Fred Hampton (1948-1969)

I have to start with a disclaimer. The songwriter of today’s song is my fellow blogger, Pat Blackman, who has been my good friend for over twenty years. So, there’s not much critical distance here from the artist. Covering this song wasn’t his idea, folks. Pat was reluctant to have the song included on its own, but agreed to let me discuss it within the context of this trajectory of the descendants of “Who Killed Cock Robin?“, of which it is a grandchild, in a manner of speaking. We normally cover more widely-known material here, but this song provides some helpful contrasts in the flow of our explorations from Monday’s “Cock Robin” to the song we’ll discuss in the final post of the week.

“Who Killed Fred Hampton?” is one of Pat’s earliest songs, written in the early 1990’s. Like the possible origins of its ancestor, “Who Killed Cock Robin?”, it’s a political critique. In that case, the story was well known, but the critique was veiled. In this case, the story is not well known in much of the country, and was new to Pat (and to me) at the time he wrote it–about 20 years ago now, and over 20 years after the events it relates. The story it tells is perhaps easily forgotten as a vestige of the turbulent 1960s. The critique, however, is not veiled. “Cock Robin” is parody, “Fred Hampton” is a remonstrance against a particular injustice in the spirit of Woody Guthrie.

Pat wrote it in response to reading the story of Fred Hampton’s killing in Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall. It was his way of processing the enormity of what he had just read. As with songwriter Michael Lewis, who was compelled to write a song in response to the power of the Nathaniel Philbrick’s story of the whaleship Essex, Pat picked up the guitar and put pen to paper to process the story musically.

Churchill and Vander Wall provide an extensive discussion of then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO operations against the Black Panther Party, and argue that such operations continued against the American Indian Movement, well after they were supposed to have been discontinued. Hoover issued internal FBI statements in the 60’s warning against the rising up of a “Black Messiah” figure. The COINTELPRO campaign, part of what appeared to be Hoover’s plan to make the FBI a domestic equivalent of the CIA rather than a law enforcement and criminal investigative agency, involved multiple attempts to undermine grassroots political movements across the country through a variety of means, including infiltrators and agent provocateurs.

Let’s get to the song, as it tells the story of Hampton’s death with efficiency and power.

Here are Pat’s lyrics, from the 1996 release, Acoustic Playground, from Williams Grassroots Music.

Who killed Fred Hampton, who has shot him dead?
One bullet to his shoulder, and two more to his head,
In Chicago, in cold blood, right on his bedroom floor.
Who killed Fred Hampton and what’s the reason for?

It was not a madman, it was not a thief,
It was agents of the FBI and the local police,
On the Fourth of December, Nineteen Sixty-Nine,
In the early morning hours, before the sun did shine.

He was a brave Black Panther, a Panther bold and true,
Fighting for his people, fighting for me and you,
With food for hungry children, and blankets for the cold,
and teaching for the people, a Truth that’s seldom told.

They tried to discredit him, they tried to lock him down,
Pit him against his comrades, with lies spread all around.
Paid a dirty coward to undermine and spy,
Fred kept on organizing, so they said he had to die.

They kicked in the front door, shot Mark Clark in the chest,
Shot forty-two machine-gun rounds through the wall at Hampton’s bed,
Hit him in the shoulder, they drug him out for more,
Shot him two times in the head while he was helpless on the floor.

The survivors were arrested for attempted homicide
Of the police and the FBI who took them by surprise.
The agents and the officers still roam this country free,
Though they murdered that loving man and father soon to be.

Who killed Fred Hampton, who has shot him dead?
One bullet to his shoulder, and two more to his head,
In Chicago, in cold blood, right on his bedroom floor.
Who killed Fred Hampton and what’s the reason for?

Illinois Black Panther Party leaders Bobby Rush and Fred Hampton. Rush won election as U.S. Representative for the 1st District of Illinois in 1993, and has served in Congress since that time.

One of the remarkable things about this song, particularly emerging from Pat’s pen when it did, is his discipline in letting the facts speak for themselves as much as possible. Verse three puts in some “editorial” plugs on behalf of Hampton’s work on behalf of the under-served in inner-city communities, but the rest of the song narrates the events as matter-of-factly as it can to get the point across. It’s pointed, but only because the facts are themselves shocking and power of the story itself comes through. Pat’s Woody Guthrie-like approach “shows” more than it “tells,” although, like Guthrie, he “tells” when necessary to sharpen the point. This approach will contrast, for instance, with the song we’ll feature in the next post.

You will likely have your own opinions on the Black Panther Party’s ambitions and their influence on society and in the communities where they worked. They paired a rhetoric of self-defense with the direct work of community service–including free health services and food programs for children and the poor. It was a movement that drew radicals and leaders. Some leaders were arrested, some were killed, some continued their passion for serving the community into more mainstream leadership positions. One of them has been a United States Congressman for over 20 years–my Congressman, in fact, for some of that time.

Hampton was charismatic, a natural leader, and remarkably effective at bringing grassroots groups together in inner city neighborhoods–negotiating gang truces as part and parcel of the effort to stop cycles of destruction within these neighborhoods. In the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, he may have represented the kind of “Black Messiah” Hoover feared, and was far less committed to nonviolence than was King.

It is difficult to read of Hampton’s death as anything other than a political assassination carried out by law enforcement. A civil jury found that the police and government agents conspired to deny Hampton and his associates their civil rights. Looking into the details of the case will lend further depth to the sense of villainy and betrayal of public trust conveyed by Pat’s song. For example, there is evidence that Hampton never woke up during the police attack, likely having been drugged by the FBI informant who was assigned to infiltrate the group and who had fed Hampton dinner that night.

Smiling police officers carry the body of Fred Hampton

The 1971 documentary The Murder of Fred Hampton is available online (click on the title), and is also available in four parts on YouTube. If you’re pressed for time, Part Three is the most devastating to the credibility of the official description of the raid.

Back to the Song

As a result of Pat’s approach to telling the story, we now have a “Who Killed…?” song that is a proper murder ballad, narrating the details of who got killed by whom and how. It is, commensurately, the least like “Who Killed Cock Robin? of the three songs we have listened to so far, although Pat plainly (and admittedly) borrows the “what’s the reason for” line from Dylan’s “Davey Moore.”

Where Rosten and Seeger on the one hand, and Dylan on the other, distribute responsibility for the killings referred to in their songs, Pat makes clear the central revelation or public betrayal of the song–that this was effectively a targeted killing by those who are supposed to enforce and follow the law. The song further implicates the individuals that directed the police’s activity. That probably extends to a level of broader democratic accountability, but the song does not dilute responsibility so far as to hold everyone accountable and therefore no one.

The “agents and the officers” did this. The song implicitly holds us responsible for figuring out how that happened and deciding what to do about it. Who killed Fred Hampton is reasonably clear. “What’s the reason for?” is the question that keeps our attention, both for the sake of the past and the sake of the future.

Coda

I don’t have other versions of Pat’s song to share. I’ve performed it before, as part of a short open mike set with Bob Dylan’s “Seven Curses,” and Richard Thompson’s “1952 Vincent Black Lightning.” All three of these songs show that the lawful and unlawful, the heroes and the villains don’t fall into neat categories–all for different reasons.

The best companion piece that I can think of for our purposes here lies below. I can’t fully explain why.

“Confession to J. Edgar Hoover” by James Wright, from Shall We Gather at the River (1968).

Hiding in the church of an abandoned stone
A Negro soldier
Is flipping the pages of the Articles of War,
That he can’t read.