Making All Black Lives Matter (#2)

  In Making All Black Lives Matter, by Barbra Ransby, there are plenty of examples where racial acts are demonstrated by racist police officers, the FBI, etc. After reading the second half of the book there is one example that stands out the most. The Fred Hampton case really struck me differently and forced me to take a step backwards to really be able to take this in. On page 130, it mentions that the black community is still "bitter" about the whole situation and I can understand why. "Hampton was a youth leader in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and later joined the Illinois Black Panther Party, rising in the ranks to become its chair" (pg 130). He was a great leader and an even better man. He "built bridges between the party" and brought various groups of people together within the city if Chicago. On December 4th, 1969, there was an early morning police raid where he was shot and killed. Hampton's comrade, Mark Clark, was killed during the raid. "Their murders were an outgrowth of the FBI's notorious COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence program), which sought to subvert and destroy Black liberation organizations that the government deemed threatening" (pg 131). This goes to show that these men were simply killed because they were a threat to the power of the whites and FBI. They saw the impact and influence that these two men had and they thought it was reasonable to kill them simply because they were fighting for equality. The FBI recognized that what they were doing was working and that the only way to prevent them from possibly taking a step towards equality was to eliminate them completely. This is sickening and really hard to think about. It is hard to believe that the whites were so afraid to lose their power and privilege that they found it necessary to kill them. As a white man it is embarrassing to think that someone of my kind was willing to do this. I hope that as time goes on people of all ethnicities and backgrounds realize that these kind of situations should not represent all whites. This event in 1969 is absolutely horrific and I hope that another black man never has to end up in another situation like this.

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