"You can kill a revolutionary, but you cannot kill a revolution. You can jail a liberation fighter, but you cannot jail liberation."
(J. Edgar Hoover, Head of the FBI and founder of Cointelpro)
The Rainbow Coalition was a coalition active in the late 1960s and early 1970s, founded in Chicago, Illinois by Fred Hampton of the activist Black Panther Party, along with William "Preacherman" Fesperman, Jack (Junebug) Boykin, Bobby Joe Mcginnis and Hy Thurman of the Young Patriots Organization and Jose (Cha-Cha) Jimenez, the Puerto Rican founder of the Young Lords. It later expanded to include various radical socialist groups. It was associated with the rising Black Power movement, which mobilized some African-American discontent and activism by other ethnic minority groups after the passage of the mid-1960s civil rights legislation under Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson.(Source)
The coalition also included members of various local ethnic gangs, among whom Hampton, Rising Up Angry, the Young Patriots, and the Young Lords had brokered treaties to end violence between them. The leaders worked to reduce conflict by the treaties, as they believed that poor youths' fighting each other in gang wars achieved little benefit for them. Hampton and his colleagues believed that the Daley Machine in Chicago and the American ruling class used gang wars to consolidate their own political positions by gaining funding for law enforcement and dramatizing crime rather than underlying social issues.
Although Hampton was not known to take drugs, Cook County chemist Eleanor Berman would report that she ran two separate tests which each showed a powerful barbiturate had been introduced into Hampton's blood. An FBI chemist would later fail to find similar traces, but Berman stood by her findings.(Source)
Automatic gunfire then converged at the head of the bedroom where Hampton slept, unable to wake up as a result of the barbiturates that the FBI infiltrator had slipped into his drink. He was lying on a mattress in the bedroom with his pregnant girlfriend. Two officers found him wounded in the shoulder, and fellow Black Panther Harold Bell reported that he heard the following exchange:(Source)
"That's Fred Hampton."
"Is he dead?... Bring him out."
"He's barely alive.
"He'll make it."
Two shots were heard, which it was later discovered were fired point blank in Hampton's head. According to Deborah Johnson, one officer then said:
"He's good and dead now."
"We were just sitting around drinking beer," Heard recalls, "talking to some friends of mine. We had company. The company left and that's when he started acting kind of strange."(Source)
At 2:30 AM the 40-year-old O'Neal ran out of his uncle's apartment, across the westbound lanes of the Eisenhower Expressway, and was struck by a car and killed. His death was ruled a suicide.
O'Neal achieved lasting infamy in 1973 when his role in the 1969 raid in which Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were murdered was revealed. Though O'Neal was a Panther insider to the point where he was in charge of security for Hampton and possessed keys to Panther headquarters and safe houses, he was at the same time serving as an informant for the FBI. Among the information the teenaged O'Neal fed his FBI contact was the floor plan of Hampton's west-side apartment that was used to plan the fatal raid. After his cover was blown O'Neal entered the federal witness protection program, assumed the alias William Hart, and moved to California. He secretly returned to Chicago in 1984.
I had never heard of the Church Committee either and I am very interested now.
Church's committee also discovered that the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation had sent anonymous letters attacking the political beliefs of targets in order to induce their employers to fire them. Similar letters were sent to spouses in an effort to destroy marriages. The committee also documented criminal break-ins, the theft of membership lists and misinformation campaigns aimed at provoking violent attacks against targeted individuals.Read more here..
One of those people targeted was Martin Luther King. The FBI mailed King a tape recording made from microphones hidden in hotel rooms. The tape was accompanied by a note suggesting that the recording would be released to the public unless King committed suicide.
In 1975 Church's committee interviewed Johnny Roselli about his relationship with the secret services. It emerged that in In September 1960, Roselli and fellow crime boss, Sam Giancana, took part in talks with Allen W. Dulles, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), about the possibility of murdering Fidel Castro.
I cannot believe I've never heard of this until now.
ETA: I am also very interested in what happened to his girlfriend and unborn (at the time) child. This aspect of the story is something that I've just started reading up on as it would be interesting to know if the persecution of the father followed through to the child and the girlfriend
The panthers left alive, including Deborah Johnson, Hampton's girlfriend, who was eight months pregnant at the time, were arrested and charged with attempting to murder the police. Afterwards, ballistic evidence revealed that only one bullet had been fired by the Panthers whereas nearly a hundred came from police guns.(Source)
Akua Njere (Deborah Johnson) joined the Black Panthers after hearing Fred Hampton speak at a public meeting. She was interviewed about her time in the organization by the Burning Spear magazine in June, 1990.(Source)
Fred Hampton was the originator of the concept of the Rainbow Coalition. He was the first person to come up with that concept in 1969. That was an effort to educate and politicize other poor and oppressed people throughout this world. He worked with and attempted to politicize the Young Patriots organization, which was a group of Appalachian whites in the near north area of Chicago, politicizing them and organizing them to recognize the leadership of the Black Revolution, the vanguard party, the Black Panther Party, and to work in their communities against this huge monster we had to deal with which is racism.
The Black Panther Party began to go out in the community from day one. We talked to residents of the community to see what issues they were concerned about that affected their survival. We did not ask them to fill out questionnaires.
We started survival programs. We started breakfast programs. We started feeding the children in the community without asking how many children you got and how many different daddies of children you got or if you're getting an aid check. Those things were not important to us and we did not say we had to wait for federal funds. As a matter of fact we could not accept any federal funds at all because we felt that an enemy that was trying to destroy us would not give federal funds to a group that had no vested interest in that enemy's survival.
We got doctors. We politicized the doctors and we let them know that public health is a priority over hospital wealth. We said it shouldn't be a question of how much insurance a person had or whether or not they had insurance or the money to pay. If people are sick and dying, then people have a right to treatment.
So the community was concluding that all this stuff they're reading about these Panthers is opposite to our practice in the community. The people began to question the role the media played in the community. They began to question even more so a government that they knew was oppressing them.
Originally posted by Rising Against
Martin Luther king is perhaps their most famous "enemy" to date, some still believing that his demise is in large part down to Cointelpro, especially after documents were uncovered showing how he was targeted, how his apartments were bugged, how personal letters aimed at forcing him into killing himself before he was to receive his Nobel Peace Prize were found and so on, all of this among even more routes of personal attacks, intimidation and character assassination used upon him through this secretive program.
- FBI agents that spied on Martin Luther King also ran Cointelpro's 'Omaha Two'
Dr. King was shot while he leaned over a second-floor railing outside his room at the Lorraine Motel. He was chatting with two friends just before starting for dinner. www.nytimes.com...
It was as Kyles, Abernathy and King prepared to leave the Lorraine, the Memphis motel where
King was staying, when death came.
When the two were leaving the motel room, Abernathy still inside, a shot rang out.
"I looked back," Kyles said. "He had been knocked from the railing back onto the floor"
www.nj.com...
Dr. King was shot while he leaned over a second-floor railing outside his room at the Lorraine Motel. He was chatting with two friends just before starting for dinner. www.nytimes.com...
Yes he was, and one of those people was Jessie Jackson. It's about his only claim to fame. He was a nobody before that.
