Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Bastards Who Killed the Black Panthers

Episode Date: January 30, 2020

Robert is joined again by political activist, poet, and podcaster, Propaganda to continue to discuss the monsters who murdered the Black Panthers. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the only podcast on the Internet that you are listening to right now, presumably. And if you're listening to a multiple podcast at once, I'm concerned. No way you're retaining anything. But it's not impossible. It's no way you're retaining anything. You're missing a lot.

Yes. 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 some folks who I think are pretty cool dudes. But last episode was to build up to the bastards who tried to destroy them. So this is an episode about the FBI and law enforcement tried to take down the Black Panther Party. My guest for part two, as with part one, is Prop Propaganda, a hip-hop artist and podcaster yourself. Yo, what's up, yo?

I'm just glad to be here. I'm just smiling so much. Glad to have you here. Yeah. Been really happy to have your perspective and excited to get into the rest of this. Yes. So we talked about the Mulford Act in the last episode, which stopped the Black Panthers from carrying loaded weapons in the state of California,

but did not stop the Black Panthers from loving themselves some firearms. Weapons training, stockpiling. They remained a big part of what they did. And I found an archive of magazines published by the Black Panther Community News Service, which was essentially their media network. And one issue from 1969 included this cartoon, which Sophie can show you. Yeah. And I guess I can describe it or you can describe it if you'd like.

Let Prop describe it. Yeah. So this is from the Black Panther thing. Take my laptop. Yeah, the magazine that they ran. Yeah, the magazine. So it's like, I don't know if you're familiar with their style of animation, but it's like thick animation style of illustrations like thick,

like out black outlined characters like that are just kind of shaded in grays. And yellow or orange letters in blue letters. It's like a black family. I think that's a child, but the child looks like an adult animation style. And it's kind of like a cartoon or like a comic strip. But the brother's got a good fro. Both the brothers got a good fro. And the sister's got her nice little hair wrap on.

Yeah. Am I supposed to say what it says? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's going on in the cartoon? It says, so dad's got his hand on the shoulders of the little homie. And he says, son, what do you want for Christmas? I can't really make out what the bottom part says. I'll read what the son says he wants for Christmas.

A machine gun, a shotgun, a box of hand grenades, a box of dynamite, and I think a box of handguns is the 1969. 1969. And then there's some stuff written around the edges of the cartoon, including off the pig, blow oink, oink away and snipe the hawks. Dude, this is NWA right here. Yeah, really intense. Yes, on his way to like the after 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. And there is this kind of unavoidably gleeful tone in some of the discussions against violence against law enforcement, which I think is really uncomfortable for a lot of particularly kind of middle-of-the-road, centrist political people to deal with. To like accept.

But there's a reason for this. Yeah. Yeah, and that's what this episode is about, is like why there was so much paranoia and hatred of the police, not just as sort of like the violence against Black people by law enforcement, but specifically because the Panthers knew the police were targeting them. Yes. And as the 60s turned into 70s,

the increasing amount of their anti-law enforcement rhetoric focused on the Federal Bureau of Investigations. And I found a really interesting website, Black Power in American History. It appears to be a graduate student project from UNC at 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 9th, 1971, when it read,

This is caught dirty snooping and shows you his badge and begs for mercy, mercy him to death with the butt of your gun. Towards the bottom, 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 just spawned from bloodthirstiness.

The FBI and the police were engaged in an active battle to destroy the Black Panthers and to murder many of their leaders in this period of time. And a lot of folks would have just called them conspiratorial, would have said that they were sort of making stuff up because they're paranoid. 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 good tie-in to modern time, especially the community that spawned the hip-hop music

that most of us consider golden age. Like, these were our dads, you know, our moms. Like, so even just like, you know, 80 song from NWA fought the police, like, this isn't just... It's hard if you're not here, like, to understand that, like, you know, Iced tea's cop killer. It's like, okay, you think that this is, like, a honorable, like, officer position,

that that job is a job of a person that carries prestige and honor. It's like, that is not our experience with the police. Like, your experience is, this is another gang, right? It's just the law protects them. You know, so you have this attitude towards them. There's another song by... I feel like your taste in hip-hop would know if I'd say Jay Dilla, you know what I'm saying? So, like, you liking more the obscure, doom-tree stuff.

I've been listening, I've been listening, you know what I'm saying? And, you know, so you take somebody like Jay Dilla, who also has a song called Fuck the Police, and it's the idea is, like, the backstory of 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 of his things. It's like, destroyed hard drives, stuff like this guy's like recording albums for,

you know, Tribe Called Quest, like, he's recording albums for Busta Rhymes, like, all these, like, main, major, like, it's like, you guys asked Pharrell, Timberlain, 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 just raided my, and so he made that song that day, like, after the police just raided 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?

So the attitude is like, you're bullies, you're not policing us, you are bullies, you know, so it's hard not to respond that way, but so if you understand, that was a long statement, but if you understand, like, our relationship with law enforcement, and I say this as somebody who's like, my brother's 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 this day, like, so it's like, this is coursing through our veins, our grandparents, our great-grandparents, our fathers, you know what I'm saying?

Like, this is our relationship with the police. Sorry, that just is so triggering. No, and just 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, I've had a 2015 article in The Washington Post about civil asset forfeitures, which is what happens when police take your stuff with no recourse versus burglary. In 2014, civil asset forfeitures totaled more than $5 billion worth of property. The police took $5 billion worth of property with no recourse, really, from people.

Burglaries accounted for less than $4 billion worth of theft. So, like, when you're making that comparison between the police and the burglars, there's some numbers you can throw out there that are very compelling. Yeah, that's probably enough for now. So, in 1956, the FBI launched its Co-Intel Pro operation. Co-Intel Pro, you usually see it written in all caps as one word, it's an acronym, initially aimed at targeting communist organizers in the United States. It was later expanded to strike it groups like the KKK.

But thanks in large part to J. Edgar Hoover, in the late 1960s, 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 primary aims in counterintelligence as it concerns the BPP is to keep the group isolated from the moderate Black and White community which may support it. And I'm going to quote again from the book Black Against Empire here. The federal agents sought to create factionalism among the party leaders in between the Panthers and other Black political organizations.

FBI operatives forged documents and paid provocateurs to promote violent conflicts 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 BPP 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 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 so, like that's so like, you know, illuminating, because it's like you're in a room, it's like you're in a room with like rational people and somebody yells from the back, you should just punch them in the butt, you're just like, 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 very insidious. Yeah. And we'll get into the numbers a little bit later of how much they spent on this, for a specific example of how this process worked. And then we need to turn to 1968, when J. Edgar Hoover sent a memorandum to 14 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 is a complicated organization. Their founder, among other things, is the guy who created Kwanzaa. And 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 they competed aggressively for new recruits. Through a network of informants, the FBI learned this.

And Hoover noted 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 counterintelligence 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 FBI ordered its informants and us to tell members when the BPP planned to have events, so that us could also show up and both organizations would wind up in conflict. They did whatever they could to stoke hatred between both groups, including having their paid informants spread rumors about either side to the other group,

like rumors about them being hits planned and murders planned, raising the temperature. That was the goal. And this all came to a boil at an event your father was at. Yes. January 17th, 1969, when Al Prentice Carter and John Huggins were gunned down by us members on the UCLA campus. Yeah. It's like junior high all over again, only with murder mixed in. Yeah, it's so sad, man.

Pops was at that. Anyway, continue. Sorry. The Black Panthers seemed to instinctively know what was going on, and their magazines declared the murders a political killing. They pointed out that us received government funding and had a working relationship with the police. They also noted that 17 Panthers were arrested in the immediate wake of the murders, while it took much longer for the law to take action against the actual killers who were members of us.

Now, only some of the FBI's co-intel pro-fuckery 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 UCA was an ordered hit. Others were argue that the FBI definitely intended for there to be murders, but they weren't trying to 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.

Yeah. Yeah, it's debated. That's my possible belief was like, they had a list, this who you supposed to die. Yeah. Yeah, and we can verify that they absolutely specifically intended to stoke violence, that they wrote, we want to make these people kill each other, like that we know to a point of certainty. Whatever the truth about how specific they were about the violence they wanted,

the violence like happened, and it was very much stoke by the FBI. And on May 23rd, 1969, Black Panther John Savage was killed by us members. Sylvester Bell 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 1970s, so particularly like white people reading about this at the time, would have just said, oh, these black liberation groups are also violent. Look at what they're doing to each other, ignoring the fact that it was their FBI that was stoking all this.

Yeah. And I found a really good at New York Times article from 1976 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 Blackstone Rangers, which are now a much more complicated organization. At that point, we're a street gang in Chicago. Yeah.

Quote, for example, a fake note was sent to the leader of the street gang, Jeff Fort, telling him the Panthers' hostility towards his group, saying, there's supposed to be a hit out for you. In noting that this meant there was probably a contract to kill someone, the Chicago FBI office said in a memorandum to headquarters that the letter may intensify the degree of animosity between the two groups and occasion Fort to take retaliatory action which could disrupt the BPP or lead to reprisals against their leadership.

So the FBI sends this fake letter about a hit and notes specifically, we 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. I just, like, can we just, like, okay, acknowledge that, like, we...

You can't make this stuff up. No. You know? No, and this is... Can't make this stuff up, you know? One thing that's really frustrating about this is that it's spread so far even outside of... among the entire left-wing activist community.

I spent a lot of time in that community for my work. And there are constant modern fears about co-onto pro stuff, even among, like, white activist groups, primarily white activist groups of FBI informants and stuff. Like, you find this, like, this fear among, like, a lot of members of anti-fascist street groups right now that there's agent provocation. And maybe there are. Like, it's happened.

Like, that's the thing. It's like, they did it. There is precedence. Yes. Yeah, there's really no limit to what you might be worried the FBI will do to your activist group because this shit happened. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, I'm going to quote again from that New York Times article. You imagine this in, like, the Internet age. Just be like... Yeah. Just trolls attacking your comment section for the purpose of... Hmm. Yeah. It'll be 20 or 30 years.

Maybe do we need to imagine it? For living it? Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. It'll probably be a few years before the extent to which that stuff's going on comes out now. Yeah.

And, you know what? To be entirely honest, it's possible that none of it now is the FBI, that it's all, for example, government, like, private corporations contracted by government agencies or whatever. Totally. Like, who knows? Yeah. The FBI's COINTELPRO campaign seriously disrupted the Black Panthers,

but it did not stop them from expanding throughout the late 60s and early 1970s. 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. I wonder why. They just all of a sudden started committing crimes. They just went off the rails.

Yeah. Yeah. I think we'll start on this subject by talking about what happened to Huey P. Newton. Yeah. On October 27, 1967, Huey walked down to his girlfriend's house on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. It was a Friday night, and they were going to party,

but she wound up feeling sick and instead lent him her car to take out on the town. He had a drink at the bar and then went to a church social, where he danced until around 2 a.m. Then he drove to a party, which he left at around 4 a.m. That early morning, October 28, Officer John Frey of the Oakland police was sitting in his squad car. He saw Huey 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 were just wanting to fuck with Huey. Either is entirely possible. Yes. 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 describes what happened next. Officer Herbert C. Heans 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 Heans' patrol car. Newton and Frey started scuffling on the trunk of Heans' car. A gun went off. Heans was hit in the right forearm. Heans fired back, hitting Newton and the gut. More shots were fired.

Heans was shot three times and survived. Newton took that bullet to the gut and fled the scene with McKinney, which is a friend he was with. Frey 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 23, but all of the men involved in the melee were well under 30. Now, we don't know what actually happened. Newton claims to have blacked out after being shot,

which was totally reasonable, and speculates that the cops shot each other. And all of the recovered bullets came from police revolvers. Speculation on what went down ranges from Huey grabbing a cop's 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 PD gone horribly wrong. I don't know what exactly went down,

but I do think additional context on Officer James Frey is useful here, and I'm going to 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, in words, in the neighborhood he patrolled were a lot of bad types. And the trial eventually held to adjudicate the events 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 Dunning into the police car. We didn't lose one of our best. Don't say that out loud. That's the quiet part.

Earlier on the evening that Huey Newton and Gene McKinney drove to get soul food on 7th 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, Frey called him inward and held his arm so the white man could beat him. So this is the guy who winds up in this altercation. I don't have trouble believing 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 Huey and shot each other.

Any scenario that works. Yeah. But obviously Huey P. Newton gets charged with murder as a result of the shooting death of Officer James Frey. And in prison, Huey became a living martyr to the Black Panthers. There was a rally on his 26th birthday, February 17, 1968, that brought more than 6,000 people to the Oakland arena. H. Wrapped Brown and a Black Power activist told the crowd, the only thing that is going to free Huey Newton is gunpowder.

And this actually wound up being inaccurate. Huey received his day in court, which revealed, among other things, that Frey had a list of 20 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 1970, that conviction was reversed after the California Court of Appeals found significant errors in the trial. Huey would be tried two more times, both trials ending in jury deadlocks before he was eventually cleared of all charges in 1971.

So he is cleared by the courts, but he loses two years of his life, you know, to the prison. My mom used to call me H. Wrapped Brown. Just for jokes. She used to do it for jokes. You know H. Wrapped Brown, whenever I would talk about Black stuff. Anyway, I thought that was funny. Now, Bobby Seal also caught serious legal trouble. In 1969, as a result of his participation in the 1968 Chicago riots over the Democratic National Convention, that year's DNC occurred in one of 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 going to get into enough detail on the 68 riots. 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 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 I sense familiar to anybody.

The 1968 riots, like sort of resulted out of all this, and they were nightmarish and caused in large part by the fact that the mayor of Chicago, Richard Daly, turned the city into what Walter Cronkite called a police state leading up 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. It was just this big, ugly nightmare that was largely instigated by state violence against protesters who were unhappy that the DNC had picked basically a conservative guy to run against fucking Nixon.

For a little bit of context, all of the people who know their history right now are fucking terrified that the DNC in 2020 is going to be another 68 Chicago. Yeah, I felt like that sitting watching the last debate, I was like, uh, here we go again. I'll be bringing my helmet, yeah. In 1969, Bobby Seale was arrested for conspiracy to incite riots at the DNC, 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. The court refused to let Seale choose his own lawyer.

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 half, yeah. That's another one of those like, okay, play some spa music. Think about that for a second. Just really ruminate on that. Yeah, ruminate on the fact that this man was not allowed to pick his own lawyer, and then when he complained about it, they gagged him.

So which one of us is like oppressive and violent? Which one of us is violent? Now, when he did get to speak, Bobby repeatedly called the judge and government attorneys, racists, fascists, and lying pigs. This was pretty true in my opinion. It did not aid in his defense. Yeah, Bobby, you can't say that out loud. Just like to keep yourself on me. Let's play a long game.

He was sentenced to four years in prison and he served 21 months before. His conviction was reversed and he was freed in 1971. So again, he has almost two years stolen from it. Now, while all this was going on, the Panthers were taking in huge sums of money. The arrest of Huey P. Newton in particular 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 in sense that they had not been allowed to keep

what they thought was their fair share of the money they raised for the group. 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 Fred Hampton, dead. Now we're going to talk about Fred. But you need to look at this thing happening behind my shoulder right now.

Oh shit, your video's frozen. Here we go, I can see it. No, it's working here. Yeah, that's just Sophie. Oh, vigorously trying to get your attention. You're making me feel like a Trump-Hillary situation and go behind prop very creepily. You know what won't falsely charge political activists with crimes they didn't commit? Oh man, the products served.

The sponsors of this podcast. Glorious. Yeah, oh boy. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the gun badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match.

And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh man, I couldn't wait to get to Fred Hampton. I feel like I've been sitting here this whole time waiting to get to Fred Hampton. I was wondering why you were getting antsy in there. I was just like Fred Hampton, Fred Hampton, Fred Hampton.

Because when you get the three, it's like this is the trinity that paints the best picture as to how they got destroyed. Because it's like, you ask ten different panthers what the black panthers were, you're going to get ten different answers. Pending on which one of these figureheads you're appealing to, you know what I'm saying? So that's why I was like, you got to have the third person. Or it doesn't make sense. Or it doesn't make sense. You don't get the full story copy. Yeah, and 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 lay the groundwork in one and then bring up.

Because Hampton's whole life is so tied in with the police violence. Yeah, you nailed it. Because his story tied with the black messiah stuff. You have to wait till they was like, don't... Because he's the most likable, if you will, out of 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. So let's talk, I mean, I find Huey and Bobby pretty likable too. I do too. Fred Hampton is the charismatic guy, yes.

So Fred Hampton was born on August 30th, 1948, 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. 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 going to quote now from a Twitter thread I found on Fred Hampton by Michael Harriet, who's a senior writer at The Root. And he knows a lot about Hampton, and obviously it's a Twitter thread, I did do my work to like double check the claims and stuff. And he's very accurate here. So I'm going to 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 NAACP in his small Illinois suburb. In a single year, he had 500 members. If this sounds like hype, consider this. When Hampton attended his first Black Panther Party meeting in November 1968, the FBI had already opened a file on him a year earlier. His phone had been tapped for nine months. He'd been designated as a key leader on the FBI's agitator index for five months before he ever joins the party. You just, he's a G. You take all of the best attributes of everybody so far, and then you put it in a guy who has the entertaining ability of a Michael Jackson.

You're just like, you can't lose. So he gives me chills when I think about his ability to just electrify a room. Yeah. Yeah, and I really recommend like pulling up videos. You can find them of Fred Hampton speaking and addressing crowds. He was very good at it. And Michael in that thread argues that the FBI recognized Hampton's exceptional nature and that they were terrified he would rise to become a national figure. And there's a lot of backing for this argument. He in particular cites a memo from Herbert Hoover himself, discussing the goals of the COINTEL program, and it included as their number two goal.

And I'm going to quote directly from the FBI here. Everybody. Take a breath. Citation. Number two, prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a messiah. He is the martyr of the movement today. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and Elijah Muhammad all aspire to this position.

Elijah Muhammad 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 necessity. Yeah, I hear that. They talk about your boy. It's the obedience to white liberal thought dog. 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 King talk. Don't let that dude talk. We'd have had to shoot him a lot earlier. Yeah, right. Oh, man. So Hampton in his early, well, he didn't have a long career, unfortunately, but Hampton early in his career worked to broker peace deals between various gangs in Chicago and came very close to getting the Blackstone Rangers, a heavily armed organization with as many as 8,000 members to join the Black Panthers.

Now, 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 Blackstone Nation. We talked about it a little bit in part one. Yeah. In early 1969, 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. 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. Hijacked a truck and beat its driver or had nothing at all to do with the robbery of $71 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.

And again, you got to be real fucking careful when you listen to charges against any of these guys because we know what was going on. Yes. It's true. It's like, okay, so take that same event and put it in, like, Toad Suck, Arkansas, which is a city I've performed in, believe it or not. And it's just funny. It's like, you know what, dude, it's hot out here. You know, I got a dollar. 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 lie. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Minimize a crime. But it's like, this is mischievous. It's just you can't be mischievous and Fred Hampton, you know? Yeah. Now, Hampton was arrested for this and charged with robbery and assault. While he waited for his trial, Fred organized a free breakfast for children program in Chicago. In its first two weeks, it fed more than 1,100 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 $2,000 bail. Fred immediately held a press conference 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.

Come on. Now, Hampton next organized a mock trial with a group of white leftists known as the New Left, and he gave in that trial what would become one of his most famous speeches, saying, we're going to fight racism, not with racism, but with solidarity. We're not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we're going to fight it with socialism. We're not going to fight reactionary pigs with any reaction on our part. We're going to fight their reaction when all of us get together and have an international proletarian revolution. You were the FBI was not a fake. The most level headed, mature response to be like, look, man, look. And in that sense, it shows sort of, even though there was differences in the solution, there was a common thread through a lot of these thinkers is just being like, look, man, I don't know if just going straight this way is going to work. But like, you know, you can't, you can't defeat racism with racism, man. 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 going to, that's not going to get us to our conclusion is more racism. I think that's important to notice that those were his words, you know, and that's the guy that they were like, he's our worst enemy. 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 Seale flew down to Chicago to attend one of Fred's events. He gave a speech there where and he said, I'm so thirsty for revolution. I'm so crazy about the people. We're going to stand together. We're going to have a black army, a Mexican American army, an alliance and solidarity with progressive whites, all of us. And we're going to march on this pig power structure. And we're going to say, stick them up, motherfucker. We come for what's ours. It's a good speech. Yo, I love it, man. Stick them up, motherfucker. We come for what's ours.

Man, can I throw in a little history lesson here? Hell yeah. Okay, I don't know what he like, because I don't like it when someone steals your thunder on the show. So I don't want to do that. No, no, no, you're here because you know more about a lot of aspects of this than I do. So yeah, hit me up. Yeah. So like, you know, towards the end of like, you know, Dr. King's like work, especially the one that the event that ended at the I Have a Dream speech, what he was on his way for to talk about really was what you say. Man, was this idea of saying, we need to build this coalition because the system itself is trying to keep us out of this. Then he does this, he does this whole, this whole diatribe about like, okay, you know, talking about the Homestead Act. Y'all could Google that, but he was talking about the Homestead Act like, okay, so to live like poor white people out of serfdom, it was like the government was handing out land grants to people to come build farms. If you didn't know what you was doing, government would train you. They pay to train you. If you didn't have no tools to work, government would 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's been handing out money to y'all this whole time. So when we go to DC, we go in and get our check because us just trying to just tell you to stop being a racist or trying to change your mind about who you are, just trying to fight you and just forget it. Let's just do it ourselves. Because it was like, no, listen, 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 the government to look at or for the FBI to say, well, Fred Hampton is saying this. I'm like, hey, but your boy King was saying the same thing, FAMO. He said the same. We're all saying the same thing, bro. We're all saying the same thing. And it's interesting that the guys who were saying that same thing didn't get a lot of time to say it. No.

Yeah. Yeah. And I don't know enough about the murder of Martin Luther King or the assassination of Martin Luther King to talk about the conspiracy theories you might say around it. But I will say there's definitely a reason to be suspicious about what kind of government involvement there might have been. Absolutely. Whole other show. Also, totally possible erasist might have, you know. Yeah, or just.

So I'm not going to get. Yeah. Hate that guy. Yeah. Yeah. Not out of the, yeah. Anyway. Yes. So by May 26, 1969, Fred Hampton's free breakfast program was feeding more than 3,000 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 1969, Fred Hampton embarked on his most ambitious plan yet. He held the conference for a united front against fascism, which he billed 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 brutality and poor public housing. And Teen Vogue actually has a really good write-up on this that I'm going to quote from now. Hampton and the other Panthers, like section leader Bobby Lee, made the case that as poor people trying to survive in 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 abuse of landlords or police.

We did security for the Panthers along with other Panthers, 70-year-old High Thurman, a member of the YPO, who told Teen Vogue from his home in Alabama, here's a bunch of hillbillies doing, you know, security for black people and black Panthers, Thurman 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 lords foregrounded issues impacting immigrants from Latin America and citizens who moved from Puerto Rico, birthplace of the co-founder Jose Chacha Jimenez. They introduced the slogan, Tango Puerto Rico en mi Corazon, in the 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 same problems and we can all fight together to deal with them. Yeah, buddy. Is that not like the, I mean, that's not good? You know what I'm saying? That's the question, wait, that's not good?

Wouldn't you desire, I mean, I just don't understand why this is a problem to y'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 start looking at the actual person fucking them over. That's probably it. Suddenly we got a real threat. Yeah, you know, you kill each other, we ain't got to do the work for you. Yeah, just kill each other, you know, so listen to this and take heed, young gangsters. Yeah, yes.

Now, all of this scared the hell out of J. Edgar Hoover. He directed his men to, quote, destroy what they stand for and eradicate its serve the people programs. I got to say, if you're talking about eradicating serve the people programs, you might be the bad guy. I just think you might be reading the story all wrong. Yeah, maybe you on the wrong side of this one, you know. It's a real, are we the baddies moment? Wait a minute. Oh, it's me, right?

Like, yeah. Oh, shit. Oh, shit, it's me. Oh, damn. Yeah. We are, we are leaving out a lot because the story of all of the shit that the police and the FBI did to take down Fred Hampton, I could do a full two parter just on that. This guy had almost as much thrown at him as Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton did combined.

It's remarkable. 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 other Panthers with his obsession for violence. At one 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 an FBI, an attempt for them to like get the Panthers to torture people so they could arrest them for torture. Sheesh.

Yeah. And Hampton's like, what the fuck are you doing building an electric chair? I'm going to quote now from a write-up in The Nation for this next bit. Quote, not simply an informant, O'Neill tried to provoke others into kamikaze-type activities. Former Panther member Lewis Trulock 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 of liquid, enough material to produce several bombs. He proposed that they blow up an armory, and later suggested robbing a McDonald's restaurant. Trulock and the others who heard O'Neill'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 Satchel, a Black Panther leader who was wounded in the raid, recalls the only person who didn't want O'Neill in the Panthers was Fred Hampton. Now, the electric chair and the bombs were part of a series of schemes O'Neill hatched to try and entrap 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 1969, 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 4.45 a.m., 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 pumped roughly 100 rounds into the building. Only one bullet was fired in response by a Black Panther. Mark Clark, age 22. 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 bullet holes in the house were centered around the location of his bed, where William O'Neill had drawn the red X.

One officer was heard saying, he's good and dead now as they traipse through the bloodstained office. And there is 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've got a photograph, Sophie can show you. We'll put it up on the side. I've seen it. It's important to see these men's faces.

This and the map with the red X are something that sits in our psyche because that image just burns in you. You know what I'm saying? When you see it and you know that's what it is, that's that man's bed. Yeah. Yeah. But for the listeners, you would think that they just left their local bar and are going to hand in each other. That's the way they look. They look like they did well on a slot machine.

Yeah. A slot machine. So true. Yeah. Speaking of doing well on a slot machine, following the raid, William O'Neill was given a $300 bonus by the FBI. For fuck's sake. And now, today, the assassination of Fred Hampton is basically universally agreed by scholars and legal experts as well as activists to have been a political assassination, organized and orchestrated by the FBI. Yes.

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 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 antsy about this whole thing. But trust me out is like when people say, hey, well, you know, these street gangs are these street, you know, they're violent too, they're shooting, they're shooting. So we're shooting.

I'm like, yeah, but you know, they're gangsters. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they're shooting. But aren't you the police? Like, aren't you supposed to carry yourself, you know, at a level of integrity? You 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 the cops though. Yeah. You know, one thing that's interesting to me that maybe I can leave as a little bit of homework for the listener. Go sit down and look up, Google all the people who were killed in mass shootings in the history of the United States. Like, not just like shootings, but like mass shootings where some nut with a gun decides to murder a bunch of strangers. Yes. Add that number together and then figure out how many people were shot dead by the police in 2019 alone.

Oh, no. Figure out which of those numbers is larger. Oh, no. A little bit of homework for you. Yes. Yeah. Now, the article that I found on the Chicago Tribune also counts the firearms the Panthers had on the property, 19, and the number of rounds over a thousand, as if any of that justifies what was done. Those were all legally owned guns and legally owned.

I have more firearms and ammunition in my house sitting five feet from me than the Black Panthers had in their house at that point. Yeah. Like, that's not a lot to be. No. In 19, the sizable number of guns for one person, but like it was multiple people's weapons and a thousand rounds is not a lot. And those gunfights with police had no connection to Fred Hampton other than that he was a Panther too. And despite the murders and the FBI fuckery and the counterintelligence operations, by 1970, the Black Panthers had offices in 68 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. And we're not going to have enough time really to go into all of the international divisions of this. Yeah. And speaking of international, Sophie is signaling to me that it's time for an ad break from the international corporations that sponsor this podcast. All right. Globalism. There we go. The globalists.

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We're back! So, 1970 would prove to be the Black Panther's high point. And again, there's a number of reasons for this police repression, disruption of the leadership and stuff had a lot to do with it. I should note, and it's very fair to note, that it was not just 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 going to 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 1969, and steadily increasing through 1970, 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 won 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, major concessions by the political establishment and the Nixon administration on the Vietnam War eroded the basis of war opponent support for the Panthers' politics. Once it appeared the war would be ended through institutionalized political means, those principally committed to ending the draft and war no longer shared a personal stake in radically transforming political institutions. Many now increasingly saw the Panthers' call for revolution as unnecessary. From 1969 onward, increasing electoral representation as well as affirmative action programs and growing access to government employment and elite education also weakened the base of support for the Panthers' revolutionary politics among blacks. From the end of Reconstruction 1877 until 1969, no more than six black people had held a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives at once. But just two years later, black representation more than doubled, with 13 black people holding seats in the U.S. House of Representatives by 1971.

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 really, got what they wanted and stopped caring about this kind of revolutionary struggle for equality. That's a part of the story too. Yeah. My father would say, like, you know, the government go always get they man. You know, whatever they want, if the system decides they want you gone, you're going to be gone, right? And, like, and he would also say, what you ain't going to never mess with is they money. And if you mess with they money, they're going to stop it. So, this idea of, 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 in the streets? All right. I guess.

You know what I'm saying? We'll just start messing with our money, though. You know, and especially, like, our international, like I said, when you, I may have said this on the last episode, when you first invited me on here, I wanted to, like, refresh my memory. Refresh my memory with, like, with, 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, the sowing seeds of, like, doubt of, like, you know, even just the idea of saying, like, hey, you know, you got this coalition, but, like, now, like, well, if the war's over, why are y'all here?

Right? So, he even mentioned, he mentioned exactly what you were saying. It was, like, now the utility's gone. Like, what do we do? And then you had, like, the, the, the, what 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 there was two or more of 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 was just, like, sowing seeds of doubt, dividing the coalition, messing with their money, just, like, all of those things together, if the government decides, these are his words, if government decides, they don't want you, they don't want you. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, yeah, I'm glad you brought up, like, the, the, like, the cracking down on so-called meetings. Yeah. Because that, again, that's, that's one of those things, like, there's, there was so much, I'm sure was on my, I think it was on my dock at some point.

I just didn't get ridden up. Yeah. 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. Yeah. So, I'm glad you did bring that up. The Black Panther Party was eventually dissolved in 1982, and the FBI and, you know, local federal state law enforcement cannot be blamed for all of that. Yeah.

But their efforts succeeded in draining huge amounts of energy from the organization, killing at least 20 of its members, and most importantly, destroying or distracting its most influential leaders. Huey P. Newton spent most of the 1970s fighting a seemingly endless series of legal battles. 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. Yeah. He was murdered in 1989 by Tyrone Johnson, a member of the Black Gorilla family, a prison gang, and it's very difficult to not draw connections between that murder and the FBI motivated us killings. Yeah.

You know, I don't know. Yeah. Impossible not to think about it. Did you come across, this is like a side note, but did you come across like the 10 demands of the Black Panther Party? Yes, yeah. We're going to get to that at the end. Okay, just making sure it was. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's what I wanted to end on. Yeah. And did you get, yeah. Are you going to cover like their connection with like the founding of the Crips and Tookie Williams and stuff? That we're not. Okay. So if you have something, yeah, I would, I would love to hear about that. Yeah.

So it's this, it's this window that you talk about this 1983 window of like the sort of seeing, you know, you got these three dudes like seeing the, the destruction of the party and almost like the same sort of disillusionment like, damn, that didn't work either. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. And then like, and then you introduced 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 called The Bastard Children of the Black Panther Party and it was about the founding of the Crips. Oh, cool. 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 shit.

Interesting. Yeah. Anyway, I had no idea about any of that. Yeah. Yeah. And the whole crack in the inner cities thing in the CIA, that that's a whole another two or three part or we're going to have to get to some point. Cause 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 the way it was carried out and it's very detailed. Yeah.

Whatever the case may be, it's understood in the inner city that like 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. And yeah, that's really important context. And also important context is the, to really get an idea of the sheer level of a fuckery perpetrated against the Black Panther Party by the FBI during the period of COINTELPRO.

Yeah. Of the 295 actions the bureau took to disrupt black groups under COINTELPRO, 233 were taken against the Panthers. Yeah. And they paid out more than $7.4 million in bribes to Black Panther informants, which is more than, for context, 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. And the mob in like the 60s and 70s when the mob is like really a big deal. Like the actual mob. Yes.

Yeah. Like the core, like the fucking Scorsese mob. Yeah. The Scorsese mob. Wild. The Scorsese mob. 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 of limits, say this. I am, we are absolutely fascinated. Like the Irishman being like, oh, the greatest movie ever. Like, you know, honored as like this. Like, nah, I'm like, yeah. Murderer. Like, okay. I like mob 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 by white gangsters? You know what I'm saying? I wonder how many of the people who love those movies also think that rap music unfairly glorifies 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. So, yeah, 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. Davidon, a professor of physics at Haverford College. In 1971, they spent months casing an FBI field office in Philadelphia. During the night of a major Frazier-Ali fight, when everyone was distracted, they broke into the FBI's offices with a crowbar and made out with a carload of FBI files. That's so great. Those files included numerous memos from J. Edgar Hoover on the Black Panthers and the COINTELPRO to operations.

Now, the FBI tried to stop the press from writing about any of this, but the Washington Post was courageous enough to flip in the bird and write about it. The findings inspired a blizzard of FOIA requests from Panthers, who suddenly had confirmation that they'd been surveilled for years. All this shit they'd been writing about, the FBI's 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 500-page file 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 creepy, man. So all of this led to an investigation in 1976 by the Senate Collect Committee on Intelligence Activities.

The final report they issued noted that the actions carried out by the FBI under COINTELPRO, quote, would be intolerable in a democratic society, even if all the targets had been involved in violent activity. But COINTELPRO 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,

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. Cool. And part of me wants to end on that note. Yeah. But I don't think I want to give the government the last word in this episode, even if that

last word is the government condemning the actions of its own agents. Yeah, our bad. So for the last word in this episode, I think we should go over the Black Panther's 10-point program, introduced in 1966 by Huey 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 of the recording of this episode, has continued to be an activist, ran for office a couple of times, and yeah, is still around to this day.

So that's at least one bit of, yeah, positive. So, here is the 10-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 for our people. Number three, we want an end to the robbery by the white men of our Black community. Later changed to, we want an end to 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 our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that 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 by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States. In 10, we want land, bread, 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.

It included a reiteration of the Panther 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 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 natures God entitle them. A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they 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 governed. But whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right 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 for light and transient causes, and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evildoers 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, evinces 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 of Independence.

Yes. Yes. Yeah. Man, what a friggin' journey. And there's so like, again, you ask 10 different people what the Black Panthers are, you get 10 different answers, even people that were in the movement. Yeah. But at the end of the day, man, wherever point might be a problem, is it so much to ask to

be like, yo, I just wanted housing that's suitable for humans. Yeah. How about that? Yeah. And if, yeah, yeah, 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 this nation to make good on its promises. Just keep your promises.

Yeah. Like they're saying like, this thing that you all claim to revere, this is a good document. It's got some good shit in there. Why aren't you doing it? Yeah. That's what we were about. Let's do it. Yeah.

Yeah. So good. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Cool. Prop, is there anything you want to go into before we roll out of this one? Man, I think mentioning some of the women, like the Tupac connection, like Afani Shakur,

I mean, Angela Davis, her prison reform stuff that she's doing now, like some of these people. Nina Simone and like, just some of the things that are happening, like who's in Cuba right now? Why am I blanking on who's in Cuba right now? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

In Cuba and in Algeria, they had a number of them wound up living there. Yeah. They just went there. Yeah. So yeah, some of the women, you know what I'm saying, that were like so pivotal, you know what I'm saying? And again, Afani Shakur, like Tupac's mom, you know what I'm saying? Yeah.

You know, going to prison, 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 biggest shortcoming of this, is that like, yeah, I mean, I definitely didn't go into detail enough about like the different women activists, the international stuff that went on, there's so much to talk about. Yeah.

And like, it was always going to be imperfect and I wish I had done more research on it. You could, like Angela 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 it and why they're still alive, you know what I'm saying? I think it's like super, but even if 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 to like just in prisons, period, like prisons are ineffective. They don't work. They just make more criminals. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. So, but you could go hear her right now. You know what I'm saying?

Like talk about it. You know what I'm saying? Like why Tupac was who he was again, his mama 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, 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, the, the

missed to me, even in a lot of like the academic work with the camp, 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 they was killing the men, guess who carried it? It was the women. You know what I'm saying?

So just, I just think that like that legacy, I would love to see more on that legacy. Not even, not from this. I'm just saying just period, like let's, can we talk about what the ladies did? You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah. And that's a, you know, that's probably a good, maybe a good subject for when we do our next heroes episode around the end of the year or something.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And part I was focusing this on, I mean, I was focusing this largely on like efforts to destroy the Panthers and those did sort of focus more on, on killing and injuring. Yeah. Yeah. 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 going to leave so much shit out. Dude. Yeah. Like how? Like that's what I was saying.

Like I was already ready to show you mercy because it's just so much 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, go read more about these guys and women and this, this, like go read more about this. I think Black Against Empire is a good place to start.

Yeah, man. There's a lot of other really good books that you can look into. Yeah. And yeah. 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 for like, I read The Death of Democracy. No, that's a good one.

God, that was, that was a book boy. Yeah. Yeah. You probably got the same chills I did when you used to read and I was like, oh, shit. Oh, this isn't good. Yeah. This is too familiar. Yeah.

Yeah. Anyway. Well, you know, you know, maybe consider some of the lessons in Black Against Empire as 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. The armed stuff and the stuff that has nothing to do with guns. Yeah. It's all very important.

So that's the end note on this episode. Prop, you want to plug your plugables before we sail out of here into the weekend. My plugables are Prop Hip Hop. Just like it sounds, Prop Hip Hop, that's Twitter, that's Instagram, that's the website. There's Merge, Coffee Paraphimilia, I'm quite a coffee nerd, a couple podcasts I'm a part of. Like really cool Coffee Paraphimilia. Oh, yeah.

It's all bad. Like really, really, really cool. You guys got to look up the poor Gami. It's going to blow your mind. DJ Daniel, our engineer, bought one. He did jerk. You're supposed, I was supposed to give you one, man. Yeah, dude.

So the poor Gami, yeah, some pods I'm a part of called Hood Politics, one I'm most excited about. It's essentially like a sort of the street level version of politics and information just to like, it's kind of fun, kind of tongue in cheek. But you can understand politics. If you survived eighth grade, you can understand geopolitics. And that's really what that's possible. Yeah, and that's kind of what I'm working on.

All right. And I am working on this podcast every week. You can find me here. You can find the sources for this episode on BehindTheBastards.com. You can find our Twitter and Instagram at at BastardsPod. You can find my Twitter at IWriteOK. And you can also find our other podcast WorstYearEver. We have a two-parter that just dropped investigating a terrorist attack on the furry community

at a convention in 2014 and it's Nazi connections. So that's a fun one. So continue learning things, read some good books and go out into the street and kick some ass or feed some ass to do something to asses, yeah. Great. All right. And we're out. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations.

In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. He didn't inside his hearse with like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.