1969: The Year of No Return
While 1969 was pivotal for me, it was fatal for Fred Hampton. His life moved so much more quickly than mine and burned so much more brightly, only to be extinguished at age twenty-one by two police bullets to the head at four-thirty in the morning on December 4. Yet the story of his life has never been told, and the story of his death, once partially illuminated, has mostly been forgotten. These stories exist in the memories of those who knew Fred, who heard him speak, who respond with excitement and recognition when I ask about him, as though I’m speaking about yesterday or last week rather than forty years ago. The memory of Fred is there in the continuing sadness in Fred’s mother Iberia’s eyes as she approaches her late eighties.
Maybe we all have points at which our consciousness changes and we cannot return to our former path. For many political activists, that dividing line occurred in the late 1960s. We were fed up with a system that thrived on war, racism, and patriarchy. We were young people who at first hadn’t understood why the United States was waging war in Vietnam but who by 1969 believed that it was endemic to an unjust system we felt compelled to stop or overthrow.
Many of the same evils are still with us, as was glaringly apparent in recent years under Bush Jr.: a war of conquest and occupation abroad and ever-growing government eavesdropping and intimidation at home. There is currently a movement to make public U.S. involvement in torture and hold those who authorized it accountable. The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld team, with their legal apologists John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, implemented secret domestic and foreign policies in total violation of the constitution and international law and still seek to justify those abuses. Many of the same perpetrators and apologists for Watergate, COINTELPRO, and the Iran-Contra scandal returned to implement even more Draconian measures. If this wrongdoing is not exposed and those who perpetuated it are not held criminally liable, then it is bound to repeat itself in clandestine programs like COINTELPRO. The need to protest, expose, and hold accountable those in power who violate our laws and personal liberties continues and remains a fundamental struggle of our society and any society.
After the publication of the hardcover edition of this book in 2010, I learned that in 1995 the FBI declassified memos, which were placed in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas. A researcher discovered the files and sent them to me. J. Edgar Hoover authored the memos, which he sent to the White House, the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Army, and the CIA. They showed the FBI had informants reporting on Fred Hampton as early as 1967, which was before he was a Black Panther. The memos misrepresented Hampton’s words and actions, attributing incendiary speeches to him that witnesses have told me were never given.