This documentary was released just a year and half after Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton and his colleague Mark Clark were killed in a raid by Chicago policeman, who were there ostensibly to serve a warrant at a pre-dawn hour. It's an operation that is now widely considered to have been a brutal political assassination for Hampton's revolutionary views, and because of that, the interviews, press clips, and speeches assembled here are incredibly important, and still chilling 51 years later.
The first half of the documentary show the political movement Hampton was a part of without sugar-coating it, which I thought was important, even as I wished it had been pared down (especially that fictional "People's Court") and narration provided to better frame the context. Through speeches and discussions, though, we see that the movement was one that advocated an overthrow of the oppressive, capitalist system that had exploited the common man and people of color for centuries, in order to advance to the "utopia of the communist state" of being. It advocated for blacks arming themselves and then killing policeman who "bother the people." It acknowledged cases where revolution had led to the revolutionary becoming an oppressor himself, like François "Papa Doc" Duvalier in Haiti, and yet still held out hope for the communist systems in Cuba and China, and indeed there are posters of Mao Zedong on walls. That's certainly not something that's aged well, but can you blame people for searching for an alternative when they're in a system that brutalizes them? And this quote early on is one that eerily rings true today:
"...racist, decadent, capitalist, imperialist America is a phony state. That a phony state exists here and that these pigs are doing nothing but protecting the avaricious businessman and the demagogic politicians, protecting the exploitative system that they got going. That, in fact, we are tired of it, we are sick of it. You've been brutalizing black people. You've been murdering and lynching them. Black people are tired of it!"
We also see the movement trying to provide for the community, e.g. Setting up medical care that's more concerned with public health that it is about profit, something which has gotten far worse all these decades later. They were for education, and standing up for their legal rights in a system that was trampling them. They were also dead on in their assessment that oppressed people had been successfully turned against one another by their oppressor, e.g. Poor white people against black people, something remarkably still true today. It's also important to note that they were young - Hampton was just 21 - and look at the arc of his colleague Bobby Rush, who was 23 here, and who would go on to serve in Congress for 30 years, announcing his retirement just this year.
Whatever you believe about the political views and lyrics to songs being chanted about killing policemen, no one should be executed over them, least of all in a country that prides itself on its freedom and democracy. You also have to understand where these views come from, and I wish the documentary had provided a little bit more by way of that.
Where it delivers best, however, is in its second half. There's something spine tingling about hearing Fred Hampton telling those in the audience to say "I am a revolutionary" before going to bed at night in case they don't wake up, and then seeing soundless footage of his dead body being carried out on a stretcher and all the blood at his apartment. From there the cutting back and forth to the establishment's version of events, given by police officers and Cook County State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan, and those who were in the apartment under a hailstorm of bullets and those who examined the scene afterwards, is as mesmerizing as it is disturbing. The inconsistencies in the State's story, the horrifying actions by the police, and the depraved indifference to both life and the truth are all outrageous. The fact that the documentary was made, bearing witness to what happened, is important, and it's one I wish was included in U. S. history curriculums. Sadly, that may be illegal now in some states, which is also outrageous.
