“I Am…”: Troy Davis, Fred Hampton and the Black Freedom Movement
by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan
The State has acted in the case of Troy Anthony Davis and in many ways that was never in doubt; it acted as it has always acted. What was never really clear, is whether we all had the resolve to respond. The more than half-million signatures that were generated on behalf of Davis (largely via social media), the re-engagement of the NAACP under the leadership of Ben Jealous, and the stellar on-the-ground coverage of the State murder of Davis by Amy Goodman and Democracy Now are just a few examples that we still do have the capacity to build, organize and resist. That we need to sustain these efforts on behalf of social justice goes without saying.
I was most struck though, by the many images of signs, tee-shirts and Facebook pages that declared “I Am Troy Davis”—images that circulated within logics particular to this moment of social media and the market forces that frame so much of our visual culture and our political activities. Anybody could imagine themselves as a political progressive if they simply wore a t-shirt. Yet, instead the invocation of “I Am Troy Davis” took me back to another historical era of mass political resistance.
Black Panther member Fred Hampton was murdered by the State, at roughly the same age as Troy Davis, when the latter was initially arrested for the murder of police officer Mark MacPhail. Unlike Davis, who was arguably tried in front of a jury of his peers, Hampton was gunned down by the Chicago Police Department in concert with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (under the directorship of J. Edgar Hoover) in the early morning hours in what poet and publisher Haki Madhubuti has called a “one-sided shootout.” Hampton’s crime was, ultimately, being one of the youngest and most effective organizers within the Black Freedom Movement of the late 1960s.
The attack on Hampton, which included the use of a Black FBI informant, was intended to highlight the so-called violent nature of the Black Panther Party and was firmly in line with the FBI’s preference to remove effective local leadership, before they ascended to the national stage. The plan backfired when the house that Hampton and comrade Mark Clark were murdered in was left open for public viewing, allowing for independent forensic experts to discover that the vast majority of the gunfire came from the police officers; the party members in the house fired one bullet in self defense.
Though Hampton’s story was long known among Chicago residents and veterans of the Black Freedom Movement, a new generation became aware with the broadcast of the ground-breaking documentary series Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Movement 1954-1985. The episode “A Nation of Law, 1968-1971” specifically examines the acts of repression visited upon the Black Freedom Movement by the State, including the murder of Hampton and the put down of the Attica prison revolt.
One of the episode’s respondents, Father George Clements, had been named the first Black priest at Chicago’s Holy Angels Catholic Church in Chicago in June of 1969, six months before Hampton’s murder. In the episode Clements recalls a mass he held in response to Hampton’s killing:
“in the midst of this mass, I was trying to explain to our children, we had all the school children there, all 1,300, and I was trying to explain to them the importance of Fred. And I wasn't getting through, at least I felt like I wasn't getting through. And in the midst of my explanation, I just burst into tears. And the next thing I knew was here was one of our 8th grade boys. He jumped up and he said, "I am Fred Hampton." And then a girl in the 6th grade, she jumps up and says, "I am Fred Hampton." Another kid in first grade, "I'm Fred Hampton." And before you knew it, the whole church, kids were all shouting, "I am Fred Hampton."
Father Clements’ recollection speaks to the power of the very idea of a Fred Hampton, as the late political leader was very much a prototype for the next generation of Black political leadership in the 1970s and the very reason he had to be destroyed. By the time Hampton’s story is told via Eyes on the Prize, the Black Freedom Movement as it existed at the end of Hampton’s life had been largely—and effectively—neutralized by the very State forces responsible for his death, more formally known as the FBI’s covert counter intelligence program or COINTELPRO.
The value of consciousness raising by hip-hop artists in the 1980s, notably Black Power child, Chuck D (Carlton Douglas Ridenhour), was that the very practices of sampling that allowed hip-hop to mine the sonic history of American music was also used to piece together a history of Black radicalism and resistance; a generation of American youth were introduced to figures like Joanne Chesimard—Assata Shakur—and Malcolm X.
It was this element of hip-hop that filmmaker Spike Lee increasingly made use of in his own films, and as such, Lee drew reference to Clements’ story about Fred Hampton in the closing montage of his film Malcolm X. In scenes shot in South Africa and Harlem, NY, Lee captured young students, encouraged by the actress Mary Alice and a just released Nelson Mandela, standing from their seats shouting “I Am Malcolm X.” It was a brilliant piece of cinematic layering that allowed for a recognition of a broader reality of Black loss and trauma.
Unfortunately in the hands of Madison Avenue advertisers, Lee’s spark of creativity was little more than a gimmick, that they later deployed in the name of a “Cablinasian” professional golfer, who had no more interest in the history of Black radicalism than he did embracing the post-racial project, even as he become the defining symbol (before our current President) for that project within a neo-liberal meritocracy. The subsequent “I am Tiger Woods” campaign which Nike ran in the aftermath of Woods’ historic win at the Master’s Tournament in 1997, effectively silenced the voices of those girls and boys who stood up in Holy Angels Catholic Church chanting Fred Hampton’s name, and the legacy of the movement that their voices embodied.
And yet in September of 2011, Fred Hampton is again recalled, this time in another symbol of the State’s will towards violence. Most heartening were images of Davis’ nephew De’Jaun Correia, a reminder that the State murder of Troy Davis can serve as his generation’s River Jordan, a possibility that was also reflected in the photoof Howard University students, mouths taped in silent protest, effectively mocking the first Black President for his own silence on the matter of Troy Davis. May a generation be renewed in the aftermath of Davis’ death.
