Part Two: The Bastards Who Killed the Black Panthers

Robert is joined again by political activist, poet, and podcaster, Propaganda to continue to discuss the monsters who murdered the Black Panthers.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the only podcast on
the Internet that you are listening to right now presumably,
and if it's you're listening to a multiple podcast at once,
I'm concerned. Yeah, no way, but it's not impossible. It's
no way you're retaining anything. You're missing a lot. Yes, um,

(00:21):
And this is a podcast about the worst people in
all of history. And we're doing a bit of an
odd duck of an episode because we're focusing a lot
on on some folks who I think are are pretty
cool dudes. Um. But last episode was to build up, uh,
to the bastards who tried to destroy them. So this
is an episode about how the FBI and law enforcement

(00:42):
tried to take down the Black Panther Party. Uh. My
guest for part two, as with part one, is prop propaganda,
hip hop artist and podcast yourself. What'saw y'all. I'm just
glad to be here, just smiling so much, I don't know,
glad to have you here. Um. We've been really happy
to have your perspective and excited to get into the

(01:04):
rest of this. So um. We talked about the Moford
Act in the last episode, which which stopped the Black
Panthers from carrying loaded weapons in the state of California. UM,
but did not stop the Black Panthers from loving themselves
some firearms, weapons training, stockpiling. They remained a big part
of what they did. Uh. And I found an archive
of magazines published by the Black Panther Community News Service,

(01:27):
which was like they're essentially their media network. Um. And
one issue from nineteen sixty nine included this cartoon UM
which Sophie can show you and I guess I can
describe it. You can describe if you'd like, Let prop
describe it. Yes, So this is from the Black Panther yeahtop, Yeah,

(01:48):
the magazine that they ran, magazine. So it's like it's
very familiar with their style of animation, but it's like
thick animation style of illustrations, like thick, like out black
out lined characters like that are just kind of shaded
in grays UM and uh, yellow or orange letters in

(02:11):
blue letters. It's like a black family. Um, I think
that's a child, but the child looks like an adult
up the animation style and it's kind of like a
cartoon or like a like a comic strip. But the
brothers got a good throw both the brothers got a
good throw and the sisters got a nice little hair
wrap on. Yeah, am I supposed to say? What? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah,

(02:33):
What's what's going on in the cartoon? It says, so
Dad's got his hand on the shoulders a little homie,
and he says, son, what do you want for Christmas?
And I can't really make out what read what the
sun says he wants for Christmas? A machine gun, a shotgun,
a box of hand grenades, a box of dynamite, and

(02:56):
I think a box of handguns is the nineteen sixty
nine um. And then there's some stuff written around the
edges of the cartoon UM, including off the pig, blow
oink oink away and snipe the hawks um in w
a yeah really intense yes on his way to like

(03:19):
the f the police song, Yeah yeah. And violence against
the police was a constant refrain in Black Panther periodicals,
and it was usually framed as necessary self defense against
an oppressive and violent force. UM. And there is this
kind of unavoidably gleeful tone and some of the discussions
against violence against law enforcement, which I think is really
uncomfortable for a lot of particularly kind of middle of

(03:41):
the road centrist political UM people to to to deal
with um to to like accept but uh, there's there's
a reason for this, Yeah, yeah, there And and that's
what this episode is about, is like why there was
so much paranoia and hatred of the police, not just

(04:02):
as sort of like the violence against black people by
law enforcement, but specifically because the Panthers knew the police
were targeting them. Um and as the sixties turned into seventies,
an increasing amount of their anti law enforcement rhetoric focused
on the Federal Bureau of Investigations. UM and I found
a really interesting website, black Power in American History. It
appears to be a graduate student project from UNC at

(04:24):
Chapel Hill, and they analyzed piles of old Black Panther
magazines and noted they would claim that if the Black
Panthers did not join or follow a particular course of action,
disaster will result. An example of this was seen in
the article published on January nine, ninety one, when it
read when a pig is caught dirty snoop and shows
you his badge and begs for mercy, mercy him to
death with the butt of your gun towards the bottom.

(04:45):
It also reads kill the pigs before they kill you.
The pigs here are referring to undercover FBI agents that
were sent to infiltrate the party and cause internal unrest.
And again, this is really uncomfortable rhetoric for a lot
of folks to read. But it wasn't It wasn't just
bawned from bloodthirstiness. The FBI and the police were engaged
in an active battle to destroy the Black Panthers and

(05:07):
to murder many of their leaders in this period of time,
and a lot of folks would have just called them conspiratorial. Um,
would have said that they were sort of making stuff
up because they're paranoid. Um. All of these fears were
proved valid by documentation that later came out, which we'll
get to at the end of this episode. There's a
a good tie into like modern time, especially like you know,

(05:29):
the community that spawned the hip hop music that most
of us kind of consider golden age, Like these were
our dads, you know, our moms. Like so even just
like you know, eight song from n w A for
the Police, like this isn't just it's hard. It's hard

(05:50):
if you're not here, like to understand that, like you know,
Iced Teas Cop killer. It's like, Okay, you you think
that this is uh like a honorable like officer position,
that that job is a job of person that carries
prestige and honor. It's like that is not our experience

(06:13):
with the police, like your experiences. This is another gang, right,
It's just the law protects them, you know. So you
have this attitude towards him. There's another song, but I
feel like you're your taste in hip hop. Would know
if I'd say, Jay Dilla, you know what I'm saying,
so like you liken more of the obscure or doom
tree stuff. I've been listening. I've been listening to you

(06:34):
know what I'm saying. Uh and uh you know. Um,
So you take somebody like J. J. Diller, who has
also has a song called the Police, and it's it's
the ideas, Like the backstory with that song was like
there was this false tip that he was engaged in
some criminal activity and the police raided his mom's basement,
you know, destroyed all these things. It's like destroyed hard

(06:56):
drive stuff. Like this guy's like recording albums for you know,
uh child call quest, Like he's recording albums for for
busta rhymes like all these like main major level Like
he's like you guys asked Pharrell, Timberland, all these like
you know, producers, they're all like we got our swing
from Jay Dilla, you know, and like and Dilla. So
Dilla wrote this song. This guy, this guy like he

(07:18):
just rated my and so he made that song that day,
like after the police just rated his mom's basement and
destroyed just volumes and volumes of music that none of
us will never get now, you know what I'm saying. Um,
So the attitude is like you're your bullies. You're not
policing us, you are bullies, you know. So it's it's

(07:39):
hard not to respond that way. But so if you
understand as a long statement, but if you understand, like
our relationship with law and for and I say this
as somebody who's like my brothers is a highway patrol officer,
you know what I'm saying, Like, so we have law
enforcement in our family, you know, but the institution since

(07:59):
this day, Like so it's like this is coursing through
our veins. Our grandparents are great grandparents, our fathers, you
know what I'm saying, Like, this is our relationship with
the police, sorry, that's just is so triggering. No, just
and just as as a way to kind of make
that point just into the modern era, because we're talking
about decades ago and most of this episode. Um. I've
had a two thousand fifteen article in the Washington Post

(08:20):
about civil asset forfeitures, which is what happens when police
take your stuff with no recourse versus burglary. In two uh,
police civil asset forfeitures total more than five billion dollars
worth of property. Police took five billion dollars worth of
property with no recourse really from people. Burglaries accounted for
less than four billion dollars worth of theft. So when

(08:42):
you're making that comparison between police and the burglars, there's
some numbers you can throw out there that are very compelling. Um. Yeah,
that's that's probably enough for now. Um. So. In nineteen
fifty six, the FBI launched its co Intel pro operation
UM co Intel pro usual. We see it written in
all caps as one one where it's an acronym. Initially

(09:03):
aimed at targeting communist organizers in the United States, it
was later expanded to strike at groups like the KKK,
but thanks in large part to jer Hoover. In the
late nineteen sixties, the FBI co intel pro operations focused
increasingly and primarily on the Black Panthers. This was a
sophisticated and complex operation. Hoover himself wrote, one of our

(09:24):
primary aims and counterintelligence as it concerns the b PP,
is to keep the group isolated from the moderate black
and white community which may support it. And I'm gonna
quote again from the book Black Against Empire here, the
federal agents sought to create factionalism among the party leaders
and between the Panthers and other black political organizations. FBI
operatives forged documents and paid provocateurs to promote violent conflicts

(09:45):
between Black Panther leaders as well as between the Party
and other Black nationalist organizations, and congratulated themselves when these
conflicts yielded the killing of Panthers, and co intel pro
sought to lead the party into unsupportable actions, creating opposition
to the bp P on the part of the majority
of the residents of the ghetto areas. For example, agent
provocateurs on the government payroll supplied explosives to Panther members

(10:07):
and sought to incite them to blow up public buildings
and they promoted kangaroo courts, encouraging panther members to torture
inspected informants. Yeah. Yeah, so like that's it's so like
that's so like, you know, illuminating, because it's like you're
in the room. It's like you're in a room with
like rational people and somebody else from the back you
should just punch them in the pot. You're just like,

(10:28):
who said that? Right? And then everybody goes you see
what they're about. They're about punching in the butt, Like, well,
who first of all, who punches in the butt? Number one?
You know what I'm saying. But then but just them
planting these people to push them into places that make
other people uncomfortable, and then that becomes the narrative. Yeah,
it's clearly so effective. Yeah, it was very effective and

(10:52):
very um insidious. Um. And we'll get into the numbers
a little bit later how much they spent on this,
but um For in a specific exam uple of how
this process worked, I think we need to turn to
nineteen sixty eight, when J. Edgar Hoover sent a memorandum
to fourteen FBI field offices noting that a state of
gang warfare existed between a group called the US Organization,
a black nationalist group, and the Panthers now US as

(11:15):
a complicated Organization UM. Their founder, among other things, is
the guy who created Quanza UM and I we're not
going to do them justice in this episode. For today's purposes.
What's important to know is that US and the Panthers
had a lot of disagreements on how to achieve black liberation,
and it competed aggressively for new recruits UM through a
network of informants. The FBI learned this, and Hoover noted

(11:36):
that they'd seen evidence that there had been threats of
murder between some members. He took notice of this and
ordered what he called imaginative and hard hitting counter intelligence
measures aimed at crippling the BPP. In order to fully capitalize,
in his words, on the rivalry and exploit all avenues
of creating further dissension, The FBA ordered its informants and
US to tell members when the BPP planned to have events,

(11:59):
so that US could also show up and both in
organizations would wind up in conflict. They did whatever they
could to stoke hatred between both groups, including having their
paid informant spread rumors about either side to the other group,
like rumors about like them being there being hits planned
and murders plan raising the temperature that was the goal. UM.
And this all came to a boil. UM at an

(12:21):
event your father was at January nineteen sixty nine, UM,
when al Prentice Carter and John Huggins were gunned down
by US members on the u c l A campus. Yeah,
it's just it's like junior high all over again, only
with like murder, yeah mixed in, you know. Yeah, it's

(12:44):
so sad man. Yeah, Pops was at that anyway, continue Sorry.
The Black Panther seemed to instinctively know what was going on.
UM and their magazines declared the murders of political killing.
They pointed out that US received government funding and had
a working relationship with the police. They also note that
seventeen Panthers were arrested in the immediate wake of the murders,
while it took much longer for the law to get

(13:04):
take action against the actual killers, who were members of US. UM. Now,
only some of the FBI's co intel profacory has been
declassified at this point, so we'll never know the exact
extent to which the Bureau planned all this. There are
allegations that what happened at u c A was an
ordered hit. Others will argue that the FBI definitely intended
for there to be murders, but they weren't trying to

(13:25):
stoke specific murders. So they wanted to raise the temperature
to where murders were inevitable, but they weren't saying, on
this date, kill these people. There's also allegations that they
were in fact saying, on this date, kill these people.
Um was like yeah, they had a list this who
you're supposed to die, you know, yeah, yeah, And we
can verify that they absolutely specifically intended to stoke violence.

(13:49):
That they wrote, we want to make these people kill
each other like that like that that that we know,
um to a point of certainty. Um. Whatever the truth
about how specific they were about the violence they wanted, Um,
the violence like happened and it was very much stoked
by the FBI. And on May nineteen sixty nine, Black
panther John Savage was killed by US members. Sylvester Bell

(14:11):
was murdered in August. Now, most of the information behind
all this didn't come out until a series of court
battles in the late nineteen seventies, so particularly like white
people reading about this at the time would have just said, oh,
these these black liberation groups are also violent, look at
what they're doing to each other, ignoring the fact that
it was their FBI and was stoking all this. Yeah. Um,
and I found a really good New York Times article

(14:33):
from nineteen seventy six, Um, when this started to come out,
that goes into detail about everything here, and it notes
that the Bureau, working with the Chicago Police Department, also
sought to create violent divisions between the Panthers and the
black Stone Rangers, which are now a much more complicated organization.
At that point, we're a street gang in Chicago. Quote.
For example, a fake note was sent to the leader
of the street gang, Jeff Ford, telling him the Panthers

(14:55):
hostility towards his group, saying they're supposed to be a
hit out for you. In noting that that this meant
there was probably a contract to kill someone, the Chicago
FBI office set in a memorandum to headquarters that the
letter may intensify the degree of animosity between the two
groups and occasion for it to take retaliatory action, which
could disrupt the b PP or lead to reprisals against
their leadership. So the FBI sends this fake letter about

(15:17):
a hit and note specifically we're hope, like we think
this is going to make them angrier at each other
and might stoke violence, and that's our goal. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's just it's just like, can we just like okay,
acknowledge that, like we you can't make this stuff up. No,
you can't make this stuff up. You know. One thing

(15:40):
that's really frustrating about this is that it, um it's
spread so far even outside of among the entire left
wing activist community. It's spent a lot of time in
that community, um for my work, and there are constant
modern fears about co intel pro stuff even among like
white activist group primarily white activist groups, um of FBI
informants and stuff like. You find this this fear among

(16:00):
a lot of members of anti fascist street groups right
now that there's agent provocateurs and maybe there are like
it's happened, like that's the thing, it's like they did it.
There is precedence, yes, yeah, yeah, there's really no limit
to what you might be worried. The FBI will do
to your activist group because this ship happened. Um yeah,
Now I'm gonna quote again from that New York Times article.

(16:21):
The report portraits of campaign in which the Bureau used
a legion of informers, sometimes as provocateurs, and close cooperation
with local police anti radical squads to so confusion, fear,
and dissension among the Panthers. Cartoons attacking them purportedly from
rival groups were distributed to aggravate antagonisms. Stories were planted
with newspaper and television outlets to put the Panthers and
their supporters in a bad light. Bogus messages were sent

(16:42):
to cause rifts between the party and its white leftist supporters.
This was a comprehensive campaign. Imagine this and like the
Internet age just be like just trolls attacking your comments
section for the purpose of m hmm. Yeah. It'll maybe
thirty years, yeah, yeah, we it'll probably be a few

(17:05):
years before the extent to which that stuff is going
on comes out now. And you know what, to be
entirely honest, it's possible that none of it now was
the FBI. That it's all for example, government like private
corporations contracted by government agencies or whatever like, who knows. Yeah,
the FBI's Cointal Probe campaign seriously disrupted the Black Panthers,
but it did not stop them from expanding. Throughout the

(17:25):
late sixties and early nineteen seventies, the organization was under
constant stress, though, and this was not helped by the
fact that, for some strange reason, its leaders kept getting
imprisoned and assassinated. I wonder why all of a sudden
started kid making crimes. They just they just went off
the rails. Yeah. I think we'll start on this subject
by talking about what happened to Huey P. Newton on

(17:48):
October seven, nineteen sixty seven, who we walked down to
his girlfriend's house on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. It was
a Friday night. They were going to party, but she
wound up feeling sick and instead lent in her card
to take out on the town own. He had a
drink at the bar and then went to a church
social where he danced until around two am. Then he
drove to a party, which he left it around four am.
That early morning, October Officer John Frey of the Oakland

(18:11):
Police was sitting in his squad car. He saw hue
drive past and recognized his plates. We don't know precisely
if the Bureau had local cops keeping tabs on Huey,
if this was an FBI directed operation, or if the
Oakland cops on their own. We're just wanting to funk
with Huey. Either is entirely possible, but without any apparent cause.
John Frey made one of the last mistakes of his life.
He pulled Huey p Newton over. Here's how SF Weekly

(18:34):
describes what happened next. Officer Herbert C. Hines rolled up
on the scene shortly after Frey had radioed for backup.
The officers told Newton to get out of the bug
and marched him to the back of Haines's patrol car.
Newton and Frey started scuffling on the trunk of Haines's car.
A gun went off. Haines was hit in the right forearm.
Heines fired back, hitting Newton in the gut. More shots
were fired. Haines was shot three times and survived. Newton

(18:56):
took that bullet to the gut and fled the scene
with McKinney, which is a friend he was with. Freight
was shot five times and died. He had been on
the force for a little over a year and had
a three year old daughter. He was only twenty three,
but all of the men involved in the melee were
well under thirty. Now we don't know what actually happened.
Newton claims to have blacked out after being shot, which
is totally reasonable, and speculates that the cops shot each

(19:17):
other and all of the recovered bullets came from police revolvers.
Speculation on what went down ranges from Huey grabbing a
cops gun and shooting them both, to him resisting when
the cops started beating him and then them shooting each
other in error, to an attempted assassination of Huey by
the Oakland p DE gone horribly wrong. I don't know
what exactly went down, but I do think additional context

(19:38):
on Officer James Frey is useful here, and I'm gonna
quote from Black Against Empire. Frey had been implicated in
numerous incidents of racism. H Bruce Bison, an English teacher
who invited Frey to speak about police work to his
class at Clayton Valley High School, reported that Frey had
told the class that inwards in the neighborhood he patrolled
were a lot of bad types, and the trial eventually

(19:58):
held to adjudicate the nts of that early morning. Alfred Dunning,
an accountant for Prudential Life Insurance, testified that Frey had
racially harassed him during a traffic accident, and when Dunning
complained that Frey was acting like the Gestapo, Frey loosened
his holster, put his hand on his gun and said
I am the Gestapo, and ordered done into the police car.

(20:20):
The best. Yeah, that's the quiet part. Yes. Earlier on
the evening that Huey Newton and Gene McKinney drove to
get soul food on Seventh Street, Frey had intervened in
a dispute between a black grocery clerk named Daniel King
and a white man without pants on, who claimed King
had stolen his pants. According to King, Fray called him
an inward and held his arms so the white man

(20:41):
could beat him. So this is the guy who winds
up in this. I don't have trouble believing um that
it was self defense. It's also entirely possible that both
of them fucked up, or that both of them were
trying to kill Hue and shot each other. Um, who
knows any scenario works, yeah, um, But obviously Huey P.

(21:04):
Newton gets charged with murder um as a result of
of of the shooting death of Officer James Freight Um,
and in prison, hue became a living martyr to the
Black Panthers. There was a rally on his twenty six
birthday February sevent nineteen sixty eight, that brought more than
six thousand people to the Oakland Arena. H Rap Brown
and Black Power activist told the crowd the only thing

(21:25):
that is going to free Huey Newton is gunpowder, and
this actually wound up being inaccurate. Hue received his day
in court, which revealed, among other things, that Frey had
a list of twenty Black Panther vehicles on the dashboard
of his car when he died. Huey was initially convicted
of voluntary manslaughter and sent to prison, but in May
of nineteen seventy that conviction was reversed after the California

(21:47):
Court of Appeals found significant errors in the trial. Hughie
would be tried two more times, both trials ending in
jury deadlocks before he was eventually cleared of all charges
in nineteen seventy one. So he is cleared by the courts,
but he loses two years of his life, you know,
to the to prison. Um my mom used to cast
My mom used to call me h rat brown just

(22:07):
for she's doing for jokes. You look h rat brown
whenever I was talking about black stuff. Anyway, it's that
that was funny now. Um. Bobby's seal also caught serious
legal trouble in nineteen sixty nine as a result of
his participation in the nineteen sixty Chicago riots over the
Democratic National Convention. That year's DNC occurred in one of

(22:27):
the most tumultuous periods in American history. And again, this
is another thing that we probably should do a whole
episode about, Like we're not gonna get into enough to
tail in the sixty eight riots. Um. The short story
is that Bobby Kennedy, who was like the progressive icon
at the time, had been gunned down the night he
won the California primary. Hubert Humphrey, the former Vice President,
hadn't actually participated in any of the primaries, but was

(22:48):
favored to become the candidate during the convention because he
was beloved by establishment Democrats. Progressives and leftists hated him.
And I'm sure, this is a situation that has sends
familiar to any um. The nineteen sixty eight riots like
sort of resulted out of all this um and they
were nightmarish and caused in large part by the fact
that the mayor of Chicago, Richard Daily, turned the city
into what Walter Cronkite called a police state leading up

(23:11):
to the event. The police turned on left wing protesters
with unspeakable violence, and the city burned. The whole ugly
event is, among other things, a big part of what
inspired Hunter Thompson to write Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
He was there at the time, um, and it was
just this this big, ugly nightmare that was largely instigated
by state violence against protesters who were unhappy that the
d n C had picked basically a conservative guy to

(23:34):
run against fucking Nixon. Um yeah, and in nineteen yeah,
And for a little bit of context, all of the
people who know their history right now are fucking terrified
that the DNC in twenty twenty is going to be
another sixty eight Chicago. Same yeah. Yeah. I felt like
that sitting watch in the last debate. I was like, Uh,

(23:54):
here we go again. I'll be bringing my helmet. Yeah.
In nineteen sixty nine, Bobby Seal was arrested for conspiracy
to incite riots at the d n C. And he
was likely targeted for this because you know, he was
a co founder of the Black Panthers, and the FBI
wanted him dead or in prison and ideally both. Um.
The court refused to let Seal choose his own lawyer.

(24:15):
When he spoke up and complained that his constitutional rights
were being violated, the judge ordered him bound and gagged.
So he is bound and gagged during his own trial.
In the idea of how yeah, yeah, that's another one
of those like okay, play some spa music. Think about
that for a second, just just really ruminate on that.
Ruminate on the fact that this man was not allowed

(24:36):
to pick his own lawyer. Yeah, and then when he
complained about it, they gagged him. You're telling you so,
which one of us is like a president violent? Which
one of us is violent? You know? Ye? Now, when
he did get to speak, Bobby repeatedly called the judge
and government attorneys racists, fascists, and lying pigs. And this
was pretty true in my opinion, and it did not
aid in his defense. Bobby can't say that out loud,

(25:00):
just like let's let's play to play a long game. UM.
He was sentenced to four years in prison and he
served twenty one months before his conviction was reversed and
he was freed in nineteen seventy one. So again, he
has almost two years stolen from UM. Now, while all
this was going on, the Panthers were taking in huge
sums of money. The arrest of Huey Pe Newton in particular,

(25:22):
drew in enormous amounts of donations, and as thousands of
men and women joined all across the country, the fundraisers
grew more and more successful, and as it tends to do,
all this money caused massive disagreements and fights between different
chapters of the party. The New York chapter being the
most successful fundraisers, were particularly incense that they had not
been allowed to keep what they thought was their fair
share of the money they had raised for the group. UM.

(25:44):
These were the sort of disagreements that any kind of
political organization is going to have, especially as they grow
and start up, and they could have been smoothed over
but for the fact that a large chunk of the
most respected Panther leadership, the men who might have been
able to work these conflicts out were in prison or,
in the case of Hampton dead. Now we're going to
talk about Fred. But you need to look at this

(26:05):
thing happening behind my shoulder right now. Oh ship, your
your your your video is frozen. Oh here we go,
I can see it. No, it's working here. That's just Sophie, Oh,
vigorously trying to get your attention. Trump hillaration behind prop
vera creeple, you know what, won't falsely charge political activists

(26:28):
with crimes they didn't commit. Oh man, the sponsors of
this podcast. Glorious, Yeah boy, oh man, all right. I
couldn't wait to get to Fred Hampton. I feel like
I've been sitting here at this all the time, waiting

(26:48):
to God. Yeah, I was wondering why you were gonna
antcy in there, because when you get the three, it's like,
this is the trinity that like paints the best picture
as to how they got destroyed it because it's like
it's like you ask, you ask ten different panthers, what
the black panthers? Where you gonna get ten different answers,
you know, pending on which one of these figureheads. You know,

(27:10):
you're appealing to you know what I'm saying. Um So,
that's why I was like, you got to have the
third person, you know, the doll I don't make sense? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
and we um you know. It was one of those
things I had to debate do I include Fred Hampton
in part one or part two? And I thought it
was best to kind of lay the groundwork in one
and then bring up because Hampton's whole life is so

(27:31):
tight in with the police violence, because his story like
tied with like the Black Massiah stuff. Like, it's like
you have to wait till there was like, don't because
he's the most like likable if you will, at all
of them. So it's like build the narrative and then
it's like, oh God, now there's a guy that's likable. Yeah,

(27:52):
so let's let's talk. I mean, I find Hughey and
Bobby pretty likable Fred. Yeah. Yeah. Fred Hampton is the
charismatic Yes, um so. Fred Hampton was born on August
ninety eight, and he grew up in the suburbs of Chicago.
He was gifted academically and physically from a very young age,
and at one point dreamed of playing for the Yankees,

(28:13):
but as he grew into a young man, the injustice
evident around him in America made anything but a revolutionary
career impossible for Fred. And I'm gonna quote now from
a Twitter thread I found on Fred Hampton by Michael Harriet,
who's a senior writer at the Route. UM, and he
knows a lot about Hampton. And you know, obviously it's
a Twitter threat. I did do my work to like
double check claims and stuff. Um. And he's very accurate here, UM,

(28:34):
So I'm gonna quote from him. Like the others he's
referring to the other Black Panther leaders. Hampton started out
with mainstream black organizations. By the time he was a teenager,
he was organizing his own youth chapter of the in
double a CP in his small Illinois suburb. In a
single year, he had five hundred members. If this sounds
like hype, consider this. When Hampton attended his first Black
Panther Party meeting in November nineteen sixty eight, the FBI

(28:55):
had already opened a file on him a year earlier.
His phone had been tapped for nine months. He had
been designated as a key leader on the FBI's Agitator
Index for five months before he ever joins the party.
He's just he's a g Like that's the what it's like.
You take all of the best attributes of everybody so

(29:16):
far and then you like put it in a guy
who has like the entertaining ability of like a Michael Jackson.
You're just like you can't lose, you know. So that's
that he he gives me chills when I think about
his ability to just like electrifier room. Yeah. Yeah. And
he's I really recommend like like pulling up videos and

(29:37):
you can find them of Fred Hampton's speaking and addressing
crowds like he was. He was very good at it
um and uh, Michael in that threat argues that the
FBI recognized Hampton's exceptional nature and that they were terrified
he would be right to become a national figure. And
there's a lot of backing for this argument. Uh. He
in particular sites a memo from Herbert Hoover himself discussing

(29:58):
the goals of the co Intel program, and it included
as their number two goal. And I'm gonna quote directly
from the FBI here, Everybody take a breath. Yeah, Number
two prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify
and electrify the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might

(30:19):
have been such a messiah. He is the martyr of
the movement today. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and Elijah
Mohammed all aspired to this position. Elijah Mohammed is less
of a threat because of his age. King could be
a very real contender for this position should he abandon
his supposed obedience to white liberal doctrines nonviolence and embrace
black nationalism. Carmichael has the necessary like, yeah, yeah, here

(30:42):
I talk about you, boys, is the yeah obedient a
white liberal thought dog. Yeah, yeah yeah. If you ever
needed evidence of sort of the value of the armed
revolutionary wing of the civil rights movement, it's the fact
that the FBI was like, thank god, Martin Luther King's chill,
he cool. Let let let kea talk. Don't let that

(31:04):
do talk. Yeah, we'd had to shoot him a lot earlier, right,
oh man so um Hampton uh in his early well
he didn't have a long career, unfortunately, but Hampton, early
in his career worked to broker peace steals between various
gangs in Chicago and came very close to getting the
black Stone Rangers, a heavily armed organization with as many
as eight thousand members, to join the Black Panthers. Now.

(31:27):
The FBI considered that possibility an enormous threat, and they
devoted significant resources to fomenting anger between both groups, going
as far as forging a death threat to the leader
of the black Stone Nation we talked about a little
bit in Part one. UM. In early nineteen sixty nine,
Fred Hampton set up the first Panther free food distribution
in Chicago. He got in trouble around this time due
to a confusing series of events with an ice cream truck.

(31:50):
And again, depending on who you listen to, he either
stole a bunch of ice cream from an ice cream
truck to give out to poor kids, um, hijacked the
truck and beat its driver, or had nothing at all
to do with the robbery of seven any one dollars
worth of ice cream. In any case, an ice cream
truck driver claimed to have been beaten up by kids
while Fred stole ice cream from his truck. UM. And again,
you gotta be real fucking careful when you listen to

(32:11):
charges against any of these guys, because we know what
was going on. Yeah, even even if it was true,
it's like, okay, so take that same event and put
it in like toadsuck Arkansas, which is a city I've performed,
didn't believe it or not, And it's just funny. It's like,
you know what, dude is hot out here. You know,

(32:33):
I got a dial it, you know, distract the guy
while we get some drumsticks. You know what I'm saying. Like,
it's more like it's mischievous. You know what I'm saying,
Like I'm not trying to like, well, yeah, I guess
you know what I'm saying, minimize a crime. But it's
like this is it's like it's mischievous. It's just you
can't be mischievous. And Fred Hampton yeah, now. Hampton was

(32:55):
arrested for this and charged with robbery and assault. Well
he waited for his trial. Fred organ used a free
breakfast for children program in Chicago. In its first two weeks,
had fed more than a grade school kids and earned
a huge amount of community support for the Panthers. Hampton
was convicted of robbery and assault in April, but thanks
to a good attorney, he was released from jail on
two thousand dollars bail fred immediately held a press conference

(33:17):
where he declared that the Black Panther Party was acting
in the interests of the people whom the government ignored
and oppressed. Quote, our case should be taken to the people,
and the people will not tolerate any oppressive system or
force that attempts to jail the very people who feed
their hungry children now. Hampton next organized a mock trial
with a group of white leftists known as the New Left,

(33:38):
and he gave in that trial what would become one
of his most famous speeches, saying, We're gonna fight racism,
not with racism, but with solidarity. We're not going to
fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we're gonna fight it
with socialism. We're not gonna fight reactionary pigs with any
reaction on our part. We're gonna fight their reaction when
all of us get together and have an international proletarian revolution.

(33:59):
The most where the FBI was not a fan, the
most level headed, like mature response to be like look man,
and just look you know, and and in and in
that sense it's like it shows sort of. Even though
there was differences in the solution, there was a common
thread through a lot of these thinkers are just being like, look, man, like,

(34:20):
I don't know. I don't know if just going straight
this way is gonna work. I don't know a straight
going this way is gonna work. But like, you know,
you can't. You can't defeat racism with racism. And it
just doesn't you know, although that's what that's what y'all want,
that's what people what they wanted us to believe about
the Black Panthers was like, y'all were racist, and He's like, no,
you don't understand. That's not gonna that's not gonna get
us to our conclusion is more racism. I think that's

(34:43):
important to notice that those were his words, you know,
and that's the guy that they were like, He's are
worse than men? Yeah, yeah yeah. Fred succeeded in building
a broad base of support in Chicago, including people of
all races and backgrounds, and this got the attention of
Panther national leadership. Bobby Seal flew down to sip Cargo
to attend one of Fred's events. He gave a speech
there wherein he said, I'm so thirsty for revolution. I'm

(35:06):
so crazy about the people. We're gonna stand together, We're
going to have a black army, a Mexican American army,
and alliance and solidarity with progressive whites, all of us,
and we're gonna march on this pig power structure and
we're gonna say, stick him up, motherfucker, we come for
what's ours. It's a good speech. I love it, man,

(35:28):
because stick him up, motherfucker we comes. Yeah, Man, Can
I throw in a little history lesson here? Hell yeah? Okay,
I don't want to, like because I don't like it
when someone steals your thunder on the show. So I
don't I don't want to do that, you know what
I'm saying, because no, no, no, you're here to because
you know more about a lot of aspects of this
than I. So yeah, hit me up. Yeah. So, like,

(35:51):
you know, towards the end of like you know, Dr
King's like work, especially the one that the event that
ended after I have a dream speech where he was
on his way for to talk about really was what
you're saying, was this idea of saying, we need to
build this coalition because the system itself is trying to

(36:13):
keep us out of this. Then he does this, he
does this whole this whole diet tribe about like, okay,
you know talking about the Homestead Act and y'all could
google that, but he was talking about the Homestead Act
like okay, so to lift like poor white people out
of serfdom. He was like, the government was handing out
land grants to people to come build farms. If you
don't know what you was doing, government would train you.

(36:33):
They pay to train you. If you don't have no
tools to work at, government pay for you to have
no tools. He's like, these are social programs that the
government has done. He's like, these are the same people
who look at us and say you need to pull
yourself up by your own bootstraps. And he's like, you
need to stop asking for government handouts. He's like, the
government has been handing out money to y'all this whole time.

(36:53):
So when we go to d C, we're going to
get our check because because us just trying to to
to to just tell you to stop being uh a
racist or trying to change your mind about who you are,
just trying to fight you. Just forget it. Let's just
do it ourselves. Black as in it it was like, no, listen,

(37:15):
this is what you said the country is. This is
what you said it was, and this is what we're
coming to do. So for you, for for for the
government to look at or or for the FBI to say, well,
Fred Hampton is saying this, I'm like, hey, but your boy,
your boy King was saying the same thing, family like
he was. He was actually he said the same it
just get we're all we're all saying the same thing.

(37:37):
Bro good, We're all saying the same thing. I mean,
And it's it's interesting that the guys who were saying
that same thing didn't didn't get a lot of time
to say it. No. Yeah, And I don't know enough
about the murder of Martin Luther King or the assassination
of Martin and Luther King to talk about the beercy

(38:00):
theories you might say around it. Um, but I will
say there's definitely a reason to be suspicious about what
kind of government involvement there might have been about Um.
Also totally possible a racist might have you know that guy. Yeah, yeah,
it's not out of anyway. Um. So. By May twenty six,

(38:20):
nineteen sixty nine, Fred Hampton's free breakfast program was feeding
more than three thousand children. On that day, he was
sentenced to two to five years in prison for his
little ice cream truck escapade. He appealed, though, and was
led out on an appeal bond by the Supreme Court
of Illinois. In July of nineteen sixty nine, Fred Hampton
embarked on his most ambitious plan yet. He held the
Conference for a United Front against Fascism, which he built

(38:43):
as an attempt to build a rainbow coalition. He brought
a lot of different people together, but focused on bringing
in poor people of all different races, particularly gang members.
Hampton told them that no matter who they were, the
root of their oppression was the same, and they would
need to work together to confront issues like police stality
and poor public housing. And teen Vogue actually has a
really good rite up on this that I'm gonna quote

(39:04):
from now. Hampton and the other Panthers, like Section leader
Bobby Lee, made the case that as poor people trying
to survive and Mayor Richard J. Daly's racially segregated city,
they had more in common with each other than not.
They banded together to protect members from the cops, fight
against police brutality, run healthcare clinics, feed the homeless and
poor kids, and connect people with legal help. If they
were dealing with abusive landlords or police. We did security

(39:27):
for the Panthers along with other panthers. Seventy year old
High Theurman, a member of the y p O, told
teen Vogue from his home in Alabama, here's a bunch
of hillbillies doing, you know, security for black people and
black panthers. Therman said that was shocking for a lot
of people. Out of respect for the Panthers, the Young Patriots,
which grew out of a street gang called the Peacemakers,
decided to stop wearing the Confederate flag. Meanwhile, the Young

(39:48):
Lords foregrounded issues impacting immigrants from Latin America and citizens
who moved from Puerto Rico, birthplace of the co founder
jose Cha Cha Yamenez. They introduced the slogan Tango Puerto
Rico in Mikorazon in a fight for Puerto Rican self determination.
So he's getting together hillbilly white gangs, Puerto Rican, Hispanic gangs,
black gangs and being like, look, we all have the

(40:09):
same problems and we can all fight together to deal
with them. Yeah, it's like, is that not like? Is
that not like the I mean, this isn't That's not good?
Like you know what I'm saying, Like that's the question, Like, wait,
that's not good, like when you desire I mean, like,
I just don't understand why this is a problem to

(40:29):
you all. Well, I mean it's because they kind of
prefer it if these gangs are shooting at each other,
because if they realize they all have more in common,
they started looking at the actual person. Fucking I'm over,
that's probably it. Suddenly we got a real threat. Now
you know, you kill each other. We ain't gotta do
to work for you, gotta just kill each other, you know.
So listen to this and take heed, young gangsters. Yes, now,

(40:52):
all of this scared the hell out of j Edgar Hoover.
He directed his men to quote destroy what they stand
for and erratic hate. It's served the people programs. I
gotta say, if you're talking about eradicating serve the people programs,
you might be the bad guy. I just think I
think you might be reading this story all wrong. Yeah,
maybe you on the wrong side of this one. You know,

(41:13):
it's a real Are we the battiest moment? Wait a minute,
it's me right, Like yeah, now we are. We are
leaving out a lot because the story of all of
the ship that the police and the FBI did to
take down Fred Hampton would I could do a full
two parter just on that. Um. This guy had almost

(41:36):
as much thrown at him as Bobby Seal and Hui P.
Newton did combined. It's it's remarkable um. For our purposes today,
we're going to focus on the actions of FBI informant
William O'Neill. Now, as soon as Fred Hampton formed the
Chicago chapter of the Black Panthers, the Bureau sent O'Neill
in to infiltrate it, and he was good at his job.
O'Neill was renowned as a hard worker, although he worried

(41:57):
other Panthers with his obsession for violence. At point, he
built an electric chair for the Panthers to use to
torture informers, which was disassembled on Fred Hampton's orders. And
it was obviously like a an FBI an attempt for
them to like get the Panthers to torture people so
that they could arrest them for a torture. Yeah, and
Hampton's like, what the funk are you doing building an
elect Get that out of what you're doing a fucking

(42:17):
electric chair? I'm gonna quote now from a rite up
in the nation for this next bit. Quote not simply
an informant. O'Neil tried to provoke others into kama Kaze
type activities. Former Panther member Lewis Truelock had submitted an
affidavit stating that during a visit to O'Neill's father's home,
the informer showed him putty blasting caps and plastic bottles

(42:38):
of liquid enough material to produce several bombs. He proposed
that they blow up an armory and later suggested robbing
and McDonald's rest around Truelock on the others who heard
O'Neil's provocative proposals rejected them as useless to the cause.
Although he was infatuated with weapons and tried to involve
other Panthers in criminal activities, O'Neill was tolerated because he
was an exceptionally hard worker around the office. Ronald doc Sat,

(43:00):
a Black Panther leader who was wounded in the raid,
recalls the only person who didn't want O'Neil and the
Panthers was Fred Hampton. Now. The electric chair and the
bombs were part of a series of schemes O'Neil hatch
to try in and trap Hampton on behalf of the FBI.
None of them worked, though, because Hampton was very smart,
and eventually the police were left with exactly one option
for dealing with Fred, cold blooded murder. In November of

(43:23):
nineteen sixty nine, William O'Neill provided the FBI with a
detailed floor plan of the Black Panther Headquarters, which doubled
as Fred Hampton's home. The map included a red X
over his bed. At four am, Sergeant Daniel Groth of
the Chicago Police Department knocked on the door of the
Black Panther Headquarters. What exactly happened next is debated, but
we know that for the next seven minutes, the police

(43:44):
pumped roughly a hundred rounds into the building. Only one
bullet was fired in response by a Black Panther, Mark Clark,
aged two. Both Clark and Fred Hampton were shot dead.
Fred died in his bed from two point blank gunshots
to the head. The vast majority of bull holes in
the house were centered around the location of his bed,
where William O'Neil had drawn the red X. One officer

(44:06):
was heard saying he's good and dead now as they
trapes through the bloodstained office, and there was a photograph
of the officers carrying Fred Hampton's body from the building.
It's one of the more disgusting things I've ever seen.
Two of the officers are visibly gritting and we we've
got a photograph, so if you can show you, we'll
put it up on the side. I've seen it. It's important, Yeah,
it's important to see these men's faces. Um this and

(44:27):
that the map with the red X or something that
like sits in our psyche, you know, because that image
is just it just burns in you. You know what
I'm saying when you see and you know, like that's
what is that's that man is bit you know? Yeah
yeah yeah, but is it that for the listeners that
the you would think that they just like left there
like local bar and just like a glad hand in

(44:49):
each other. Like that's the way they look like they
did well on a slot machine. Yeah, yeah, so true,
speaking of doing well on a slot machine. Following the ray,
William O'Neal was given a three hundred dollar bonus by
the FBI. And now today the assassination of Fred Hampton
is basically universally agreed by scholars and legal experts as

(45:12):
well as activists, to have been a political assassination organized
and orchestrated by the FBI. Um. There is really zero
disagreement about this fact between credible people who study it. However,
in mainstream coverage of the raid, you still run into
people who will equivocate on this fact. A Chicago Tribune
article I read about the assassination stated in the two
years before the raid, police and panthers had engaged in

(45:32):
eight gun battles nationally in which three police officers and
five panthers died. Four of the shootouts, including one in
which two police officers were killed, occurred in Chicago. To
try and make the case that, like there was reason
for the police to be super anty about this whole thing,
you know what like is like when people say, hey, well,
you know these street gangs are these streets, you know,
they're violent to they're shooting, they're shooting, so we're shooting.

(45:55):
I'm like, yeah, but you know they're gangsters. Yeah, yeah,
they're shooting. But aren't aren't you the police, Like, aren't
you supposed to carry yourself? You know, at a level
of integrity, you're telling me your bar of integrity is
a street gang. That's what you're telling me right now,
you know. So even if I'm just saying, like, even
if that was your reasoning, I'm like, yeah, but you're

(46:16):
the cops though. Yeah. You know one thing that's interesting
to me that maybe I can leave a little bit
of homework for the listener. Go sit down and and
look up Google all the people who were killed in
mass shootings in the history of the United States, Like, like,
not just like shootings, but like mass shootes where some
nut with a gun decides to murder a bunch of strangers.
Add that number together, and then figure out how many

(46:38):
people were shot dead by the police in two thousand
nineteen alone. Oh no, figure out which of those numbers
is larger. But a homework for you now. Uh. The
article um that I found in the Chicago Tribune also
counts the firearms the panthers had on the property nineteen
and the number of rounds over a thousand, as if
any of that justifies what was done. Those were all

(46:59):
the legally owned guns and legally owned I have more
firearms and ammunition in my house sitting five feet from
me in the black Panthers had in their house at
that point. Um, Like, that's not a lot to be
I mean, it's the nineteens, a sizable number of guns
for one person, but like it was multiple people's weapons,
and a thousand rounds is not a lot. Um. And
those gunfights with police had no connection to Fred Hampton

(47:20):
other than that he was a Panther to UM. And
despite the murders and the FBI factory and the counterintelligence operations,
by seventy the Black Panthers had offices in sixty eight cities.
The representatives had traveled to meet with communist leaders in
North Vietnam, North Korea, and China. Some Panthers had set
up shop in Algeria. UM. And we're not gonna have
enough time really to go into all of the international

(47:42):
divisions of this. And speaking of international, UM, Sophie is
signaling to me that it's time for an ad break
from the international corporations that sponsored this podcast. All right, globalism,
the globalist you're Alex Jones voices on point, We're back.

(48:12):
So UM nineteen seventy would prove to be the Black
Panthers high point. And again there's a number of reasons
for this. Police repression, UM, disruption of the leadership and
stuff had a lot to do with it. UM. I
should note, and it's very fair to note that it
was not just UM police and state violence that were
responsible for the decline of the Black Panthers. There were
other sort of factors that played into it. And I'm

(48:33):
gonna quote from Black Against Empire again because it gives
you an idea of some of these other factors. The
resilience of the Black Panthers politics depended heavily on support
from three broad constituencies, Blacks, opponents of the Vietnam War,
and revolutionary governments internationally. Without the support of these allies,
the Black Panther Party could not withstand repressive actions against
them by the state. But, beginning in nineteen sixty nine

(48:53):
and steadily increasing through nineteen seventy, political transformations undercut the
self interest that motivated these constituencies to support the Panthers politics.
As mainstream Democratic leaders opposed the war and Nixon scaled
back the military draft, blacks one broader social access and
political representation, and revolutionary governments entered diplomatic relations with the
United States, the Panthers had greater difficulty sustaining Allied support. First,

(49:16):
major concessions by the political establishment and the Nixon the
administration on the Vietnam War eroded the basis of war
opponents support for the Panthers politics. Once it appeared the
war would be ended through institutionalized political means, those principally
committed to ending the draft in war no longer shared
a personal stake and radically transforming political institutions, many now
increasingly saw the Panthers call for revolution as unnecessary. From

(49:38):
nineteen sixty nine onward, increasing electoral representation as well as
affirmative action programs and growing access to government employment and
e leite education also weakened the base of support for
the Panthers revolutionary politics among blacks. From the end of
reconstruction eighteen seventy seven until nineteen sixty nine, no more
than six black people it held a seat in the
U s House of Representatives at once, but just two
years later black representation more than doubled, with thirteen Black

(50:01):
people holding seats in the US House of Representatives by
nine So a lot of why the Panthers decline is
because these groups who supported them because they were in
like for their own self interest, got what they wanted
and stopped caring about this kind of revolutionary struggle for equality. Yeah,
that's part of this story too. Yeah, my uh, my

(50:23):
father would say, like, you know, the government go always
get their man, you know, whatever they want. If the
if the system decides they want you going, you're gonna
be going right and like and he would also say,
what you ain't what you ain't gonna never mess with
is their money. And if you mess it with their money,
they're gonna stop it. You know. So this idea of

(50:44):
like you had this coalition. It was cool when it
was like, Okay, y'all want to sit at the same
table as us, all right, that's all right, fine, you
know what I'm saying. Okay, you want us to not
beat you on the streets, all right, I guess you
know what I'm saying. Won't you start messing with our
money though, you know, and um and and especially like

(51:05):
our our internationals. Like I said, when you may have
said this on the last episode when you first invited
me on here, I wanted to like refresh my memory
with like with with my father's experience. So I caught
him and talked to him about it for a while.
So this was like the time he was in and
he was saying he was saying that he would talk
about like the multi tiered approach of like, uh, the

(51:30):
sowing seeds of like doubt of like you know, even
just the idea of saying like hey, you know, um,
you got this coalition, but like now, like well, if
the war is over, why are y'all here? Right? So
he he even mentioned he mentioned exactly what you were saying.
It was like, now the utility is gone, Like what
do we do? Then you have like the the what

(51:52):
we what we in the in slang, now we'll call
street sweepers. But it was essentially like the injunctions of
like you're not allowed to gather. He was talking about
like if it was two or more y'all on a sidewalk,
that constitutes a black panther meeting. So you'd be stopped
by the police and like broken up because you're just
standing on a street corner together, you know what I'm saying.
So like this multi tiered approach to like whether it

(52:16):
was just like sowing seeds of doubt, dividing the coalition,
messing with their money, just like all of those things together, Um,
if the government decides these are his words of government.
Decide down, won't you down? Won't you? Yeah? Yeah, And
it's um, yeah, I'm glad you brought up like the
like the cracking down on so called meetings, because that again,

(52:38):
that's that's one of those things, like there's there was
so much. I'm sure it was on my I think
it was on my dock at some point. I just
didn't get written up. And that's absolutely important. I'm sure
there's other stuff like that that I've left out because
there's just so much to go over here. Um, so
I'm glad you did bring that up. Um. The Black
Panther Party was eventually dissolved in and the FBI and

(52:59):
you know, local federal, state law enforcement cannot be blamed
for all of that, but their efforts succeeded in draining
huge amounts of energy from the organization, killing at least
twenty of its members, and most importantly, destroying or distracting
its most influential leaders. Huey P. Newton spent most of
the nineteen seventies fighting a seemingly endless series of legal battles.

(53:20):
There were accusations of violence and embezzling and even murder
that are very hard for me to parse out. It
is possible he committed some of these crimes, possibly embezzled.
Given what we know about the FBI's efforts to take
him down, I have a lot of difficulty giving too
much credit to any of these charges. Um, he was
murdered in nineteen eighty nine by Tyrone Johnson, a member
of the Black Guerrilla Family, a prison gang, and it's

(53:41):
very difficult to not draw connections between that murder and
the FBI motivated US killings. Um, you know, I I
don't know, impossible not to think about it. Did you
come across this is like a side note, but did
you come across like the ten demands of the Black
Panther Party? Yes, yeah, we're getting Yeah. Yeah, that's that's
what I wanted to end on. Yeah, And did you

(54:02):
get don't are you going to cover like their connection
with like the founding of the crips and Tookie Williams
and stuff that we're not So if you have something,
yeah I would I would love to get. So it's this,
it's this window that you're talking about, this window of
like the sort of seeing you know, you got these
three dudes like seeing the the destruction of the party

(54:24):
and almost like the same sort of disillusionment, Like damn,
that didn't work either, you know what I'm saying, And
just being like, and then you introduce Crack and then
it just everything changes. But like that sort of transition
from the Panthers dissolving to these like you know, just
street gangs of just like what we know as the crips,
you know what I'm saying, Being like, there's a documentary

(54:45):
called The Bastard Children of the Black Panther Party and
it was about the founding of the crips and uh,
and that window between those two sort of like like
the dissolving of that and then the birth of this,
you know, being a new sort of like communal police
force and then and then the Crack attack and then
it all goes to ship But interesting. Yeah, anyway, I

(55:08):
had no idea about any of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And the whole Crack in the Inner Cities thing in
the c I that that's a whole another two or
three part because I don't want to just like spout
off about that because even among the people who are
on the right track, there's a lot of misconceptions about
that's carried out and it's it's very detailed his whatever

(55:28):
the case may be. It's it's understood in the inner
city that like, yeah, crack destroyed us. It's what made
our gangs violent, you know what I'm saying. And just
the moving of drugs is what made our gangs violent. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
and um yeah, that's really important context. Um. And also
important context is the to really get an idea of

(55:51):
the sheer level of of factory perpetrated against the Black
Panther Party by the FBI during the period of Cointeal
Pro of the two nine as the bureau took to
disrupt black groups. Under co Intal Pro two hundred and
thirty three were taken against the Panthers. The FBI paid
out more than seven point four million dollars in bribes
to Black Panther informants, which is more than for for context,

(56:15):
that's more than twice the amount of money they spent
on bribing informants who were organized crime informants nationwide. So
they spent twice as much money on the Black Panthers
as they did on the fucking mob. Mob. And the
mob in like the sixties and seventies, when the mob
is like really a big deal the actual mob. Yes, yeah,

(56:35):
like the hardcore like the fucking Scorsese mob. Yeah, yeah,
you know it's that I will speak. I think I
could speak for all of black people. I'm like, I'm
gonna go out a limit say this. I am. We
are absolutely fascinated like the Irishman being like, oh, the

(56:55):
greatest movie ever, like you know, honored as like this,
Like now, I'm like, y'all murder Murderer, Like okay, I
like my movies too, But how come like y'all are
so fascinated with just these like these white like gangsters,
Like why is it okay? Why are y'all so fascinated

(57:16):
by white gangsters? I'm saying, I wonder how many of
the people who love those movies. Um, I also think
that rap music unfairly glorified criminals. Yes, that's my point,
that's my point. I'm just like, why is it why
y'all okay with this? Like why is this type entertaining?
Like why is this okay? Yeah? Yeah? Yeah? Um so. Yeah.

(57:41):
We've spent this episode talking about this incredibly sweeping campaign
to disrupt and destroy the Black Panthers by the FBI
and by law enforcement, and we might not know about
any of this if it weren't for the actions of
eight really fucking cool dudes led by William C. Daviden,
professor of physics at Haverford College. In nineteen seventy one,
they spent months casing an FBI field office in Philadelphia.

(58:05):
During the night of a major Fraser Ali fight, when
everyone was distracted, they broke into the FBI's offices with
a crowbar and made out with a car load of
FBI files. Those files included numerous memos from j Edgar
Hoover on the Black Panthers and the co Intel pro
to operations. Now, the FBI tried to stop the press
from writing about any of this, but The Washington Post

(58:25):
was courageous enough to flip in the bird and right
about it. The findings inspired a blizzard of foyer request
from Panthers, who suddenly had confirmation that they've been surveilled
for years. All these ship they've been writing about the
fbis on our backs. No, you're paranoid, No, look, no seriously, yeah. Yeah.
For an example of what was found, one member, a
guy named Rodney Barnett, received a five hundred page file

(58:46):
on himself quote documenting his whereabouts, interviewing every employer he's
ever had, interviewing his high school teacher, his neighbors, all
of his siblings, and observing him getting on airplanes. So
all this led to an investigation in nineteen seventy six
by the Senate collect Committee on Intelligence Activities. The final
report they issued noted that the actions carried out by
the FBI under co Intel pro quote would be intolerable

(59:09):
in a democratic society even if all the targets had
been involved in violent activity. But co Intel pro went
far beyond that. The unexpressed major premise of the programs
was that a law enforcement agency has the duty to
do whatever is necessary to combat perceived threats to the
existing social order and political order. But the report stated,
although the claimed purpose of the program was to prevent violence,

(59:31):
its tactics quote were clearly intended to foster violence, and
many could reasonably have been expected to cause violence. The
Senate concluded that the FBI quote itself, engaged in lawless
tactics and responded to deep seated social programs by fomenting
violence and unrest. And part of me wants to end
on that note, but I don't think I want to

(59:52):
give the government the last word in this episode, even
if that last word is the government condemning the actions
of its own agents. So for the last word in
this episode, I think we should go over the Black
Panthers tin Point Program introduced in nineteen sixty six by
huy P. Newton and Bobby Seal. And Bobby Seal, by
the way, we talked about Newton, he died, obviously, Hampton died.
Seal is still alive today, or at least as if

(01:00:12):
the recording this episode has continued to be an activist
ran for off as a couple of times. Um, and yeah,
it's still around to this day. So that's at least
one bit of yeah positive. Um. So here is the
tin Point program. What we want now. Number one, we
want freedom. We want the power to determine the destiny
of our black community. Number two, we want full employment

(01:00:34):
for our people. Number three we want an into the
robbery by the white men of our black community, later
changed to we want an into the robbery by the
capitalists of our black and depressed communities. Four we want
decent housing fit for the shelter of human beings. Five
we want education for a people that exposes the true
nature of this decadent American society. We want education that

(01:00:56):
teaches us our true history and our role in the
present day society. Six we want all black men to
be exempt from military service. Seven we want an immediate
end to police brutality and murder of black people. Eight
we want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county,
and city prisons and jails. Nine we want all Black people,
when brought to trial, to be tried in a court

(01:01:17):
by a jury of their peer group or people from
their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the
United States. And ten we want land, bred housing, education, clothing, justice,
and peace. Now. That list of demands also included a
list of beliefs, starting with we believe that black people
will not be free until we are able to determine
our own destiny, and included a reiteration of the Panther

(01:01:39):
belief in the importance of community self defense. We believe
we can end police brutality in our black community by
organizing black self defense groups that are dedicated to defending
our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The
Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States gives
us the right to bear arms. We therefore believe that
all black people should arm themselves for self defense. There
were also demands for the release of all black people

(01:02:01):
incarcerated in American prisons, since none of them could possibly
have received a fair trial. The whole thing ended with
this paragraph. When in the course of human events, it
becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds
which have connected them with another, and to assume among
the powers of the earth the separate and equal station
to which the laws and Nature's God entitle them. A
decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they

(01:02:23):
should declare the causes which impel them to separation. We
hold these truths to be self evident, and that all
men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights,
governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from
the consent of the government. That whenever any form of
government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right

(01:02:44):
of the people to alter and abolish it, and to
institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and
organizing its power in such a form as to them
shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness.
Prudence indeed will dictate that governments long established should not
be changed light and transient causes. And accordingly, all experience
hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while

(01:03:05):
levelers are sufferable, than to write themselves by abolishing the
forms to which they are accused. But when a long
train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object,
evince as a design to reduce them under absolute despotism,
it is their right and their duty to throw off
such government and to provide new guards of their future security.
You may recognize that as the beginning of the declaration

(01:03:27):
to if independence. Yes, man, what a freaking journey. And
they're so like again us ten different people with the
black panthers? Are you get ten different answers, even people
that were in the movement. But at the end of
the day, man, like, you know, wherever like point might

(01:03:51):
be a problem? Like is it? I mean, is it
so much to ask to be? Like? Yo, I just
wanted housing that's like suitable for humans? How about that? Yeah?
You know, if yeah, yeah it and at the end
of the day, and I think why they ended on
that note I'm just quoting the introduction to the Declaration
of Independence, is they're saying, what we want is for

(01:04:13):
this nation to make good on its promises. Just just
keep your promises. Yeah, like yeah, like they're saying, like
this thing that you all claim to revere, this is
a good document. It's got some good ship in there.
Why aren't you doing it? That's what we were about.
Let's do it. Yeah yeah, so good, yeah yeah cool cool,

(01:04:38):
um prop Is there anything you want to go into
before we roll out of this one? Man? Um? I
think uh, mentioning some of the like some of the women,
like the Tupac connection, you know Nikki, I mean Angela Davis,
you know what I mean her her prison reform stuff
that she's doing now, like some of these people, um

(01:04:59):
you know, uh, Nina Simone and like you know, just
some of the like things that are having like uh,
who's in Cuba right now? What am I blank? And
who's in Cuba right now? Oh? Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
um some of their like because yeah they're in Cuba
and in um Algeria, they had like a number of
them wound up living. Yeah, they just they just went there. Yeah.

(01:05:20):
So yeah, some of the some of the women, you
know what I'm saying that we're like so pivotal, you
know what I'm saying. And again like uh Afana shakor
like Tupac's mom, you know what I'm saying, Um, you know,
going to prison or being pregnant with Tupac in prison.
You know what I'm saying. Stuff like that like that
like ties to like now I think would be cool
to kind of cover. Yeah. Yeah, And that's definitely the

(01:05:42):
biggest shortcoming of this is that, like, yeah, I mean
I definitely didn't go into detail enough about like the
different women activists, um, the the international stuff that went on. Um,
It's there's so much to talk about. Yeah, like there was.
It was always going to be imperfect, and I totally
but gun you could go here, you could like Angela

(01:06:02):
Davis like teaches at Berkeley, Like you could go hear
her right now, you could go hear her lecture, you
know what I'm saying. Like those things to me, like
these like living you know monuments that like like if
we could gather these stories and hear the more somebody
could hear them. Why they're still alive? You know what
I'm saying, Um, I think it's like super even if

(01:06:23):
you don't like even if you don't rock with like
a lot of whatever they stood for right now, like
she was, she was on this campaign and like just
in prisons period, Like prisons are ineffective, They don't work,
They just make more criminals, you know what I'm saying. Um,
So you could go hear her right now. You know
what I'm saying, Like talk about it. You know know, I'm saying,
like why Tupac was who he was again, his mama

(01:06:45):
was a panther, you know what I'm saying, and like
it was in prison pregnant with him, you know things
like that. I just think it's like these this like
it's not it's it's not that long ago, you know
what I'm saying, Like some of these people are still
alive and still accessible. But really the misst to me

(01:07:05):
even in a lot of like the academic work with
the with the panthers, Like I know I've harped on
this a lot, but like what the women did, you
know what I'm saying. They were doing the cooking for
all those like breakfast programs that was women doing that,
you know what I'm saying, When they locked up all
the men when it was killing the men, guess who
charried it. It It was the women, you know what I'm saying.
So it's just I just think that, like that legacy,
I would love to see more on that legacy, not

(01:07:28):
even not from this, I'm just saying just period, Like listen, yeah,
can we talk about what the ladies did? You know
what I'm saying. Yeah, Yeah, And that's you know that
that's probably a good maybe a good subject from when
we do our next Heroes episode, uh around the end
of the year or something. Yeah. Um, and part I
was focusing this on, I mean, I was focusing this
largely on like efforts to destroy the panthers, and those

(01:07:50):
did sort of focus more on on killing and injuring Yeah, yeah, yeah,
imprisoning some of the Yeah. But you're right, like that's
a you know, and it's one of those things. As
soon as I started reading Black Against Empire, it was
like this anxiety attack of like I'm gonna leave so
much sh it out, dude. Yeah, you can't like how
like that's what I was saying, Like I was already
ready to show you mercy because it's just so much

(01:08:11):
to cover, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, this
was a very focused episode, and my main hope for
it is that it convinces people, particularly other like white
kids like me, Um, go read more about these guys
and women and and and this this, Like, go read
more about this. I think Black Against Empire is a
good place to start. Um. There's a lot of other
really good books, um, um that you can look into.

(01:08:33):
And I'd say i'd even tell everybody, like I've taken
your book advice before, you know, read a few things
you didn't put out there, and has sent those four
Like I read The Death of Democracy. That's a good one.
That was That was a book. Boy. Yeah, yeah, you
probably got to save chills. I did. When he was reading,
I was like, oh, oh this isn't good. Yeah, this

(01:08:55):
is too familiar. Yeah. Anyway, well, um, you know, you know,
maybe consider some of the lessons in Black Against Empire
is part of the antidote to the Death of Democracy,
especially the survival programs, that sort of thing, this idea
of community organizing for self defense, um, the armed stuff

(01:09:15):
and the stuff that has nothing to do with guns.
It's all very important. So that's the in note on
this episode. Prop you wanna plug your plug doubles before
we sail out of here into the weekend. My plug
doubles are prop hip hop. Uh, just like it sounds
prop hip hop. That's that's Twitter, that's Instagram, that's the website.

(01:09:36):
There's Merche coffee, Paraphamalilia. I'm quite a coffee nerd uh.
A couple of podcasts I'm a part of, like really
cool coffee paper. Oh yeah, it's really really really you
guys got to look up the Poor Gammy. It's gonna
blow your mind. DJ Daniel, our engineer bought one jerk.
You're supposed I was supposed to give you one man.
Uh yeah, dude, so the Poor Gammy. Um ye, some pods.

(01:10:00):
I'm a part of Godhood Politics when I'm most excited
about essentially like a uh sort of the like street
level version of like politics and information just to like
it's kind of fun, kind of tongue tongue in cheek.
But you can understand politics. If you survived eighth grade,
you can understand geo politics. And that's really what and
that's what kind of what I'm working on. All right,

(01:10:23):
and I am working on this podcast every week. You
can find me here, you know, and the sources for
this episode on behind the Bastards dot com. You can
find our Twitter and Instagram and at Bastards pod you
can find my Twitter at I right, okay, um, and
you can also find our other podcast, Worst Year Ever. Um.

(01:10:44):
We have a two parter that just dropped, investigating a
terrorist attack on the furry community at a convention in
to US in fourteen and it's Nazi connections. So that's
a fun one. Um. So uh, continue uh learning things,
read some good books and go ahead into the street
and and kick some ass or or feed some ass

(01:11:05):
to do something two asses. Yeah, great, all right, and
we're out. H m.