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Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Wanna say I don't know less? Listen to stuff you should know more. Join host Josh and Chuck on the podcast packed with fascinating discussions about science, history, pop culture and more episodes. Dive into topics like was the lost, city of Atlantis Real? And how does pizza work? Say goodbye to I don't know. Because after listening to stuff you should know you will listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her impactful behavioral discoveries on chimpanzees. It wasn't until one of the chimpanzees began to lose his fear of me, but I began to really make discoveries that actually shook the scientific world. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to behind the ******** the only podcast on the Internet that you are listening to right now. Presumably you. And if it's you listening to multiple podcast at once, I'm concerned. Yeah. Yeah, I would. No way. But it's not impossible. No way you're retaining anything. You're missing a lot. Yes. And this is a podcast about the worst people in all of history. And we're doing a bit of an odd duck of an episode because we're focusing a lot on on some folks who I think are. Pretty cool dudes, but last episode was to build up to the ******** who tried to destroy them. So this is an episode about how the FBI and law enforcement tried to take down the Black Panther Party. My guest for Part 2, as with part one, is prop propaganda, a hip hop artist and podcaster yourself. Yo, what's up, yo? I was just glad to be here. I was just smiling so much. We're glad to have you here. Been really happy to have your perspective and excited to get into the rest of this. Yes, so we talked about the Mulford Act in the last episode, which which stopped the Black Panthers from carrying loaded weapons in the state of California, but did not stop the Black Panthers from loving themselves some firearms weapons training, stockpiling. They remained a big part of what they did and I found an archive of magazines published by the Black Panther Community News Service, which was like they're essentially their media network and one issue. From 1969 included this cartoon which Sophie can show you and I guess I can describe her you can describe if you'd like. Let prompt describe it. Yeah, so this is from the the Black Panther. Take my laptop. Yeah, the magazine that they ran. Yeah, magazine. So it's like it's if you're familiar with their style of animation, but it's like thick animation style illustrations, like thick like out black. Outlined characters like that are just kind of shaded in Grays. And. Yellow or orange letters in blue letters, it's like a black family. I think that's a child, but the child looks like an adult in the animation style, and it's kind of like a cartoon or like a like a comic strip. But the brothers got a good fro, both the brothers got a good fro and the sisters are got her nice little hair wrap on. Yeah? Am I supposed to say what it is? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What's what's going on in the cartoon? It says. So. Dad's got his hand on the shoulders of the little homie and he says. Son, what do you want for Christmas? And I can't really make out what. Yeah, it's it's all read what the the Son says he wants for Christmas. A machine gun, a shotgun, a box of hand grenades, a box of dynamite, and I think a box of handguns is the 1969 nineteen 69. And then there's some stuff written around the edges of the cartoon. Yeah, including off the pig blow, Oink, oink away and snipe the hogs. Dude. Yeah. N.W.A right here. Yeah. Really intense. Yes. On his way to like the F the police on. Yeah, yeah. And violence against the police was a constant refrain in in Black Panther periodicals. And it was usually framed as necessary self-defense against an oppressive and violent force. And there is this kind of. Unavoidably gleeful tone in some of the discussions against violence against law enforcement, which I think is really uncomfortable for a lot of particularly kind of middle of the road centrist political people to to to deal with. To to like accept. But there's there's a reason for this. Yeah yeah there. And and that's what this episode is about is like why there was so much paranoia and hatred of the police. Not just to sort of like the violence against black people by law enforcement, but specifically because the Panthers knew the police were targeting them and as the 60s turned into 70s, an increasing amount of their anti law enforcement rhetoric focused on the Federal Bureau of Investigations. And I found a really interesting website, black power in American history. It appears to be a graduate student project from UNC at Chapel Hill, and they analyzed piles of old Black Panther magazines and noted they would claim that if the Black Panthers did not join or follow a particular course of action, disaster will result. An example of this was seen in the article published on January 9th, 1971 when it read when a pig is caught dirty snooping and shows you his badge and begs for Mercy, mercy him to death with the **** of your gun towards the bottom. It also reads kill the pigs before they kill you. The pigs here are referring to undercover FBI agents that were sent to infiltrate the party and cause internal unrest. And again, this is really uncomfortable rhetoric for a lot of folks to read. Yeah, but it wasn't. It wasn't just spawned from Bloodthirstiness. The FBI and the police were engaged in an active battle to destroy the Black Panthers and to murder many of their leaders in this period of time. And a lot of folks would have just called them conspiratorial, would have said that they were sort of making stuff up because they're paranoid. All of these fears were proved valid by documentation that later came out, which we'll get to at the end of this episode. Yeah, there's a. Good tie into like modern time, especially like. You know the the the community that spawned the hip hop music that most of us kind of consider golden Age? Like these were our debts, you know, our moms like, so even just like, you know, 80 song from N.W.A **** the police. Like this isn't just. It's high. It's hard if you're not here like to understand that like. You know, ice T's cop killer? It's like, OK, you. You think that this is a like a honorable like officer position, that that job is a job of person that carries prestige and honor. It's like that is not our experience with the police like your experiences. This is another gang, right? It's just the law protects them, you know? So you have this attitude towards them. There's another song by you. I feel like your your your taste in hip hop would know if I'd say. Jay Dilla, you know, I'm saying. So like you liked more the obscure doom tree stuff. I've been listening. I've been listening, you know, saying and you know, so you take somebody like J Dilla, who has this also has a song called **** the police and it's it's the idea is like the back story of that song was like. There was this false tip that he was engaged in some criminal activity and the police raided his moms basement, you know, destroyed all these things. It's like destroyed hard drive, stuff like this guy's like recording albums for, you know, tribe called Quest. Like he's recording albums for, for Busta Rhymes, like, all these, like, main major level, like he's like, you guys asked Pharrell, Timberland, all these, like, you know, producers. They're all like, we got our swing from Jay Dilla, you know, and like, and did. So Dillon. But this guy, this guy like you just raided my. So he made that song that day, like after the police just raided his mom's basement and destroyed just volumes and volumes of music that none of us will never get. Now, you know, I'm saying so that attitude is like you, you're bullies. You're not policing us. You are bullies. You know? So it's it's hard not to respond that way. But so if you understand as a long statement, but if you understand like our relationship with law enforce. And I say this as somebody who's like my brothers. It's a Highway Patrol officer. You know, I'm saying, like, so we have. Law enforcement in our family, you know, but. The institution since this day, like, so it's like this is coursing through our veins, our grandparents, our great grandparents, our fathers. You know, I'm saying like this is our relationship with the police. I'm sorry, that just is so triggering. No, just and just as as a way to kind of make that point just into the modern era, because we're talking about decades ago in most of this episode. I found a 2015 article in the Washington Post about civil asset forfeitures, which is what happens when police take your stuff with no recourse versus burglary in 2014. Police civil asset forfeitures totaled more than $5 billion worth of property. Police took $5 billion worth of property, with no recourse, really, from people. Burglaries accounted for less than $4 billion worth of theft does. So, like when you're making that comparison between Belize and the burglars, there's some numbers you can throw out there that are very compelling. Yeah, that's that's probably enough for now. So in 1956, the FBI launched its Co Intel Pro operation. Umm Co Intel pro usually see it written in all caps. As one one word. It's an acronym initially aimed at targeting communist organizers in the United States. It was later expanded to strike at groups like the KKK. But thanks in large part to J Edgar Hoover in the late 1960s, the FBI COINTELPRO operations focused increasingly and primarily on the Black Panthers. This was a sophisticated and complex operation, Hoover himself wrote. One of our primary aims, and counterintelligence as it concerns the BPP, is to keep the group isolated from the moderate. Black and white community which may support it, and I'm going to quote again from the book Black Against Empire. Here, federal agents sought to create factionalism among the party leaders and between the Panthers and other black political organizations. FBI operatives forged documents and paid provocateurs to promote violent conflicts between Black Panther leaders as well as between the party and other black nationalist organizations, and congratulated themselves when these conflicts yielded the killing of Panthers. And COINTELPRO sought to lead the party into unsupportable actions, creating opposition to the. PPP on the part of the majority of the residents of the ghetto areas, for example, agent provocateurs on the government payroll supplied explosives to Panther members and sought to incite them to blow up public buildings. And they promoted kangaroo courts encouraging Panther members to torture inspected informants. Yeah. Yeah. So, like, that's it's so, like, that's so, like, you know, illuminating because it's like you're in the room. It's like you're in a room with, like, rational people and somebody yells from the back, you should just punch him in the ****. Just like, who said that? Right. And then everybody goes, you see what they're about. They're about punching in the **** like, well, who first of all, who punches in the ****? Number one, you know, I'm saying, but then, but just them planting these people to push them into places that make other people uncomfortable and then that becomes the narrative. Yeah, it's clearly so effective. Yeah, it was very effective and very insidious. And we'll get into the numbers a little bit later, how much they spent on this, but for any specific. Example of how this process worked. And then we need to turn to 1968, when J Edgar Hoover sent a memorandum to 14 FBI field offices noting that a state of gang warfare existed between a group called the US Organization, a black nationalist group, and the Panthers, now us, as a complicated organization. Their founder, among other things, is that the guy who created Kwanzaa, and we're not going to do them justice in this episode for today's purposes, what's important to know is that us and the Panthers had a lot of disagreements on how to achieve black liberation. And they competed aggressively for new recruits through a network of informants. The FBI learned this, and Hoover noted that they'd seen evidence that there had been threats of murder between some members. He took notice of this and ordered what he called imaginative and hard hitting counterintelligence measures aimed at crippling the BP. In order to fully capitalize and his words on the rivalry and exploit all avenues of creating further dissension, the FDA ordered its informants in us to tell members when the BP planned to have events so that us could also show up in both. The organizations would wind up in conflict. They did whatever they could to stoke hatred between both groups, including having their paid informant spread rumors about either side to the other group, like rumors about like them being they're being hits planned and murders planned, raising the temperature. That was the goal. And this all came to a boil at an event your father was at, yes, January 17th, 1969, when Al Prentice Carter and John Huggins were gunned down by US members on the UCLA campus. Yeah, it's just it's like. Junior high all over again, only with like murder. Yeah, mixed in, you know? Yeah, it's so sad, man. Yeah, pops was at that. Anyway, continue. Sorry. The Black Panthers seemed to instinctively know what was going on, and their magazines declared the murders of political killing. They pointed out that US received government funding and had a working relationship with the police. They also noted that 17 Panthers were arrested in the immediate wake of the murders. While it took much longer for the law to get take action against the actual killers who were members of us, now only some of the FBI's COINTELPRO ******* has been declassified at this point, so we'll never know the exact extent to which the Bureau planned all this. There were allegations that would happened at UCLA. Is an ordered hit. Others were argue that the FBI definitely intended for there to be murders, but they weren't trying to stoke specific murders. So they wanted to raise the temperature to where murders were inevitable. But they weren't saying On this date kill these people. There's also allegations that they were in fact saying On this date kill these people. That's what pops debate. That's not possible. Leaf was like, yeah, they had a list. This who you supposed to die, you know? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And we can verify that they absolutely specifically intended to stoke violence that they wrote, we want to make these people kill each other like that like that that that we know to a point of certainty. Whatever the truth about how specific they were about the violence, they wanted the the violence like happened and it and it was very much stoked by the FBI. And on May 23rd, 1969, Black Panther John Savage was killed by US members. Sylvester Bell was murdered in August. Now most of the information. Final list didn't come out until a series of court battles in the late 1970s. So particularly, like, white people reading about this at the time would have just said, oh, these these black liberation groups are also violent. Look at what they're doing to each other, ignoring the fact that it was their FBI stocking all this, yeah. And I found a really good New York Times article from 1976 when this started to come out that goes into detail about everything here. And it notes that the Bureau, working with the Chicago Police Department, also sought to create violent divisions between the Panthers and the Blackstone Rangers, which are now a much more complicated organization. At that point, where a street gang in Chicago quote, for example, a fake note was sent to the leader of the street gang, Jeff Fort, telling him the Panthers hostility towards his group, saying they're supposed to be a hit out for you. In noting that this meant there was probably a contract to kill someone, the Chicago FBI office said in a memorandum to headquarters that the letter May intensify the degree of animosity between the two groups and occasion Fort to take retaliatory action, which could disrupt the BPP or lead to reprisals against their leadership. So the FBI sends this fake letter about a hit and notes specifically. We're hope. Like, we think this is going to make them angrier at each other and might stoke violence. And that's our goal. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just it's just like, can we just like. OK, acknowledge that like we you can't make this stuff up. No, you know, no. And this is can't make this stuff up, you know? One thing that's really frustrating about this is that it it spreads so far, even outside of among the entire left wing activist community. I spent a lot of time in that community for my work and there are constant modern fears about COINTELPRO stuff. Even among like white activist group, primarily white activist groups of FBI informants and stuff like, you find this like this fear among like a lot of members of anti fascist St groups right now that there's Agent Provocateur and maybe there are like it's happened, like that's The thing is like they did it. There is precedence, yes. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. There's really no limit to what you might be worried the FBI will do to your activist group because this **** happened. Yeah. Yeah. Now I'm going to quote again from that New York Times article. The report portrays a campaign in which the Bureau used a legion of informers, sometimes as provocateurs, and close cut cooperation with local police anti radical squads to sow confusion, fear and dissension among the Panthers. Cartoons attacking them, purportedly from rival groups, were distributed to aggravate antagonisms. Stories were planted with newspaper and television outlets to put the Panthers and their supporters in a bad light. Bogus messages were sent to cause rifts between the party and its white leftist supporters. So this was a comprehensive campaign, you imagine. This is like the Internet age. Just be like, yeah, just trolls attacking your comment section for the purpose of. Yeah. It'll be 20 or 30 years. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, we it'll probably be a few years before the extent to which that stuff's going on comes out now. And you know what? To be entirely honest, it's possible that none of it now is the FBI, that it's all, for example, government, like, private corporations contracted by government agencies or whatever. Like, who knows? Yeah, the FBI's COINTELPRO campaign seriously disrupted the Black Panthers, but it did not stop them from expanding. Throughout the late 60s and early 1970s, the organization was under constant stress, though, and this was not helped by the fact that. For some strange reason, its leaders kept getting imprisoned and assassinated. I wonder why they just all of a sudden started kid meeting crimes. They just they just went off the rails. Yeah, yeah. I think we'll start on this subject by talking about what happened to Huey P Newton. On October 27th, 1967, Huey walked down to his girlfriend's house on Telegraph Ave in Oakland. It was a Friday night and they were going to party, but she wound up feeling sick and instead lent him her car to take out on the town. He had a drink at the bar and then went to a church social where he danced until around 2:00 AM. Then he drove to a party, which he left at around 4:00 AM that early morning, October 28th, Officer John Frey of the Oakland Police was sitting in his squad car. He saw Huey Drive past and recognized his plates. We don't know precisely if the Bureau had local cops keeping tabs on Huey, if this was an FBI directed operation, or if the Oakland cops on their own were just wanting to **** with Huey. Either is entirely possible, but without any apparent cause. John Frey made one of the last mistakes of his life. He pulled Huey P Newton over. Here's how SF Weekly describes what happened next. Officer Herbert C Heines rolled up on the scene shortly after Frey had radioed for backup. The officers told Newton to get out of the bug and marched him to the back of Heinen's. Control car Newton and Fray started scuffling on the trunk of Heinz's car. A gun went off. Haynes was hit in the right forearm. Heines fired back, hitting Newton in the gut. More shots were fired. Haynes was shot three times and survived. Newton took that bullet to the gut and fled the scene with McKinney, which is a friend. He was with freight, was shot five times and died. He had been on the force for a little over a year and had a 3 year old daughter. He was only 23, but all of the men involved in the melee were well under 30. Now we don't know what actually happened. Newton claims to have blacked out after being shot, which was totally reasonable, and speculates that the cops shot each other and all of the recovered bullets came from police revolvers. Speculation on what went down ranges from Huey grabbing a cop's gun and shooting them both, to him resisting when the cops started beating him and then them shooting each other in error to an attempted assassination of Huey by the Oakland PD gone horribly wrong. I don't know what exactly went down, but I do think additional context on Officer James Fray. Is useful here, and I'm going to quote from black against empire. Frey had been implicated in numerous incidents of racism. H Bruce Bison, an English teacher who invited free to speak about police work to his class at Clayton Valley High School, reported that Frey had told the class that inwards in the neighborhood he patrolled were a lot of bad types, and the trial eventually held to adjudicate the events of that. Early morning. Alfred Dunning, an accountant for Prudential Life insurance, testified that Frey had racially harassed him during a traffic accident, and when Dunning complained that Frey was acting like the Gestapo, Frey loosened his holster, put his hand on his gun, and said. They am the Gestapo, she ordered. Done into the police car, yeah. That was one of our best. I'll say that out loud. Yeah, yeah, that's the quiet part, yes. Earlier on the evening that Huey Newton and Gene McKinney drove to get soul food on 7th, St Frey had intervened in a dispute between a black grocery clerk named Daniel King and a white man without pants on who claimed King had stolen his pants. According to King, Fray called him an inward and held his arm so the white man could beat him. So this is the guy who winds up in this altercation. I don't have trouble believing that it was self-defense. It's also entirely possible that both of them ****** ** or that both of them were trying to kill Huey and shot each other. Who knows? Any scenario works. Yeah, but obviously Huey P Newton gets charged with murder. As a result of of of the shooting death of Officer James Fray and in prison, Huey became a living martyr to the Black Panthers. There was a rally on his 26th birthday, February 17th, 1968 that brought more than 6000 people to the Oakland Arena. H rap, Brown and a black power activist told the crowd the only thing that is going to free Huey Newton is gunpowder. And this actually wound up being inaccurate. Huey received his day in court. Yeah. Which revealed, among other things, that Frey had a list of 20 Black Panther vehicles on the dashboard of his car when he died. Huey was initially convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sent to prison. But in May of 1970, that conviction was reversed after the California Court of Appeals found significant errors in the trial. Huey would be tried two more times, both trials ending in jury deadlocks, before he was eventually cleared of all charges in 1971. So he is cleared by the courts. But he loses 2 years of his life, you know, to the to prison. My mom used to cuss like my mom used to call me H rap brown just for jokes. She's doing for jokes, you little H rap brown whenever I was talk about black stuff. Anyway, thought that was funny now. Bobby Seale also caught serious legal trouble in 1969 as a result of his participation in the 1968 Chicago riots over the Democratic National Convention. That year's DNC occurred in one of the most tumultuous periods in American history. And again, this is another thing we probably should do a whole episode about. Like, we're not going to get into enough detail in the 68 riots. Yeah, the short story is that Bobby Kennedy, who was like the progressive icon at the time, had been gunned down the night he won the California primary. Hubert Humphrey, the former vice president, hadn't actually. Participated in any of the primaries, but was favored to become the candidate during the convention because he was beloved by establishment Democrats. Progressives and leftists hated him, and I'm sure this is a situation that has sense familiar to anybody. The 1968 riots like sort of resulted out of all this, and they were nightmarish and caused in large part by the fact that the Mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley, turned the city into what Walter Cronkite called a police state. Leading up to the event, the police turned on left wing protesters with unspeakable violence and the city burned. The whole ugly event is, among other things, a big part of what inspired Hunter Thompson to write fear and loathing in Las Vegas. He was there at the time. It was just this, this big ugly nightmare that was largely instigated by state violence against protesters who were unhappy. That the DNC had picked basically a conservative guy to run against *******. Nixon yeah, yeah, yeah, and in 19, yeah, and it for a little bit of context. All of the people who know their history, right now are ******* terrified that the DNC in 2020, is going to be another 68 Chicago Samesies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I felt like that sitting watching the last debate, I was like. Yeah, we go again. I'll be bringing my helmet. Yeah, yeah. In 1969, Bobby Seale was arrested for conspiracy to incite riots at the DNC. And he was likely targeted for this because, you know, he was a co-founder of the Black Panthers, and the FBI wanted him dead or in prison and ideally both. The court refused to let seal choose his own lawyer. When he spoke up and complained that his constitutional rights were being violated, the judge ordered him bound and gagged. So he is bound and gagged during his own trial. And the idea of how, yeah, yeah, that's another one of those. Like, OK, play some spa music. Think about that for a second. Really? Ruminate on that? Yeah. Ruminate on the fact that this man was not allowed to pick his own lawyer. Yeah, and then when he complained about it, they gagged him. And you tell me, so which one of us is, like, oppressive and violent? Which one of us is violent? You know? Yeah. Now, when he did get to speak, uh, Bobby repeatedly called the judge and government attorneys racists, fascists, and lying pigs. And this was pretty true in my opinion, but it did not aid in his defense. Yeah, Bob, you can't say that out loud. Just, like, keep yourself on me. Let's let's play play a long game. He was sentenced to four years in prison, and he served 21 months before his conviction was reversed and he was freed in 1971. So again, he has almost two years stolen from it now. While all this was going on, the Panthers were taking in huge sums of money. The arrest of Huey P Newton in particular drew in enormous amounts of donations, and as thousands of men and women joined all across the country, the fundraisers grew more and more successful. And as it tends to do, all this money caused massive disagreements and fights between different chapters of the party, the New York chapter being the most. Successful fundraisers were particularly incensed that they had not been allowed to keep what they thought was their fair share of the money they raised for the group. These were the sort of disagreements that any kind of political organization is going to have, especially as they grow and start up. And they could have been smoothed over but for the fact that a large chunk of the most respected Panther leadership, the men who might have been able to work these conflicts out, were in prison or, in the case of Fred Hampton, dead. Now we're going to talk about Fred, but you need to look at this thing. Yeah. Happening behind my shoulder right now. Oh, ****. You're you're you're your video's frozen. Oh, here we go. I can see it now. It's working here. That's just Sophie vigorously trying to get your attention. Yes. Know what Trump Hillary situation and go behind prop very creepily. You know what won't falsely charge? Political activists with crimes they didn't commit? Ah man though, rodome service. So is it this podcast? Glorious? Yeah, boy. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one meant mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. 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A therapist can help you become a better problem solver, which can make it easier to accomplish your goals, no matter how big or small they happen to be. So if you're thinking of giving therapy a try, better help is a great. Option it's convenient, accessible, affordable, and it is entirely online. You can get matched with a therapist after filling out a brief survey, and if the therapist that you get matched with doesn't wind up working out, you can switch therapists at any time. When you want to be a better problem solver, therapy can get you there. Visit betterhelp.com behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better helpp.com/behind betterhelp.com/behind. My name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Freight true crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world and if you can give a voice to them, you can create change. To be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with speaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. I always felt like an ambassador for speaker, but that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with speaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker from iheart. Oh, man. All right. I couldn't wait to get to Fred Hampton. I feel like I've been sitting here the whole time waiting to get Fred Hampton, but yeah, I was wondering why you were getting antsy in there. Because when you get the three, it's like, this is the Trinity that, like, paints the best picture as to how they got destroyed. Because it's like you, it's like you ask, you ask 10 different Panthers what the Black Panthers were. You don't get 10 different answers, you know, pending on which one of these figureheads you know, you're appealing to, you know, I'm saying. So that's why I was like, you got to have the third person, you know, the doesn't make sense. I don't make sense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we, you know, it was one of those things I had to debate to include Fred Hampton and. In part one or Part 2. And I thought it was best to kind of lay the groundwork in one and then bring up because Hampton's whole life is so tied in with the police violence. Yeah, you nailed it because his story, like, tied with like the black Messiah stuff, like, it's like, you have to wait till there was like, don't because he's the most, like, likable, if you will, out of all of them. So it's like, build the narrative and then it's like, oh God, now there's a guy that's likable, right? Yeah, yeah. So let's let's talk. I mean, I I find Huey and and Bobby pretty likable. I do too, Fred. Yeah. Yeah. Fred Hampton is the charismatic guy, yes. So Fred Hampton was born on August 30th, 1948, and he grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. He was gifted academically and physically from a very young age and at one point dreamed of playing for the Yankees. But as he grew into a young man, the injustice evident around him in America made anything but a revolutionary career impossible for Fred. And I'm going to quote now from a Twitter thread I found on Fred Hampton by Michael Harriet, who's a senior writer at the Root. And he knows a lot about Hampton. And, you know, obviously it's a Twitter thread. I did do my work to like, double check the claims and stuff. And he's very accurate here, so I'm going to quote from him. Like the others, he's referring to the other Black Panther leaders. Hampton started out with mainstream black organizations. By the time he was a teenager, he was organizing his own youth chapter of the N Double ACP in his small Illinois suburb. In a single year, he had 500 members. If this sounds like hype, consider this. When Hampton attended his first Black Panther Party meeting in November 1968, the FBI had already opened a file on him. A year earlier. His phone had been tapped for nine months. He had been designated as a key leader on the FBI's agitator index for five months before he ever joins the party. He's just, he's a dog, like that's the what it's like. You take all of the best attributes of everybody so far, and then you're like, put it in a guy who has, like, the entertaining ability of, like, a Michael Jackson. You're just like, ah, you can't lose, you know? So that's I just he he gives me chills when I think about. His ability to just, like, electrify a room. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And he's. I really recommend, like, like, pulling up videos some. You can find them of Fred Hampton speaking and addressing crowds like he was. He was very good at it. Yeah. And Michael in that thread argues that the FBI recognized Hamptons exceptional nature and that they were terrified he would be right to become a national figure. And there's a lot of backing for this argument. He in particular cites a memo from Herbert Hoover himself discussing the goals of the Cointel program. And it included as their number two goal. And I'm going to quote directly from the. BI here, everybody take a breath citation. Listen to the eye #2 prevent the rise of a Messiah who could unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a Messiah. He is the martyr of the movement today. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and Elijah Muhammad all aspired to this position. Elijah Muhammad is less of a threat because of his age. King could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed obedience to white. Liberal doctrines. Nonviolence and embrace black nationalism. Carmichael has the necessary. Like, yeah, yeah, I hear that I talk about your boy, he says. Yeah. Obedient to white liberal thought dog. Yeah, we're going. Yeah. Yeah. If you ever needed evidence of sort of the value of the armed revolutionary wing of the civil rights movement, it's the fact that the FBI was like, thank God, Martin Luther King's Chill. Cool. Let, let let King talk. Don't let that dude talk. Yeah, we'd had to shoot him a lot earlier. Yeah, right. Ohh man so. Hampton in his early well, he didn't have a long career, unfortunately. But Hampton, early in his career, worked to broker peace deals between various gangs in Chicago and came very close to getting the Blackstone Rangers, a heavily armed organization, with as many as 8000 members to join the Black Panthers. Now, the FBI considered that possibility an enormous threat, and they devoted significant resources to fomenting anger between both groups, going as far as forging a death threat to the leader of the Blackstone nation. We talked about a little bit in part one in early 1969. Fred Hampton set up the First Panther free food distribution in Chicago. He got in trouble around this time due to a confusing series of events with an ice cream truck. And again, depending on who you listen to, he either stole a bunch of ice cream from an ice cream truck to give out to poor kids, hijacked a truck and beat its driver, or had nothing at all to do with the robbery of $71.00 worth of ice cream. In any case, an ice cream truck driver claimed to have been beaten up by kids while Fred stole ice cream from his truck. And again, you got to be real ******* careful when you listen to charges. Against any of these guys because we know what was going on. Yeah. Yes. I mean, even even if it was true, it's like, yeah, OK. So take that same event and put it in like, Toad suck Arkansas, which is a city I've performed in, believe it or not. And it's just funny. It's like, you know what? Dude is hot out here, you know, I got a dollar, you know, distract the guy while we get some drumsticks. You know, I'm saying, like, it's more like it's mischievous, you know? I'm saying, like, I'm not trying to like. Why, yeah. Yeah. Yes. You know, I'm saying minimize a crime, but it's like, this is miss. It's like it's mischievous. It's just you can't be mischievous. And Fred Hampton. Yeah, now. Hampton was arrested for this and charged with robbery and assault. While he waited for his trial, Fred organized a free breakfast for children program in Chicago in its first two weeks at Fed more than 1100 grade school kids and earned a huge amount of community support for the Panthers. Hampton was convicted of robbery and assault in April, but thanks to a good attorney, he was released from jail on $2000 bail. Fred immediately held a press conference where he declared that the Black Panther Party was acting in the interests of the people whom the government ignored and oppressed. Quote. Arcade should be taken to the people, and the people will not tolerate any oppressive system or force that attempts to jail the very people who feed their hungry children. Come on. Now Hampton next organized a mock trial with a group of white leftists known as the New Left. And he gave in that trial what would become one of his most famous speeches saying we're going to fight racism not with racism, but with solidarity. We're not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we're going to fight it with socialism. We're not going to fight reactionary pigs with any reaction on our part. We're going to fight their reaction when all of us get together and have an international proletarian revolution. The most see why the FBI was not available. The most level headed like mature response to be like look man, look, you know and and and and in that sense it's like it shows sort of. Even though there was differences in the solution, there was a common thread through a lot of these thinkers just being like look man like. I don't know. I don't know if just going straight this way is going to work. I don't know, straight going this way is going to work. But like, you know, you can't, you can't defeat racism with racism and it just doesn't, you know? Although that's what that's what you want. That's what people, what they wanted us to believe about the Black Panthers was like, y'all were racist and he's like, no, you don't understand. That's not gonna, that's not gonna get us to. Our conclusion is more racism. I think that's important to notice that those were his words, you know? And that's the guy that they were like, he's our worst enemy. Yeah. Fred succeeded in building a broad base of support in Chicago, including people of all races and backgrounds, and this got the attention of Panther national leadership. Bobby Seale flew down to Chicago to attend one of Fred's events. He gave a speech there wherein he said, I'm so thirsty for revolution. I'm so crazy about the people. We're going to stand together. We're going to have a black. For me, I'm Mexican American army, an alliance and solidarity with progressive whites, all of us. And we're going to March on this pig power structure and we're going to say stick em up, ************. We come for what's ours. Here's a good speech. Yo, I love it, man. Because they come up, ************. We pick him up. Yeah. Yeah, man. Can I throw in a little history lesson here? Hell, yeah. OK. I don't really like because I I don't like it when someone steals your Thunder on the show. So I don't, I don't. I don't want to do that. You know, I'm saying because no, no, no. You're here because you you know more about a lot of aspects of this than I do. So, yeah, hit me up. Yeah. So, like, you know, towards the end of, like, You know Doctor King's like work especially the one that the event that ended at the I have a dream speech where he was on his way for to talk about really was what you said was this idea of saying we need to build this coalition because the system itself is trying to keep us out of this. Then he does this. He does this whole this whole diatribe about like. OK, you know, talking about the Homestead act, y'all could Google that, but he was talking about the Homestead act like, OK, so to live like, poor white people out of serfdom, he was like, the government was handing out land grants to people to come build farms. If you know what you was doing, government would train you. They pay to train you. If you don't have no tools to work it, government pay for you to have no tools. He's like, these are social programs that the government has done. He's like, these are the same people who look at us and say, you need to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. And he's like. You need to stop asking for government handouts. He's like the government's been handing out money to y'all this whole time. So when we go to DC, we going to get our check. Because wow, because us just trying to to to to just tell you to stop being. A A racist or or trying to change your mind about who you are. Just trying to fight. You just forget it. Let's just do it ourselves. Back as it was, like, no, listen, this is what you said the country is. This is what you said it was. And this is what we're coming to do. So for you for for for the government to look at or or for the FBI to say, well, Fred Hampton is saying this. I'm like, hey, what's your boy? Your boy King was saying the same thing famo like he was. He was actually. He said the same. It just do it. We're all. We're all saying the same thing. Go get you all say the same thing and it's it's interesting that the guys who were saying that same thing didn't didn't get a lot of time to say it. No. Yeah, yeah. And I don't know enough about the, the, the, the murder of Martin Luther King or the assassination of Martin Luther King to talk about the conspiracy theories you might say around it. But I will say there's definitely reason to be suspicious about what kind of government involvement there might have been. Absolutely. Whole other show. Also totally possible eracist might, you know. Yeah. So I'm not gonna be like, yeah. Hate that guy. Yeah. Yeah. Not out of it. Yeah. Anyway, so by May 26th, 1969, Fred Hampton's free breakfast. Program was feeding more than 3000 children. On that day, he was sentenced to two to five years in prison for his little ice cream truck escapade. He appealed, though, and was led out on an appeal bond by the Supreme Court of Illinois. In July of 1969, Fred Hampton embarked on his most ambitious plan yet. He held the conference for a united front against Fascism, which he billed as an attempt to build a rainbow coalition. He brought a lot of different people together, but focused on bringing in poor people of all different races, particularly gang members. Hampton told them that no matter who they were, the root of their oppression was the same and they would need to work together to confront issues like police brutality and poor public housing. And Teen Vogue actually has a really good write up on this that I'm going to quote from now. Hampton and the other Panthers like section leader Bobby Lee, made the case that as poor people trying to survive and Mayor Richard J Daley's racially segregated city, they had more in common with each other than not. They banded together to protect members from the cops, fight against police brutality, run healthcare clinics, feed the homeless and poor kids, and connect people with legal help if they were dealing with abusive landlords or police. We did security for the Panthers, along with other Panthers 70 year old High, Thurman, a member of the White PO, told Teen Vogue from his home in Alabama. Here's a bunch of hillbillies doing, you know, security for. Black people and Black Panthers, Thurman said that was shocking for a lot of people. Out of respect for the Panthers, the young Patriots, which grew out of a street gang called the Peacemakers, decided to stop wearing the Confederate flag. Meanwhile, the Young Lords foregrounded issues impacting immigrants from Latin America and citizens who moved from Puerto Rico, birthplace of the cofounder Jose Cha Cha Yamez. They introduced the slogan Tango Puerto Rico in mid Corazon in the fight for Puerto Rican self-determination. So he's getting together. Hillbilly white gangs, Puerto Rican Hispanic. Bangs, black gangs and being like, look, we all have the same problems and we can all fight together to deal with them. Yeah, buddy, it's like, is that not like? Is that not like the. I mean this isn't. That's not good. Like, you know, I'm saying like that's the question. Like, wait, that's not good. Like wouldn't you desire? I mean like I just don't understand why this is a problem to y'all. Well, I mean, it's because they kind of prefer it if these gangs are shooting at each other because if they realize they all have more in common, yeah, they start looking at the actual person, ******* him over. That's probably it. Suddenly we got a real threat here, you know? You kill each other. We ain't gotta do the work for you. Yeah, just kill each other, you know? So listen, listen, take heed, young gangsters. Yeah. Yes. Now, all of this scared the hell out of J Edgar Hoover. He directed his men to, quote, destroy what they stand for and eradicate it. Serve the people. Programs. And I got to say, if you're talking about eradicating serve the people programs, what, you might be the bad guy. I just think, Matt, think you might be reading this story all wrong. Yeah, maybe you are on the wrong side of this one. You know, it's a real are we the battiest moment? Wait a minute. Me right like there. Yeah ohh **** it's me. Ohh damn. Yeah, we are. We are leaving out a lot because the story of all of the **** that the police and the FBI did to take down Fred Hampton, would we? I could do a full 2 parter just on that. This guy had almost as much thrown at him as Bobby Seale and Huey P Newton did combined. It's it's remarkable for our purposes. Today we're going to focus on the actions of FBI informant William O'Neill. Now, as soon as Fred Hampton formed the Chicago chapter of the Black Panthers, the Bureau sent O'Neill in to infiltrate it and he was good at his job. O'Neill was renowned as a hard worker, although he worried other Panthers with his obsession for violence. At one point he built an electric chair for the Panthers to use to torture informers, which was disassembled on Fred Hampton's. Quarters. And it was obviously like a black, an FBI, an attempt for them to, like, get the Panthers to torture people so they could arrest them for torture. Sheesh. Yeah. And Hampton's like, what the **** are you doing building? Like, get that out of what are you doing? Yeah, ******* electric chair. I'm gonna quote now from a write up in the nation for this next bit quote not simply an informant, O'Neill tried to provoke others into kamikaze type activities. Former Panther member Louis Trulock had submitted an affidavit stating that during a visit to O'Neill's father's home, the informer showed him putty, blasting caps and plastic bottles of liquid, enough material to produce several bombs. He proposed that they blow up an Armory and later suggested robbing a McDonald's restaurant. Truluck and the others who heard O'Neill's provocative proposals rejected them as useless to the cause. Although he was infatuated with weapons and tried to involve other Panthers and criminal activities, O'Neill was tolerated because he was an exceptionally hard worker around the office. Ronald Doc Satchel, a Black Panther leader who was wounded in the raid, recalls the only person who didn't want O'Neill and the Panthers was Fred Hampton, now the electric chair, and the bombs were part of a series of schemes O'Neill Hatch to try and entrap Hampton on behalf of the FBI. None of them worked, though, because Hampton was very smart, and eventually the police were left with exactly one option for dealing with Fred. Cold blooded murder in November of 1969, William O'Neill provided the FBI with a detailed floor plan of the Black Panther headquarters which doubled as Fred Hampton's home. The map included a red X over his bed. At 4:45 AM, Sergeant Daniel growth of the Chicago Police Department knocked on the door of the Black Panther headquarters. What exactly happened next is debated, but we know that for the next 7 minutes the police pumped roughly 100 rounds into the building. Only one bullet was fired in response by a Black Panther Mark Clark. Age 22. Both Clark and Fred Hampton were shot dead. Fred died in his bed from 2 point blank gunshots to the head. The vast majority of bullet holes in the house were centered around the location of his bed where William O'Neill had drawn the Red X. One officer was heard saying he's good and dead now as they traipse through the blood stained office and there is a photograph of the officers carrying Fred Hampton's body from the building. It's one of the more disgusting things I've ever seen. Two of the officers are visibly gritting and we we've got a photograph. Sophie can show you. We'll put it up on the side. I've seen it. It's important. Yeah. It's important to see these men's faces. Yeah. This and that. The, the map with the red X or something that like sits in our psyche, you know, because that image is just, it just burns in, you know? I'm saying when you see it and you know, like, that's what is, that's that man's bad, you know? Yeah. Yeah. That that for the listeners that that you would think that they just like, left their, like local bar and just like are going handing each other, like, that's the way they look. They look like they did. Well, on a slot machine, yeah, yeah, yeah. So true. Yeah. Speaking of doing well on a slot machine, following the raid, William O'Neill was given a $300.00 bonus by the FBI, for ****** sake. And now today, the assassination of Fred Hampton is basically universally agreed by scholars and legal experts, as well as activists who have been a political assassination organized and orchestrated by the FBI. There is really 0 disagreement about this fact between credible people who study it, however. In mainstream coverage of the raid, you still run into people who will equivocate on this fact, a Chicago Tribune article I read about the assassination stated in the two years before the RAID, police and Panthers had engaged in eight gun battles nationally in which three police officers and five Panthers died. Four of the shootouts, including one in which two police officers were killed, occurred in Chicago to try and make the case that, like, there was reason for the police to be super antsy about this whole thing. You know, what you know is like when people say, hey, well, you know, these St gangs are these street, you know? They're violent, too. They're shooting. They're shooting. So we're shooting. I'm like, yeah, but you know, they're gangsters. Yeah, the yeah. Yeah. They're shooting. But aren't aren't you the police? Like, aren't you supposed to carry yourself, you know, a level of integrity? You telling me your bar of integrity is a street gang? That's what you're telling me right now, you know? So even if I'm just saying, like, even if that was your reasoning, I'm like, yeah, but you're the cops, though. Yeah, it you know one thing that's interesting to me that maybe I can leave a little bit of homework for the listener. Go sit down and and look up. Google all the people who were killed in mass shootings in the history of the United States of like, you know, like, not just like shootings, but like mass shootings where some nut with a gun decides to murder a bunch of strangers. Yeah, add that number together and then figure out how many people were shot dead by the police in 2019 alone. About which of those numbers is larger? Oh no, but a homework for you. Yes. Yeah. Now, the article that I found in the Chicago Tribune also counts the firearms the Panthers had on the property 19 and the number of rounds over 1000, as if any of that justifies what was done. Those were all legally owned guns and legally owned. I have more firearms and ammunition in my House sitting five feet from me in the Black Panthers head in their house at that point. Yeah, like, that's not a lot to me. I mean, it's the 19 is a sizable number of guns for one person, but like. It was multiple people's weapons, and 1000 rounds is not a lot. And those gunfights with police had no connection to Fred Hampton. Other than that he was a Panther too. And despite the murders and the FBI ******* and the counterintelligence operations, by 1970 the Black Panthers had offices in 68 cities. The representatives had traveled to meet with communist leaders in North Vietnam, North Korea, and China. Some Panthers had set up shop in Algeria. And we're not going to have enough time, really, to go into all of the international divisions of this. Yeah, and Speaking of international, Sophie is signalling to me that it's time for an ad break from the international corporations that sponsor this podcast. Alright, globalism. Did. The globalists. Your Alex Jones voice is on point. Thank you. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. 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Get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker from iheart. We're back. So 1970 would prove to be the Black Panthers high point. And again, there's a number of reasons for this. Police repression, disruption of the leadership and stuff had a lot to do with it, I should note, and it's very fair to note, that it was not just police and state violence that were responsible for the decline of the Black Panthers. There were other sort of factors that played into it. And I'm going to quote from black against Empire again because it gives you an idea of some of these other factors. The resilience of the Black Panthers politics depended heavily on support from 3 broad constituencies, blacks, opponents of the Vietnam War, and revolutionary governments internationally. Without the support of these allies, the Black Panther Party could not withstand repressive actions against them by the state. But beginning in 1969 and steadily increasing through 1970, political transformations undercut the self-interest that motivated these constituencies to support the Panthers politics. As mainstream Democratic leaders oppose the war and Nixon scaled back the military draft, blacks won broader social access and. Political representation and revolutionary governments entered diplomatic relations with the United States. The Panthers had greater difficulty sustaining Allied support. First, major concessions by the political establishment and the Nixon administration on the Vietnam War eroded the basis of war opponent support for the Panthers politics, once it appeared the war would be ended through institutionalized political means. Those principally committed to ending the draft in war no longer shared a personal stake in radically transforming political institutions. Many now increasingly saw the Panthers call for revolution as unnecessary. From 1969 onward, increasing electoral representation as well as affirmative action programs and growing access to government employment and elite education also weaken the base of support for the Panthers revolutionary politics among blacks. From the end of Reconstruction 1877 until 1969, no more than six black people had held a seat in the US House of Representatives at once. But just two years later, black representation more than doubled, with 13 black people holding seats in the US House of Representatives by 1971. So a lot of why the Panthers declined. Is because these groups who supported them because they were in like for their own self-interest, really utility got what they wanted and stopped caring about this kind of revolutionary struggle for equality? Yeah, that's part of the story too. Yeah, my, my father would say like, you know? The government will always get their man, you know, whatever they want. If the if the system decides they want you gone, you're going to be gone, right? And like, and he would also say what you want, what you ain't gonna never mess with. Is their money. And have you messing with their money, they're gonna stop it, you know? So this idea of, like, you had this coalition, it was cool when it was like, OK, you y'all want to sit at the same table as us? Alright, that's alright, fine. You know, I'm saying, OK. You want us to not beat you in the streets? All right. I guess, you know, I'm saying when you start messing with our money, though. You know, and and and especially like our, our international is like I said when you I mean I said this on the last episode when you first invited me on here. I wanted to like refresh my memory with like with with with my father's experience. So I caught him and talked to him about it for a while. So this was like the time he was in and he was saying he was saying that he was talking about like. The multi tiered approach of like. This this the sewing seeds of like doubt of like you know even just the idea of saying like hey you know you got this coalition but like now like well if the war is over, why are y'all here? Right. So he he he even mentioned he mentioned exactly what you were saying was like now utilities gone like what do we do then you have like the the the the what we what we in the in slang now will call St Sweepers. But it was essentially like the injunctions of like you're not allowed to gather. He was talking about like if it was two or more of y'all. The sidewalk that constitutes a Black Panther meeting so you'd be stopped by the police and like broken up because you're just standing on a street corner together. You know, I'm saying so like this multi tiered approach to like whether it was just like sowing seeds of doubt, dividing the coalition, messing with their money. Just like all of those things together, if the government decides this, these are his words. If government decide they don't want you, they don't want you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's Umm, yeah. I'm glad you brought up like the, the, the, like the, the cracking down on so-called meetings. Yeah, because that again, that's that's one of those things. Like there's there was so much, I'm sure it was on my, I think it was on my dock at some point. I just didn't get written up and that's absolutely important. I'm sure there's other stuff like that that I've left out because there's just so much to go over here. So I'm glad you did bring that up. The Black Panther Party was eventually dissolved in 1982, and the FBI and you know, local federal state law enforcement cannot be blamed for all of that. Yeah, but their efforts succeeded in draining huge amounts of energy from the organization, killing at least twenty of its members, and most importantly, destroying or distracting its most influential leaders. Huey P Newton spent most of the 1970s fighting a seemingly endless series of legal battles. There were accusations of violence and embezzling and even murder that are very hard for me to parse. Out. It is possible he committed some of these crimes, possibly embezzled. Given what we know about the FBI's efforts to take him down, I have a lot of difficulty giving too much credit to any of these charges. He was murdered in 1989 by Tyrone Johnson, a member of the Black Guerrilla family, a prison gang. And it's very difficult to not draw connections between that murder and the FBI motivated US killings. You know, I I don't know. Yeah. Impossible not to think about it. Did you come across? This is like a side note, but did you come across like the the. The 10 demands of the Black Panther Party. Yes. Yeah. We're getting to that. OK. Making sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's that's what I wanted to end on. Yeah. And did you get. Yeah. Are you gonna cover like, their connection with like, the founding of the ***** and Tookie Williams and stuff that were not? So if you have something. Yeah, I would. I would love to. So it's this it's this window that you talk about, this 1983 window of like the sort of. Seeing, you know, you got these St dudes. Like seeing the. The destruction of the party and almost like the same sort of disillusionment like, damn, that didn't work either. You know, I'm saying. And just being like, and then you introduce crack and then it just everything changes. But like that sort of transition from the Panthers dissolving to these like, you know, just St gangs of just like what we know as the ***** you know? I'm saying being like, there's a documentary called The ******* Children of the Black Panther Party, and it was about the founding of the ***** and and that window between those two, sort of like. Say like the dissolving of that and then the birth of this, you know, being a new sort of like communal police force and then and then the crack attack and then it all goes to ****. But interesting. Yeah. Anyway, I had no idea about any of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the whole crack in the inner cities thing in the CIA that that's a whole another two or three-part. We're going to get to that point because I don't want to just like spout off about that because even among the people who are on the right track, there's a lot of misconceptions about the. Carried out and it's it's very detailed his yeah. Whatever the case may be, it's it's understood in the inner city that like yeah crack destroyed us. It's what made our gangs violent. You know I'm saying and just the the the moving of drugs is what made our gangs violent. Yeah yeah and yeah that's really important context and also important context is the to really get an idea of the sheer level of of of ******* perpetrated against the Black Panther. Probably by the FBI. During the period of COINTELPRO. Of the 295 actions the Bureau took to disrupt black groups under COINTELPRO, 233 were taken against the Panthers. The FBI paid out more than $7.4 million in bribes to Black Panther informants. Which is more than for for context, that's more than twice the amount of money they spent on bribing informants who were organized crime informants nationwide. So they spent twice as much money on the Black Panthers. They did on the ******* box. And the mob in, like the 60s and 70s when the mob is like, really a big deal. Yeah. Actual mob. Yes. Yeah. Like the ******** like the ******* Scorsese mob. Yeah. Of course. While the Scorsese mob. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's that I I will speak. I think I could speak for all of black people. I'm like, I'm gonna go out on limb and say this. I am. We are absolutely fascinated. Like the Irishman being like, all the greatest movie ever, like, you know, honored as like this. Now I'm like y'all. Murder this murderer. Like, OK, I I like. I like my movies too. But how come? Like, y'all are so fascinated with just these? Like. These white like, gangsters like, why is it OK? Why are y'all so fascinated by white gangsters? You know, I'm saying I wonder how many of the people who love those movies? Also think that rap music unfairly glorifies criminals. Yes, that's my point. That's my point. I'm just like, why is it? Why y'all OK with this? Like, why is this type entertaining? Like, why is this OK? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, we've spent this episode talking about this incredibly sweeping campaign to disrupt and destroy the Black Panthers by the FBI and by law enforcement. And we might not know about any of this if it weren't for the actions of eight really ******* cool dudes. Led by William C Davidon, a professor of physics at Haverford College in 1971, they spent months casing an FBI field office in Philadelphia during the night of a major Frazier Ali fight. When everyone was distracted, they broke into the FBI's offices. The crowbar and made out with a carload of FBI files. Those files included numerous memos from J Edgar Hoover on the Black Panthers and the COINTELPRO to operations. Now, the FBI tried to stop the press from writing about any of this, but the Washington Post was courageous enough to flip in the bird and write about it. The findings inspired a Blizzard of FOIA request from Panthers who suddenly had confirmation that they've been surveilled for years. All the **** they've been writing about. Yeah, FBI's on our backs. No, you're paranoid. No, look, no, seriously. Yeah. Yeah. For an example of what was found, one member, a guy named Rodney Barnett, received a 500 page file on himself quote documenting his whereabouts, interviewing every employer he's ever had, interviewing his high school teacher, his neighbors, all of his siblings, and observing him getting on airplanes. So creepy. So. All of this led to an investigation in 1976 by the Senate Collect Committee on intelligence activities. The final report they issued noted that the actions carried out by the FBI under COINTELPRO quote would be intolerable in a democratic society, even if all the targets had been involved in violent activity. But COINTELPRO went far beyond that. The unexpressed major premise of the programs was that a law enforcement agency has the duty to do whatever is necessary to combat perceived threats to the existing social order and political order. But, the report stated although the claimed purpose of the program was to prevent violence, its tactics quote were clearly intended to foster violence and many could reasonably have been expected to cause violence. The Senate concluded that the FBI quote itself engaged in lawless tactics and responded to deep seated social programs by fomenting violence and unrest. And part of me wants to end on that note. Yeah, but I don't think I want to give the government the last word in this episode, even if at that last word is the government condemning the actions of its own agents are bad. So for the last word in this episode, I think we should go over the Black Panthers 10 point program introduced in 1966 by Huey P Newton and Bobby Seale and Bobby Seale. By the way, we talked about Newton. He died, obviously. Hampton died. Seal is still alive today, or at least as of the recording. This episode has continued to be an activist, ran for office a couple of times, and yeah, it's still around to this day. So that's at least one bit of yeah, positive. So here is the 10 point program. What we want now, number one, we want freedom. We want the power to determine the destiny of our black community, #2. We want full employment for our people. #3. We want an end to the robbery by the white men of our black community, later changed to. We want an end to the robbery by the capitalists of our black and oppressed communities. Four, we want decent housing fit for the shelter of human beings. 5 We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American Society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present day society. Six, we went all black men to be exempt from military service. Seven, we want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people. Eight, we want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county, and city prisons and jails. 9 we want. All black people, when brought to trial to be tried in a court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities as defined by the Constitution of the United States and 10 we want land bred housing, education, clothing, justice, and peace. Now, that list of demands also included a list of beliefs, starting with we believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our own destiny. It included a reiteration of the Panther belief in the importance of Community self-defense. We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States gives us the right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self-defense. There were also demands for the release of all. Black people incarcerated in American prisons, since none of them could possibly have received a fair trial, the whole thing ended with this paragraph. When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the Earth the separate and equal station to which the laws and nature's God entitle them. A decent respect to the opinions of mankind, requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, and that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator. With certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter and abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its power in such a form as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed, for light and transient. Causes, and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accused. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right and their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards of their future security. You may recognize that as the beginning of the Declaration of Independence. Yes, yeah. Man, what a frigging journey. And they're so like. Again? You ask. 10 different people with the Black Panthers are you get 10 different answers. Even people that were in the movement. Yeah, but at the end of the day, man, like, you know, wherever, like. Point might be a problem. Like, is it? I mean is it so much to ask to be like, yo, I just want housing that's like suitable for humans. How about that? Yeah, you know if, yeah it, yeah, it it it it. And at the end of the day and I think why they ended on that note, I'm just quoting the introduction to the Declaration of Independence is they're saying. What we want is for this nation to make good on its promises. Just just keep your promises. Yeah, like, yeah. Like they're saying, like, this thing that you all claim to Revere. This is a good document. It's got some good **** in there. Why aren't you doing it? Yeah, that's what we were about. Let's do it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So good. Yeah. Yeah. Cool, cool. Prop. Is there anything you want to go into before we we roll out of this one, man? I think, uh, mentioning some of the like. Some of the women like the Tupac connection, like a funny Shakur, you know, Nikki, I mean Angela Davis, you know, I mean her, her Prison Reform stuff that she's doing now, like some of these people, you know, Nina Simone and like, you know, just some of the like things that are happening like. Who's in Cuba right now? Why am I blanking on who's in Cuba right now? Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Some other, like because, yeah, they're in Cuba and in Algeria they had like a number of them wound up living. Yeah. They just, they just went there. Yeah. So, yeah, some of the, some of the women, you know, I'm saying that were like so pivotal, you know, saying and again, like. Afina Shakur, like Tupac's mom, you know, I'm saying, yeah, you know, going to prison, her being pregnant with Tupac in prison, you know, I'm saying stuff like that like that, like ties to, like, now, I think would be cool to kind of cover. Yeah. And that's definitely the biggest shortcoming of this is that, like, yeah, I mean, I I definitely didn't go into detail enough about, like, the different women activists, the the international stuff that went on. It's there's so much to talk about. Yeah. And, like, there was always going to be imperfect. And I totally. I wish I had done more research here. You could like Angela Davis, like, teaches at Berkeley, like you could go hear her right now. You could go hear her lecture. You know, I'm saying, like, those things to me, like these, like living, you know, monuments that like, like, if we could gather these stories and hear the more somebody could hear them, why they still alive. You know, I'm saying I think it's like, super even if you don't like, even if you don't rock with, like, a lot of whatever they stood for. Right now, like she was, she was on this campaign to like, just in prisons. It was like, prisons are ineffective. They don't work. They just make more criminals, you know? I'm saying so. But you could go hear her right now, you know, I'm saying, like, talk about it, you know, saying like why Tupac was who he was again, this Mama was a Panther, you know, I'm saying. And like, it was in prison, pregnant with him, you know, things like that. I just think is like, these this like it's not. It's it's not that long ago. You know I'm saying like some of these people are still alive and still accessible but really the the the mist to me even in a lot of like the academic work with the with the Panthers like I know harped on this a lot but like what the women did you know I'm saying they were doing the cooking for all those like breakfast programs that was women doing that. You know, I'm saying when they locked up all the men when they was killing the men, guess who carried it was the women, you know I'm saying so just I just think that like that legacy. I would love to see more on that legacy. Not even, not from this. I'm just saying just. Like, let's. Yeah. Can we talk about what the ladies did, you know, I'm saying yeah. Yeah. And that's a, you know that that's probably a good, maybe a good subject for him when we do our next Heroes episode around the end of the year or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And part I was focusing this on, I mean, I was focusing this largely on like efforts to destroy the Panthers. And those did sort of focus more on, on killing and injuring. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Imprisoning some of the. Yeah, but you're right. Like, that's a you know, and it's one of those things. As soon as I started reading Black against empire, it was like this anxiety attack of, like, I'm going to leave so much **** out, dude. Yeah, you can't. Like, how, like, that's what I was saying. Like, I was already ready to show you mercy because it's just so much to cover, you know? I'm saying, yeah, yeah. This was a very focused episode. And my main hope for it is that it convinces people, particularly other, like, white kids like me. Go read more about these guys and women and and and this this, like, go read more about this. I think black against empire is a good place to start. Yeah, man, there's a lot of other really good books. That you can look into. And I'd say, I'd even tell everybody, like, I've taken your book advice before, you know, read a few things you didn't put out there and has sent those for, like, I read the death of democracy. No, that's a good one. Yeah, that was that was a book boy. Yeah. Sheesh. Yeah. You probably got the same chills I did when you was reading. I was like, oh, **** this isn't good. Yeah, this is too familiar. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, well, you know, you know, maybe consider some of the lessons in black against empire as part of the antidote to the death of democracy, especially the survival programs, that sort of thing. This idea of community organizing their self-defense, the armed stuff and the stuff that has nothing to do with guns, it's all very important. So that's the end note on this episode. Prop. You want to plug your plug cables before we sail out of here into the weekend. My plegables are prop hip hop, just like it sounds. Prop hip hop. That's that's Twitter, that's Instagram, that's the website. There's merch, coffee paraphernalia. I'm quite a coffee nerd. Couple podcasts I'm a part of. Like, really cool. Coffee paraphernalia. Ohh yeah, it's like, really, really, really. You guys got to look up the poor egami. It's gonna blow your mind. DJ Daniel, our engineer, bought 1. Jerk. You're supposed I'm supposed to give you one man. Yeah, dude. So the poor egami. Yeah, some pods on my part of called Hood politics, one of most excited about. It's essentially like a a sort of the like street level version of like politics and information. Just to like, it's kind of fun, kind of tell me tongue in cheek, but you can understand politics. If you survived 8th grade, you can understand geopolitics and that's really what that positive about. Yeah, and that's kind of what I'm working on. Alright, and I am working on this podcast every week. You can find me here. You know the sources for this episode on behindthebastards.com. You can find our Twitter and Instagram and that ******* pod. You can find my Twitter at irido. OK, and you can also find our other podcast worst year ever, we have a 2 parter that just dropped investigating a terrorist attack on the furry community at a convention in 2014 and it's Nazi connection. So that's a fun. One so. Continue learning things. Read some good books and go out into the street and and kick some *** or or feed some *** to do something. Wow, two ***** yeah? Great. All right. And we're out. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break her handle the hosting creation distribution. And monetization of your podcast? Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. 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