The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther

by Jeffrey Haas

Movements create leaders, and leaders build movements.

A curious seventh grader asked Lynn, “Why did you join the Panthers?” Lynn responded, “Because I was tired of begging and asking for my rights. The Panthers demanded them.”

If you dare to struggle, you dare to win. If you dare not struggle then damn it, you don’t deserve to win.

“If you walk through life and don’t help anybody, you haven’t had much of a life.”

You can jail a revolutionary but you can’t jail revolution. You can lock up a freedom fighter, like Huey Newton, but you can’t lock up freedom fighting.

“You can’t control what life you were born into, you can only control what you do with it.”

“L. D. Barkley [a main inmates spokesperson who’d declared, ‘We are men, not beasts, and we will not be driven and beaten as such’]

when you lie, ‘you come up with answers that don’t answer and with explanations that don’t explain.’

“Fred was the motivating force inside the party. Fred’s influence was the greatest…. [He had] the dedication of a Malcolm X, the speaking ability of Martin Luther King, and as far as courage, there are few with that type of courage. No one displayed leadership qualities like Fred did at twenty-one.”

“It don’t seem right that the people who shot us pay nothing.” It always pisses off victims of the police to learn that taxpayers foot the bill.

Flint commented in the article, “The case may be almost over in the legal sense but it will live on as a reminder to people of how far the government can and will go to suppress those whose philosophies it does not like.”

“Fred would like it here, too,” Iberia says after she sits down with us. “But he wouldn’t have been content. He had to be doing something for someone else. He could never sit still.” “He was never happy if someone else was being mistreated,” Francis adds. “That’s why he wanted to be a lawyer. But he couldn’t wait.”

“After all these years, what do you think our lawsuit proved?” Without hesitation Iberia replied, “They got away with murder.”