Fred Hampton Sr’s 1969 assassination commemorated

Chicago — This year as every year, Comrade Mother Akua Njeri, the Prisoners of Conscience Committee, the Black Panther Party Cubs and their allies held a vigil for the martyred revolutionary, Chairman Fred Hampton Sr. on his birthday, Aug. 30, at Ground Zero, the site of his assassination by a cop death squad on Dec. 4, 1969.

Chairman Fred Hampton Sr. would have been 64 this year. They call this location Ground Zero because it was the 9/11 of the proletarian revolutionary movement in Chicago’s Black community, where the cops assassinated the Twin Towers of the Illinois Black Panther Party, Chairman Fred and Defense Captain Mark Clark.

Supporters and allies from all over the city and the rest of the country came here to the West Side to show their respect. The residents of 2337 W. Chairman Fred Hampton Sr. Way (Monroe) even have a picture of Chairman Fred Sr. taped up in the second floor window.

Comrade Mother Akua gave a harrowing account of how the Chicago Police Department/Illinois State Attorney’s Office/FBI death squad used machine guns and pump shotguns in the terrorist attack in 1969 and how Chairman Fred Sr. was murdered execution-style after having already been hit by several shots in his blood-soaked bed.

The cops even put a gun to Comrade Mother Akua’s (then known as Deborah Johnson) pregnant belly and threatened to kill her and her unborn son. Chairman Fred Hampton Jr. described the two components of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program: military and psychological. The psychological aspect was the attempt to wipe out the historical legacy of the Black liberation movement, especially the most advanced, revolutionary proletarian expression of it: the Black Panther Party.

He spoke about the need for revolutionary organizations to have discipline and structure in order to minimize the damage state agents can do.

Chairman Fred Jr. has plenty of his own experience with state repression. As a young revolutionary, he was framed up in 1992 by the cops for an alleged arson that never actually even took place, and railroaded into prison until he was paroled in 2001. The state made two attempts to assassinate him in 2002 after he was released, which he described in detail in an interview with hip-hop journalist Davey D.

Despite the threats, he continues his organizing efforts with the POCC, an organization dedicated to upholding and defending the Panther legacy, and fighting for proletarian revolution and the national liberation of the Black internal colony in the U.S. He says the counterinsurgency has not let up but has, instead, continued to harass them.

After the vigil at Ground Zero, Chairman Fred Jr. and Comrade Mother Akua took questions from the crowd and received messages of solidarity from Workers World Party and Occupy Chicago. Everyone then made their way down to The Wall, which is a giant mural of Chairman Fred Sr. at the corner of Madison and California, for the 2012 Streetz Party birthday celebration.

Among those there were Reginald Akkeem Berry Sr. of Saving Our Sons Ministries with a large group from his organization, and others from the Nation of Islam, Occupy Chicago, Radicals Against Discrimination and the Revolutionary Communist Party. A DJ spun hip-hop and dusties [classic R&B and soul music] for the crowd.

Throwing large events like this can strain the resources of grassroots revolutionary organizations like the POCC/BPPC. Those who wish to can send donations to Chairman Fred Hampton Jr., P.O. Box 368255, Chicago, IL 60636.