Fred Hampton, deputy chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, was born on August 30, 1948 and raised in the Chicago suburb of Maywood, Illinois. In high school he excelled in academics and athletics. After Hampton graduated from high school, he enrolled in a pre-law program at Triton Junior College in River Grove, Illinois. Hampton also became involved in the civil rights movement, joining his local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His dynamic leadership and organizational skills in the branch enabled him to rise to the position of Youth Council President. Hampton mobilized a racially integrated group of five hundred young people who successfully lobbied city officials to create better academic services and recreational facilities for African American children.
In 1968, Hampton joined the Black Panther Party (BPP), headquartered in Oakland, California. Using his NAACP experience, he soon headed the Chicago chapter. During his brief BPP tenure, Hampton formed a “Rainbow Coalition” which included Students for a Democratic Society, the Blackstone Rangers, a street gang and the National Young Lords, a Puerto Rican organization. Hampton was also successful in negotiating a gang truce on local television.
In an effort to neutralize the Chicago BPP, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Chicago Police Department placed the chapter under heavy surveillance and conducted several harassment campaigns. In 1969, several BPP members and police officers were either injured or killed in shootouts, and over one hundred local members of the BPP were arrested.
During an early morning police raid of the BPP headquarters at 2337 W. Monroe Street on December 4, 1969, twelve officers opened fire, killing the 21-year-old Hampton and Peoria, Illinois Panther leader Mark Clark. Police also seriously wounded four other Panther members. Many in the Chicago African American community were outraged over the raid and what they saw as the unnecessary deaths of Hampton and Clark. Over 5,000 people attended Hampton’s funeral where Reverends Ralph Abernathy and Jesse Jackson of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference eulogized the slain activist. Years later, law enforcement officials admitted wrongdoing in the killing of Hampton and Clark. In 1990, and later in 2004, the Chicago City Council passed resolutions commemorating December 4 as Fred Hampton Day.
Why the US government murdered Fred Hampton
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I’d like to rant about LGBT erasure in academia for a bit. Specifically, historians become incredibly angry when you suggest that Ancient Romans who were assigned male, wore women’s clothing, castrated themselves and married men were trans. You’ll hear complaints about how it’s ahistorical to use a contemporary label for the past, but I never understood that kind of criticism. It’s not like being transgender is a random social identity or subculture without any deeper meaning; it refers, roughly speaking, to a certain combination of behaviors that transgress the bounds of gender assignment. So when I say that Elagabalus, for example, was probably a trans woman, I don’t mean that she consciously thought about herself in our contemporary terms, but that from what those admittedly questionable Roman historians write of her, she expressed a strong wish to be and be seen as a woman. I think it’s fair to use the term “trans” for that.
Personally, I blame both old-fashioned positivists and Foucault for these brainworms. I think they both agree that you must understand the past from within itself, and not by relating it to the present. For me, that’s so far away from my lived experience and from the way I approach texts that I just can’t fathom it.
Given the evidence and existence of social categories that align with our modern conception of transness across, essentially, every culture including the ones not influenced by the old world until the 17th century - the possibility of being trans is just part of what it means to be human, doesn’t matter what you call it or if ancient societies didn’t have our understanding of rigid gender binary etc, anymore than saying ancient societies may have considered fingers as being part of hands and not a different category means we can’t meaningfully say those ancient humans had fingers (although that’s a little too biological I guess as an analogy).
You’ll hear complaints about how it’s ahistorical to use a contemporary label for the past
This is how you know they’re actually just homophobic:
Tell them that heterosexuality is a a modern concept so it would be ahistorical to assume people in the past were straight. We can only assume they were pansexual. They’ll either deny it because they secretly think being gay is unnatural, or they’ll shut up and realize they were wrong.
Btw something like ⅓ of Han emperors had gay relationships.
