Fred Hampton Must Have Scared the Crap Out of Mississippi

Fred Hampton, Activist

At 4am on December 4th, 1969, the FBI, working with the Chicago police department, assassinated Chicago Black Panther Party Deputy Chairman Fred Hampton in his bed as he slept. Along with the murder of Mark Clark in the same apartment that night, the "raid" was one in a long line of illegal actions taken by the FBI as part of its COINTELPRO war against the social justice and anti-war movements.

Hampton's death was chronicled in the 1971 documentary film The Murder of Fred Hampton, as well as an episode the documentary series Eyes on the Prize.

Hampton was known as a skilled leader, and the FBI kept close tabs on his activities; FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover was determined to prevent the formation of a cohesive Black radical movement in the United States. Hoover viewed the Panthers, and other such radical coalitions, as a move toward the creation of a revolutionary body that could potentially overthrow the U.S. government.

The FBI opened a file on Hampton in 1967 that over the next two years expanded to twelve volumes and over four thousand pages. A wire tap was placed on Hampton's mother's phone in February 1968. By May of that year, Hampton's name was placed on the "Agitator Index" and he would be designated a "key militant leader for Bureau reporting purposes.

Not surprisingly, Mississippi Sovereignty Commission was keeping tabs on Hampton, too. Here are several links to get started ...

A letter dated Jan. 20, 1970 from the Committee to Defend the Panther 21. Ralph Abernathy’s name is at the top of the list of sponsors and has been circled.

A speech by Carl Braden at the University of Mississippi. "Don't end up ... and get murdered like Fred Hampton." Notes the RNA came to Mississippi for reasons of peace and media has misrepresented its efforts. Report is unsigned but stamped by the University Police.

Several heavily redacted news articles from the Commercial Appeal, Times Picayune, etc. from 1970.

Should make for some good reading ... even if the best files are probably still hidden somewhere underground in Jackson or nearby.

ACORN Misrepresented? No Change From the 70's -- Groups Trying to Help Miss. Blacks Spied On By Mississippi Sovereignty Commission

BY THE END of the 1960s and into the early 1970s, well over a dozen years after Brown v. the Board of Education followed by the murders of Rev. George Lee, Lamar Smith and then Emmett Till, violence was accelerating in Mississippi. More black people were being killed or turning up “missing” than had been in recent years.

Attempts to destroy organizations trying to stop the violence increased, too. Black Panthers, just coming into the Delta, and small volunteer groups, sometimes church run, were trying to help Mississippi’s blacks either change their conditions or flee the state.

Both the Panthers and the Box Project, the later aiding sharecroppers to physically escape plantations, were perceived much like ACORN in 2009 – their efforts at community organization and related activities often misunderstood or misrepresented.

Fear of northern events such as Watts’s burning in 1965 translated to attempts at halting the Panthers, who in 1969 were quietly trying to organize college students at Delta State University in Cleveland, 17miles southwest of Drew.

Isaac Henderson Shorter of Cleveland returned home from Detroit where he had led demonstrations, hoping to galvanize Delta State students through the Black Panther organization. The Sovereignty Commission was right on it – spying on Shorter, a Delta State student, and others who had “returned from Berkeley with a stack of Black Panther newspapers.”

For an agency two years away from winding down, the returning organizers brought new life to the Commission’s investigations; current archives show 25 files on Shorter, alone.

Here a some links to several of Shorter's files. Of course, you will find more records by visiting the digital archives hidden away at


http://mdah.state.ms.us/arrec/digital_archives/sovcom/

Trip out to Berkeley for Black Panther Materials

Draft board information, classifications, on Shorter and others shared with Sovereignty Commission