Claire Willett

BTW this thread is not for Black folks, who know this already, or for white activists who have already done the work and educated themselves on their history this thread is for, like, your white relatives who think all protest and all Black activism is inherently threatening

And this is not to position myself as an expert, but to share some information, documents and further resources that might help contextualize why one of the state's most powerful weapons against Black people is nice white people.

So, COINTELPRO stands for Counter-Intelligence Program, and it was a secret FBI project created by J. Edgar Hoover designed to spy on, infiltrate and discredit every progressive activist movement, with a particular emphasis for Black civil rights leaders, especially the Panthers.

If you've heard about, like MLK being wiretapped and blackmailed about his affairs, that was COINTELPRO. They also gave an advance heads-up to KKK-affiliated cops to let them know when Freedom Riders would be coming through town, so they could arm up and be ready for them.

COINTELPRO had three core goals w/r/t the Panthers: 1. to discredit radical leaders in their own communities, by falsely painting them as snitches or sellouts, spreading rumors that they were collaborating with the FBI or law enforcement, so their own people wouldn't trust them

2. to force rifts between different coalitions with the same values - whether between, say, a very liberal Black civil rights org vs a more centrist one, or between a Black activist group and a Latinx one - to sow chaos and prevent cooperation;

and 3, most relevant to our current national conversation - to create a framework in which the vast, vast, vast majority of white people saw not just the Panthers but the entire Black civil rights movement as a violent, disruptive threat which needed constant police control.

And the only reason we know that these things were carefully-crafted tactics is that in 1971 a group of white activists broke into an FBI field office in Pennsylvania, stole a bunch of documents and revealed the existence of the then-secret COINTELPRO operation to the public.

But the thing about human brains is that when you've believed something for so long that it FEELS TRUE, it is hard to receive or absorb even the most concrete facts in opposition to your idea.

So even seeing literal FBI documents saying "HEY, LET'S CONVINCE EVERY WHITE PERSON THAT THE BLACK PANTHERS ARE A BUNCH OF DOMESTIC TERRORISTS LOL" didn't UN-convince white people that the Black Panthers were a bunch of domestic terrorists, because it still FELT TRUE

This is a PDF of a pamphlet from 1980 called "Counterintelligence: A Documentary Look at America's Secret Police," and I cannot urge too strongly that white people read it. It's full of leaked FBI memos and documents, including those from the 1971 raid. https://peopleslawoffice.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Hampton.Cointelpro-Booklet.pdf …

The greatest danger to the FBI's supremacy was the risk that white people would start realizing, "hey, wait a minute, Black people aren't scary, and the things they're asking for are actually super reasonable, and the way they're being treated is horrible" so they just .... lied

If you grew up, like I grew up, with the vague notion that the Black Panthers like, just went around wantonly shooting at cops, then you might never have learned - I know I didn't - that a huge part of their role in communities was stuff like free breakfast programs for kids.

Also, they were by and large armed DEFENSIVELY, not OFFENSIVELY, with firearms and licenses obtained legally, which they used to protect their neighborhoods (cops were less likely to wander in and fuck up some kids for sport if there were a few armed Panthers on the corner)

Anyway, so this brings us to Fred Hampton. I cannot stress enough to white folks who have never heard of Fred Hampton how different our world might be in 2020 if this one man had not been murdered.

“The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther” by Jeffrey Haas (a Jewish civil rights activist and a Panther lawyer) is also a great book, and all of this has far more information than I can dump on you in a Twitter thread, BUT

So Fred Hampton was this just extraordinary young person, who really wanted to play for the Yankees when he grew up, but instead he decided to go to school to study law, to help his people. He was a youth organizer for the NAACP in Chicago and a WILDLY charismatic speaker.

He joined the Panthers and rose through the ranks so quickly that he was Chairman of the Chicago chapter by like, age 20? And his specialty was coalition-building. Which is, of course, how he landed on COINTELPRO's radar.

The thing that Fred Hampton was really, really good at was going to a group of people with seemingly conflicting ideologies - rival gangs, for example - and convince them of their shared interests, shared need, and common enemy: the white supremacist power structure.

The FBI decided to murder him when he was 21 years old, just as he was on the cusp of brokering a transformative collaboration between the Black Panthers, the Latin Kings, and a coalition of white churches to begin organizing in earnest around fair housing.

He was drugged by his bodyguard, who was an FBI plant, and assassinated. You can find the details yourself, I don't want to put more brutalization of Black bodies into everyone's timelines, but what you need to know is that the cops broke into his house and fired 99 times.

The Panthers fired exactly one shot in response, which was an accidental reflex of a dying man whose hand clenched on the trigger as an unconscious muscle spasm.

But part of COINTELPRO was making sure Hoover had local white government leaders in his pocket, and he had locked in the support of state's attorney Edward Hanrahan, and if you read some of the shit they said in the news about the Panthers shooting first, your blood would boil.

“Chicago Police Sgt. Daniel Groth, who led the fourteen police raiders, said: 'There must have been six or seven of them firing. The firing must have gone on ten or twelve minutes. If 200 shots were exchanged, that was nothing. It’s a miracle that not one policeman was killed.'"

fucking Hanrahan: "The immediate, violent and criminal reaction of the occupants in shooting at announced police officers emphasizes the extreme viciousness of the Black Panther Party. So does their refusal to cease firing at police officers when urged to do so several times."

it cannot be overstated that THE ONLY REASON THE COUNTRY EVENTUALLY LEARNED THAT THIS WAS BULLSHIT was because two years later those people broke into the FBI office and leaked all those COINTELPRO documents that revealed all the details of the murder plot.

and it STILL took like 18 years and multiple lawsuits for the surviving Panthers' names to be cleared and for the cops who committed the murders to actually be charged with a crime.

Fred Hampton had done nothing wrong except be charismatic and passionate and fight to build a coalition of diverse communities that could have changed not just Chicago but the whole country if he had been allowed to grow up into the elder statesman he deserved to become.