panther Party is doing that. We didn't talk about
a breakfast for children program, we got one. PANTHER: Come on in, little brothers, come
on in, little sisters, you all can sit down and get something to eat.
NARRATOR: The new breakfast for children program soon attracted the attention of the FBI. Claiming
the program served to indoctrinate children, the Bureau directed field offices to "Formulate
specific counterintelligence techniques to disrupt this nefarious activity." The FBI
stepped up its efforts to recruit blacks to infiltrate the Black Panther Party.
My recruitment by the FBI was very efficient, very simple, really. I'd stole a car and went
joyriding over the state limit. And they had a potential case against me, and I was looking
for an opportunity to work it off. And a couple months alter, that opportunity came when the
FBI agent Roy Mitchell asked me to go down to the local office of the Black Panther Party
and try to gain membership. I think everyone that was in the Black Panther
Party kind of understood that it was a given that we would have wiretaps, that we would
be followed, that we would be harassed, we'd be locked up, that we would even be beaten
by the police. NARRATOR: In the winter of 1969, law enforcement
agencies launched efforts to undermine an attempted coalition between the Black Panther
Party and the Blackstone Rangers, a Chicago gang.
HOWARD SAFFOLD: The Panthers were pursuing an ideology that said we need to take these
young minds, this young energy, and turn it into part of our movement in terms of black
liberation and the rest of it. And I saw a very purposeful, intentional effort on the
part of the police department to keep that head from hooking up to that body. It was
like, you know, do not let this thing become a part of what could ultimately be a political
movement, because that's exactly what it was. NARRATOR: FBI agents wrote an anonymous letter
to Jeff Fort, the leader of the Blackstone Rangers warning Fort that the Panthers have,
"a hit out for you." The Bureau knew that the information was false, but believed that
Fort might take retaliatory action against the Panthers. Meanwhile, city officials announced
a crackdown on gangs. REPORTER: Would you say that street gangs
can do no good? Is that what you would say? >No, I wouldn't say that. I think that the
energy of youth properly directed could be a tremendous betterment, could lead to a tremendous
betterment of our city and individuals progress themselves. Now, I am complaining about the
misdirection, I am complaining about the fact that 620 out of 693 shooting victims are black
themselves, and I think that's a tragedy. That is where the black genocide is occurring
here. NARRATOR: The Chicago police expanded their
anti-gang campaign to include the Black Panther Party. In late May, Fred Hampton was sent
to prison. He had been convicted on a charge of stealing $71 worth of ice cream bars.
WILLIAM O'NEAL: We tried to develop negative information to discredit him, just like we
did everybody else. We, me and the FBI, tried to come up with signs of him doing drugs or
something. And never could, he was clean, he was dedicated.
I've had private conversations with him. We got along pretty well.