February 11, 2021 from lbfroml by Meilan Solly
When Chicago lawyer Jeffrey Haas first met Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, he was struck by the 20-year-old activistâs âtremendous amount of energyâ and charisma.

It was August 1969, and Haas, 26 years old at the time, and his fellow attorneys at the Peopleâs Law Office had just secured Hamptonâs release from prison on trumped-up charges of stealing $71 worth of ice cream bars. To mark the occasion, Hampton delivered a speech at a local church, calling on the crowd to raise their right hand and repeat his words: âI am a revolutionary.â
SEE AlSO: Fred Hampton: Before being Assassinated This Black Panther United All Races Against The âEliteâ
âI couldnât quite say that, because I thought I was a lawyer for the movement, but not necessarily of the movement,â recalls Haas, who is white. âBut as Fred continued saying that, by the third or fourth time, I was shouting âI am a revolutionaryâ like everyone else.
Judas and the Black Messiah, a new film directed by Shaka King and co-produced by Black Panther director Ryan Coogler, deftly dramatizes this moment, capturing both Hamptonâs oratorical prowess and the mounting injustices that led him and his audience to declare themselves revolutionaries. Starring Daniel Kaluuya of Get Out fame as the chairman, the movie chronicles the months preceding Hamptonâs assassination in a December 1969 police raid, detailing his contributions to the Chicago community and dedication to the fight for social justice. Central to the narrative is the activistâs relationship withâand subsequent betrayal byâFBI informant William OâNeal (LaKeith Stanfield), who is cast as the Judas to Hamptonâs âblack messiah.â
âThe Black Panthers are the single greatest threat to our national security,â says a fictionalized J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen), echoing an actual assertionmade by the FBI director, in the film. âOur counterintelligence program must prevent the rise of a black messiah.â
Hereâs what you need to know to separate fact from fiction ahead of Judas and the Black Messiahâs debut in theaters and on HBO Max this Friday, February 12.
Is Judas and the Black Messiah based on a true story?
In short: yes, but with extensive dramatic license, particularly regarding OâNeal. As King tells the Atlantic, he worked with screenwriter Will Berson and comedians Kenny and Keith Lucas to pen a biopic of Hampton in the guise of a psychological thriller. Rather than focusing solely on the chairman, they opted to examine OâNealâan enigmatic figure who rarely discussed his time as an informantâand his role in the FBIâs broader counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO.
âFred Hampton came into this world fully realized. He knew what he was doing at a very young age,â says King. âWhereas William OâNeal is in a conflict; heâs confused. And thatâs always going to make for a more interesting protagonist.â

Daniel Kaluuya (center) as Fred Hampton (Glen Wilson / Warner Bros.)
Speaking with Deadline, the filmmaker adds that the crew wanted to move beyond Hamptonâs politics into his personal life, including his romance with fellow activist Deborah Johnson (Dominique Fishback), who now goes by the name Akua Njeri.
â[A] lot of times when we think about these freedom fighters and revolutionaries, we donât think about them having families ⊠and plans for the futureâit was really important to focus on that on the Fred side of things,â King tells Deadline. âOn the side of OâNeal, [we wanted] to humanize him as well so that viewers of the film could leave the movie wondering, âIs there any of that in me?ââ
Who are the filmâs two central figures?
Born in a suburb of Chicago in 1948, Hampton demonstrated an appetite for activism at an early age. As Haas, who interviewed members of the Hampton family while researching his book, The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther, explains, âFred just couldnât accept injustice anywhere.â At 10 years old, he started hosting weekend breakfasts for other children from the neighborhood, cooking the meals himself in what Haas describes as a precursor to the Panthersâ free breakfast program. And in high school, he led walkouts protesting the exclusion of black students from the race for homecoming queen and calling on officials to hire more black teachers and administrators.
According to William Pretzer, a supervisory curator at the Smithsonianâs National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), the young Hampton was keenly aware of racial injustice in his community. His mother babysat for Emmett Till prior to the 14-year-oldâs murder in Mississippi in 1955; ten years after Tillâs death, he witnessed white mobs attacking Martin Luther King Jr.âs Chicago crusade firsthand.
âHampton is really influenced by the desire of the NAACP and King to make change, and the kind of resistance that they encounter,â says Pretzer. âSo itâs as early as 1966 that Hampton starts to gravitate toward Malcolm X ⊠[and his] philosophy of self-defense rather than nonviolent direct action.â

Fred Hampton speaks at a rally in Chicagoâs Grant Park in September 1969 (Chicago Tribune file photo / Tribune News Service via Getty Images

William OâNeal in a 1973 mugshot (Fair use via Wikimedia Commons)
After graduating from high school in 1966, Hampton, as president of the local NAACP Youth Chapter, advocated for the establishment of an integrated community pool and recruited upward of 500 new members. In large part due to his proven track record of successful activism, leaders of the burgeoning Black Panther Party recruited Hampton to help launch the movement in Chicago in November 1968. By the time of his death just over a year later, heâd risen to the rank of Illinois chapter chairman and national deputy chairman.
OâNeal, on the other hand, was a habitual criminal with little interest in activism before he infiltrated the Panthers at the behest of FBI agent Roy Mitchell(portrayed in the film by Jesse Plemons). As OâNeal recalled in a 1989 interview, Mitchell offered to overlook the-then teenagerâs involvement in a multi-state car theft in exchange for intel on Hampton.
â[A] fast-talking, conniving West Side black kid who thought he knew all the angles,â OâNeal, according to the Chicago Tribune, joined the party and quickly won membersâ admiration with his bravado, mechanical and carpentry skills, and willingness to place himself in the thick of the action. By the time of the police raid that killed Hampton, heâd been appointed the Panthersâ chief of security.
âUnlike what we might think of an informer being a quiet person who would appear to be a listener, OâNeal was out there all the time spouting stuff,â says Haas. âPeople were impressed by that. ⊠He was a âgo do itâ guy. âI can fix this. I can get you money. I can do these kinds of things. And ⊠that had an appeal for a while.â

Why did the FBI target Hampton?
Toward the beginning of Judas and the Black Messiah, Hoover identifies Hampton as a leader âwith the potential to unite the Communist, the anti-war, and the New Left movements.â Later, the FBI director tells Mitchell that the black power movementâs success will translate to the loss of â[o]ur entire way of life. Rape, pillage, conquer, do you follow me?â
Once OâNeal is truly embedded within the Panthers, he discovers that the activists are not, in fact, âterrorists.â Instead, the informer finds himself dropped in the midst of a revolution that, in the words of co-founder Bobby Seale, was dedicated to âtrying to make change in day-to-day livesâ while simultaneously advocating for sweeping legislation aimed at achieving equality.
The Panthersâ ten-point program, penned by Seale and Huey P. Newton in 1966, outlined goals that resonate deeply today (âWe want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black peopleâ) and others that were certain to court controversy (âWe want all Black men to be exempt from military serviceâ and âWe want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jailsâ). As Jeff Greenwald wrote for Smithsonian magazinein 2016, members âdidnât limit themselves to talk.â Taking advantage of Californiaâs open-carry laws, for instance, beret-wearing Panthers responded to the killings of unarmed black Americans by patrolling the streets with riflesâan image that quickly attracted the condemnation of both the FBI and upper-class white Americans.

Fred Hampton (far left) attends an October 1969 rally against the trial of eight people accused of conspiracy to start a riot at the Democratic National Convention. (Don Casper / Chicago Tribune / Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
According to Pretzer, law enforcement viewed the Panthers and similar groups as a threat to the status quo. âThey are focused on police harassment, ⊠challenging the authority figures,â he says, âfocusing on social activities that everybody thinks the government should be doing something aboutâ but isnât, like providing health care and ensuring impoverished Americans had enough to eat.
The FBI established COINTELPROâshort for counterintelligence programâin 1956 to investigate, infiltrate and discredit dissident groups ranging from the Communist Party of the United States to the Ku Klux Klan, the Nation of Islamand the Panthers. Of particular interest to Hoover and other top officials were figures like Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Hampton, many of whom endured illegal surveillance, explicit threats and police harassment. Details of the covert program only came to light came to light in 1971, when activists stole confidential files from an FBI office in Pennsylvania and released them to the public.
Though Hampton stated that the Panthers would only resort to violence in self-defense, Hoover interpreted his words as a declaration of militant intentions.
âBecause of COINTELPRO, because of the exacerbation, the harassment, the infiltration of these and agent provocateurs that they establish within these organizations, itâs a self-fulfilling prophecy from the FBIâs point of view,â Pretzer explains, â[in that] they get the violence they were expecting.â
As Haas and law partner Flint Taylor wrote for Truthout in January, newly released documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request confirm the lawyersâ long-held suspicion that Hoover himself was involved in the plan to assassinate Hampton.
LaKeith Stanfield (left) as William OâNeal and Jesse Plemons (right) as FBI agent Roy Mitchell (Glen Wilson / Warner Bros.)
What events does Judas and the Black Messiah dramatize?
Set between 1968 and 1969, Kingâs film spotlights Hamptonâs accomplishments during his brief tenure as chapter chairman before delving into the betrayals that resulted in his death. Key to Hamptonâs legacy were the Panthersâ survival programs, which sought to provide access to âfundamental elements of life,â per Pretzer. Among other offerings, the organization opened free health clinics, provided free breakfasts for children, and hosted political education classesthat emphasized black history and self-sufficiency. (As Hampton said in 1969, â[R]eading is so important for us that a person has to go through six weeks of our political education before we can consider [them] a member.â)
On an average day, Hampton arrived at the Panthersâ headquarters with âa staccato of orders [that] gave energy to everyone around him,â says Haas. âBut it wasnât just what he asked people to do. He was there at 6:30 in the morning, making breakfast, serving the kids, talking to their parents.â
In addition to supporting these community initiativesâone of which, the free breakfast program, paved the way for modern food welfare policiesâHampton spearheaded the Rainbow Coalition, a boundary-crossing alliance between the Panthers, the Latino Young Lords, and the Young Patriots, a group of working-class white Southerners. He also brokered peace between rival Chicago gangs, encouraging them âto focus instead on the true enemyâthe government and the police,â whom the Panthers referred to as âpigs,â according to the Village Free Press.

Fred Hampton raises his right hand at an October 11, 1969, rally in Chicago. (Photo by David Fenton / Getty Images)
Speaking with Craig Phillips of PBSâ âIndependent Lensâ last year, historian Lilia Fernandez, author of Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago, explained, âThe Rainbow Coalition presented a possibility. It gave us a vision for what could be in terms of interracial politics among the urban poor.â
Meanwhile, OâNeal was balancing his duties as an informant with his rising stature within the party. Prone to dramatic tendencies, he once built a fake electric chair intended, ironically, to scare informers. He also pushed the Panthers to take increasingly aggressive steps against the establishmentâactions that led âmore people, and Fred in particular, [to become] dubious of him,â says Haas.
The months leading up to the December 1969 raid found Hampton embroiled in legal troubles as tensions mounted between police and the Panthers. Falsely accused of theft and assault for the July 1968 ice cream truck robbery, he was denied bail until the Peopleâs Law Office intervened, securing his release in August 1969. Between July and November of that year, authorities repeatedly clashed with the Panthers, engaging in shootouts that resulted in the deaths of multiple party members and police officers.

Daniel Kaluuya as Fred Hampton (far left) and LaKeith Stanfield as William OâNeal (far right) (Glen Wilson / Warner Bros.)
By late November, the FBI, working off OâNealâs intel, had convinced Cook County Stateâs Attorney Edward Hanrahan and the Chicago Police Department to raid Hamptonâs home as he and his fiancĂ©e Johnson, who was nine months pregnant, slept. Around 4:30 a.m. on December 4, a heavily armed, 14-person raiding party burst into the apartment, firing upward of 90 bullets at the nine Panthers inside. One of the rounds struck and killed Mark Clark, a 22-year-old Panther stationed just past the front door. Though law enforcement later claimed otherwise, the physical evidence suggests that just one shot originated within the apartment.
Johnson and two other men tried to rouse the unconscious 21-year-old Hampton, whoâd allegedly been drugged earlier that nightâpossibly by OâNeal, according to Haas. (OâNeal had also provided the cops with a detailed blueprint of the apartment.) Forced out of the bedroom and into the kitchen, Johnson heard a cop say, âHeâs barely alive. Heâll barely make it.â Two shots rang out before she heard another officer declare, âHeâs good and dead now.â
What happened after Hamptonâs assassination?
Judas and the Black Messiah draws to a close shortly after the raid. In the filmâs final scene, a conflicted OâNeal accepts an envelope filled with cash and agrees to continue informing on the Panthers. Superimposed text states that OâNeal remained with the party until the early 1970s, ultimately earning more than $200,000 when adjusted for inflation. After he was identified as the Illinois chapterâs mole in 1973, OâNeal received a new identity through the federal witness protection program. In January 1990, the 40-year-old, whoâd by then secretly returned to Chicago, ran into traffic and was struck by a car. Investigators deemed his death a suicide.
âI think he was sorry he did what he did,â OâNealâs uncle, Ben Heard, told the Chicago Reader after his nephewâs death. âHe thought the FBI was only going to raid the house. But the FBI gave [the operation] over to the stateâs attorney and that was all Hanrahan wanted. They shot Fred Hampton and made sure he was dead.â
The attempt to uncover the truth about Hampton and Clarkâs deaths began on the morning of December 4 and continues to this day. While one of Haasâ law partners went to the morgue to identify Hamptonâs body, another took stock of the apartment, which the police had left unsecured. Haas, meanwhile, went to interview the seven survivors, four of whom had been seriously injured.

A floor plan of Fred Hamptonâs apartment provided to the FBI by William OâNeal (Peopleâs Law Office)
Hanrahan claimed that the Panthers had opened fire on the police. But survivor testimony and physical evidence contradicted this version of events. âBullet holesâ ostensibly left by the Panthersâ shots were later identified as nail heads; blood stains found in the apartment suggested that Hampton was dragged out into the hallway after being shot in his bed at point-blank range.
Public outrage over the killings, particularly within the black community, grew as evidence discounting the authoritiesâ narrative mounted. As one elderly woman who stopped by the apartment to see the crime scene for herself observed, the attack âwas nothing but a Northern lynching.â
Following the raid, Hanrahan charged the survivors with attempted murder. Haas and his colleagues secured Johnsonâs release early enough to ensure she didnât give birth to her son, Fred Hampton Jr., in jail, and the criminal charges were eventually dropped. But the attorneys, ânot content with getting people off, decided we needed to file a civil suitâ alleging a conspiracy to not only murder Hampton, but cover up the circumstances of his death, says Haas.
Over the next 12 years, Haas and his colleagues navigated challenges ranging from racist judges to defendantsâ stonewalling, backroom deals between the FBI and local authorities, and even contempt charges brought against the attorneys themselves. Working from limited information, including leaked COINTELPRO documents, the team slowly pieced together the events surrounding the raid, presenting compelling evidence of the FBIâs involvement in the conspiracy.

Hamptonâs fiancĂ©e, Deborah Johnson (sitting in middle, as portrayed by Dominique Fishback), gave birth to their son, Fred Hampton Jr., 25 days after the raid. (Glen Wilson / Warner Bros.)
Though a judge dismissed the original case in 1977 following an 18-month trial, Haas and the rest of the team successfully appealed for a new hearing. In 1982, after more than a decade of protracted litigation, the defendants agreed to pay a settlement of $1.85 million to the nine plaintiffs, including Clarkâs mother and Hamptonâs mother, Iberia.
âI used to describe being in court like going to a dog fight every day,â says Haas. âEverything we would say would be challenged. The [defendantsâ lawyers] would tell the jury everything the Panthers had ever been accused of in Chicago and elsewhere, and [the judge] would let them do that, but he wouldnât let us really cross examine the defendants.â
Hamptonâs death dealt a significant blow to the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, frightening members with its demonstration of law enforcementâs reach and depriving the movement of a natural leader.
According to Pretzer, âWhat comes out is that the the assassination of Hampton is a classic example of law enforcementâs malfeasance and overreach and ⊠provoking of violence.â
Today, says Haas, Hampton âstands as a symbol of young energy, struggle and revolution.â
The chairman, for his part, was keenly aware of how his life would likely end.
As he once predicted in a speech, âI donât believe Iâm going to die slipping on a piece of ice; I donât believe Iâm going to die because I got a bad heart; I donât believe Iâm going to die because of lung cancer. I believe that Iâm going to be able to die doing the things I was born for. ⊠I believe that I will be able to die as a revolutionary in the international revolutionary proletarian struggle.â
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-history-behind-one-night-miami-180976768/
SEE AlSO: Fred Hampton: Before being Assassinated This Black Panther United All Races Against The âEliteâ
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Source: Thefreeonline.wordpress.com