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Diane Nash: A True Heroine in Leadership and Bravery
Not everyone is born to lead. Not everyone has greatness thrust upon them. Not everyone lives in remarkable times. For Diane Nash of Chicago, she did all three in just a short span of time. Diane Nash’s life changed when she left Chicago behind in the late 1950s to go to college – first at Howard University in Washington, and then at Fisk University in Nashville. There in Tennessee, the young coed met Southern segregation for the first time. As a result, she became a leader in fighting against segregation. Nashville and that fight came to define the rest of her life and helped changed the nation.
Born in Chicago in 1938, Diane grew up on the south side in a middle class neighborhood and attended Catholic schools. While her father was overseas during World War II, her grandmother, Carrie Bolton, helped raised her and became a huge influence on how Diane looked at the world and treated other human beings. Her grandmother taught her that no one person was better than any other. After World War II ended, her father came home, her parent’s marriage ended, her mother remarried, and yet her Grandmother still remained in her life.
Even in that positive environment, Diane experienced racism and discrimination. However, racism in the North was more subtle than in the South. Most racism was unspoken. Diane experienced Northern racism whenever she tried to enter beauty pageants. She was denied entrance to several because of the color of her skin. She was even denied entrance to a charm school because it “was not equipped to handle Negroes.” She graduated with honors from Hyde Park High School. When it came time to pick a college, Diane chose Howard University in Washington, D.C. She later transferred to Fisk University in Nashville to major in English.
Heading South: The Sit-Ins
It was in Tennessee that Diane experienced a more “in-your-face” spoken and legislated form of racism. Diane writes:
In September 1959, I came to Nashville as a student at Fisk University. This was the first time I had been as far south as Tennessee; therefore it was the first time I had encountered the blatant segregation that exists in the South. I came to see the community in sin.
The controlling nature of this form of segregation was an affront to the young Nash, as if being slapped in the face constantly. From the signs in every place in society to being denied service in commercial parts of the city, Nash knew she had to do something. Her frustration at being treated so overtly turned to anger.
Under the guidance of James Lawson, Diane began to learn nonviolent forms of protest. As the young age of 22, Diane rose quickly into a leadership position in the newly formed Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. At Fisk University, Diane’s natural leadership and stunning presence began to attract members to the organization. In early 1960, inspired by the Greensboro Four Sit-In in early February, Diane organized a sit-in in Nashville for late February.
Nash describes the scene:
The sit-ins were really highly charged, emotionally. In our nonviolent workshops, we had decided to be respectful of the opposition and try to keep the issues geared toward desegregation. And the first sit-in we had was really funny, because the waitresses were nervous. They must have dropped $2,000 worth of dishes that day! I mean, literally, it was almost a cartoon. I can remember one in particular. She was so nervous, she picked up the dishes and dropped one, and she’d pick up another one and drop it. It was really funny, and we were sitting there trying not to laugh, because we thought that laughing would be insulting. At the same time, we were scared to death.
When the police came, they arrested whoever was sitting at the counter. The police became perplexed quickly as the empty seats were soon filled with new protesters to arrest.
Nash explained her view of the Civil Rights Movement:
The Negro is seeking to take advantage of the opportunities that society offers; the same opportunities that others take for granted, such a cup of coffee at Woolworth’s, a good job, an evening at the movies, and dignity. Persons favoring segregation often refer to the rights of man, but they never mention the rights of Negro men.
The Sit-Ins drew national attention to the cause, but also to Diane. She knew the risks involved. As one of the few women in a leadership role, Diane spoke eloquently and forcefully for human dignity in ending segregation.
In leading a march to the steps of city hall in Nashville, Diane stood face-to-face with the mayor of Nashville, Ben West. Diane, calmly but firmly asked Mayor West, “…do you recommend that the lunch counters be desegregated?” To many people’s surprise, he answered “Yes.”
Spurred on by her success, Diane organized other protests in and around Nashville’s downtown economic center thereby desegregating the city through economic power and boycotts.
Showing such grace, style, and a steadfast approach to bridging the race barrier, Diane left Fisk without graduating. Her professors understood that she had a greater calling. Over the next five years, Diane Nash was at the center of the Civil Rights Movements greatest moments. She was also behind the scenes orchestrating them as well. She became a key strategist for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference from 1961-65.
Other Key Events
The leadership skills Diane learned at Fisk would serve her well in several other key moments in the movement. In Rock Hill, South Carolina, she was arrested in early 1961 and refused to pay bail – a strategy that she in part helped to plan in order to clog the jails. When arrested, Diane wanted Civil Rights protesters to not post bail but rather remain in jail and cause the local government to spend more money to house and feed them all. Not all agreed with her methods including her father who sent these telegrams to President Kennedy.
In 1962, while six months pregnant, Diane refused to post bail and was sentenced to two years in jail. She said, “I believe that if I go to jail now it may help hasten that day when my child and all children will be free – not only on the day of their birth but for all their lives.” A judge was none too happy and commuted her term to ten days.
Diane was also a strategist for the Freedom Rides that included her then husband, James Bevel. Her she explains the event and strategies:
Here is a letter she wrote to the Kennedy Administration about actions taken in Mississippi against the riders.
While many of the riders served several months in jail, her leadership garnered the attention of the President Kennedy. She was named by President Kennedy to a committee that began the Civil Rights Act. She later worked for the SCLC in Selma in 1965 and spoke out against Vietnam in 1967.
The leadership skills she learned in Nashville served her well throughout her life and have helped many people. She reflected on those times by saying:
The movement had a way of reaching inside me and bringing out things that I never knew were there. Like courage, and love for people. It was a real experience to be seeing a group of people who would put their bodies between you and danger. And to love people that you work with enough that you would put your body between them and danger […] But when the time came to go to jail, I was far too busy to be afraid. And we had to go, that’s what happened. I think it’s really important that young people today understand that the movement of the sixties was really a people’s movement. The media and history seem to record it as Martin Luther King’s movement, but young people should realize that it was people just like them, their age, that formulated goals and strategies, and actually developed the movement. When they look around now, and see things that need to be changed, they should say: “What can I do?”
When the Civil Rights Movement began to wane, Diane returned home to Chicago where she still lives. She has spent the last 45 years working tirelessly to help people find affordable housing, taught in the Chicago Public Schools, and is an advocate for Civil Rights. She tours the country and is a highly sought after public speaker.
Diane Nash’s experiences were unique because of the remarkable times, but her leadership also helped to make them remarkable. Her strategies meant that some would die and that she was putting her own life at risk for freedoms denied. When most of the leaders of the movement were men, she, as a woman, stood out as an inspiration. Her distinct style, manner, grace, and forthright ability to find solutions made her an excellent leader. She is a true heroine.
Sources
Books
Women and the Civil Rights Movement
The Children by David Halberstam
Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970
Magazines
Video Interviews
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/tavissmiley/interviews/civil-rights-activist-diane-nash/
http://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/Lessons-from-the-Freedom-Rides-Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEsD8DtWNLk
Internet
http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKWHSFHW-005-003.aspx
http://archive.tennessean.com/civil-rights/
http://www.sc.edu/uofsc/announcements/2014/02_diane_nash_leadership_dialogue.php#.U0lJXVfqiSo
Teaching D-Day: Surviving the Invasion
Having a student teacher in the fall has its advantages. I spent a lot of time watching her try new things and doing different type of lessons. During the Civil War unit, she made the students hard tack. She was very good and will make a good teacher wherever she goes. During many of her lessons I would be surfing on a tablet for new things to use in the classroom to reinvigorate me, the lessons and, ultimately, the students. In early November, I took my little history club over to Cantigny in Wheaton, Illinois, where they have the museum for the US Army First Division. While on the website booking the trip I came across some great resources. I immediately downloaded the pdf files and began cherry picking what I could use. Once I came across these resources, I knew I was onto to redoing how I teach DDay.
I am one of those teachers who doesn’t teach the same way every year, or should I say as I did when I started teaching. Technology, mainly the Internet, has changed a lot of that. Just using Google allows me to access historical sites, pictures, journals, and maps from repositories all over the world. What once was the sole bastion of scholars who visited libraries and museums is now available at the click of a finger.
Before this great adventure, I had done all kinds of different approaches to teaching about the world’s greatest invasion. I has shown parts of “Band of Brothers,” used maps, scenarios, photograph analysis, Eisenhower’s DDay Letter, and/or simulations. That lesson was usually one day long. But I wanted to make it was unique and something they wouldn’t forget after the test. So, I began to restructure the lesson. Some elements remain from past lessons, and some new elements were created. This lesson should take three days to do this week. Key word is should – it might take four…..or five.
Day One…
It all begins by connecting what they learned with what they are going to learn. So, to connect their learning, I use a cartoon.
This is by Dr. Seuss. The students have already seen several cartoons by Dr. Seuss about World War II, but this cartoon is about the ramifications from the Battle of Stalingrad which they just learned about the day before. When teaching cartoons, some kids struggle with the symbolism, but they can at least identify objects, actions, and words in the cartoon. Once the basics are established, I go for three higher order/critical thinking questions:
- Which words are of most importance?
- Predict what you think will happen when Winter sits up
- Why does that matter?
The students must think about the implications of winter ending and what Hitler will do and what the US (you and me) will do, too.
After that discussion, I go into a few notes and pictures on Fortress Europa, the Atlantic Wall, Italy, the Battle of Kursk in 1943. That should take about 7-10 minutes. The emphasis is on opening up a second front in Europe. Once 1944, comes, I shift gears and segue into a scenario about where to invade in France to open up a second front and create a German sandwich. The students will get a map, some descriptions of the four places. They are to then in small groups make a chart that analyzes the positives and negatives about each place.
The choices will be Dieppe, Calais, Cherbourg, and Havre.
As a class we will then go over the columns and select one landing spot and then I will spill the beans about what the choice was.
Every time I teach a new lesson, you would think that after 20+ years, I would know how long things are going to take. I do, but when it comes to the interest the students show by asking questions, I never know. Some classes don’t ask many questions, others ask a lot. I hope that by this time, the lesson should be 30 minutes in. The lesson turns again when I will ask one simple question, “How do you hide the largest invasion force in history?” The students had previously learned that the Germans did have spies in Britain during the Battle of Britain and the British were masters of deception during the Battle of El Alamein. Students then will be asked to come up with some strategies about how to deceive the German spies in Britain and those listening on BBC radio across the English Channel in northeastern France. Once the students put forth their deceptive answers, I will show them some pictures and some information on Operation Fortitude – the plan for deceiving German Intelligence.
Day one ends (I hope) with me putting a nice ribbon and bow on everything by tying all three parts of the lesson together – the cartoon, the chart, and the deception. The students then get a worksheet about DDay that examines some cartoons that were published just before the invasion.
Day Two
This day begins by quickly reviewing the previous days events and then examine 2 letters. The first comes a surprise. It is the letter that Eisenhower wrote in case DDay failed.
“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault is attached to the attempt it is mine alone.”
We will discuss why this letter was written. We will also discuss their reactions to reading it, and finally, we will discuss why it never saw the light of day.
Moving on, the students then read Ike’s letter to the troops. They then answer four questions about it.
Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!
You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have
striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The
hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you.
In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well
equipped and battle hardened. He will fight savagely.But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of
1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!I have full confidence in your courage and devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!
Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.
SIGNED: Dwight D. Eisenhower
1. Underline the ten keys words in the letter.
2. What events had taken place before the letter?
3. Why did he the write letter?
4. What might have happened after?
We discuss word choice and other possible words. The highlight of the four day lesson comes next to me. I hand out a packet of pictures that has artifacts that the soldiers used to survive the invasion. Students guess for what each artifact was used.
I do not tell them what they are or how they were used. We discuss their possible uses and it is a great activity as students should get pretty creative with their answers (I do something similar in the Civil War but about life in camp). They now have to figure out what the artifacts were used for by watching an educational film from the Discovery Channel called “Surviving DDay.” For the last 15 minutes of Day Two, we begin watching the film. Students are to identify artifacts in the movie and write down how they helped the soldiers survive. The students get a map worksheet for their assignment.
Day Three
The third day begins by using resources from Cantigny (mentioned above) that include some journals/diaries by soldiers. We read one today and another one on Day Four. This will give a glimpse into the struggles the soldiers faced and how they had to problem solve on the beaches. After the discussion, we resume the video.
At several points during the film, we will stop and discuss certain artifacts and their implications on survival. Students will also have time to pair and share information every fifteen minutes during the film (I don’t like to make them sit there – who wants to do that?). This makes me think that four days may not be enough.
At the end of class, the students get a second map worksheet about the dangers on the beach.
Day Four
The second diary entry is read, discussed, and then students finish watching the video. The remaining time in class is spent making a pamphlet called “Surviving DDay” using the artifacts from the film. When the film concludes, I have a few notes on the implications of the invasion and how it fits in the context of the war, problem solving, and critical thinking. I hope that four days is enough. It is a lot of time to spend on one event but “more on less” is a philosophy I believe in. I hope this turns out to be an experience that they remember. It could be five days. If it is, I will adjust. I would be OK with that.
Becoming an Historian: A Weird and Wacky Path
The other day in class, a student asked me why I became an historian. It was hard to answer. In fact, all I could come up with was, “I don’t think it was any one thing, but a series of events pushing me to becoming an historian.” And I think that it is different for every historian. Looking back at my life, five things influenced me into loving history: the context of my life, television, some wonderful professors, my family, and some great books and authors.
The Context of My Life
Being born in 1963, some of first memories are of the war in Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Beatles. Every day, my family would gather round the television at 5:30 p.m. to watch Walter Conkrite do the CBS Evening News. The images I saw still impact me today. I am a very visual teacher in that students examine a lot of images like political cartoons and images. For me, the images of Vietnam have been seared into my brain. They do not haunt me, but I will always remember the images I saw like “Napalm Girl,” “Shell Shocked-Soldier,” and Eddie Adams’ “The Assassination.” I introduce them to my students along with other images from that era including the Civil Rights movement in Birmingham, Bull Connor, Malcolm X, and the Black Panthers. The era is ripe with stark images of the events.
Add in my own personal fascination with the Beatles, and everything about them. When older, I began researching them and finding out information about them. They were my favorite band up until I was a junior in high school. That fascination would continue when I began listening to Led Zeppelin, The Police, Rush, and Pearl Jam – my other favorite bands. I always researched every artist. I still do today. I dig into their past and find out who influenced them, why they picked up an instrument, and how they got in the record business. It is always interesting to me.
Television
You wouldn’t think that TV as a medium would influence an historian in the pre-cable days, but the show I would always watch when I came home from school was “Hogan’s Heroes.” I know it sounds corny, but the truth of the matter is that I wanted to learn more about what was happening on each episode of “Hogan’s Heroes.” I would always use an encyclopedia to find out about something mentioned on Hogan’s Heroes whether it was the Gestapo or the city of Hamburg or some member of the Nazi hierarchy. It really piqued my interest in World War II. I remember there was a kid in my class named Larry Weaver whose dad served in World War II. His dad had brought back/mailed stuff from his service and I always thought those artifacts, including a Luger and a Nazi flag, were the coolest things!
College Professors
When I went to college in 1982 to Western Illinois University, I had the great honor of learning under Larry Balsamo and the late Darrel Dykstra. Both were quite different in their teaching styles and I think I liked that about them. Larry Balsamo was very energetic, always had a story to tell, and he loved the little details he found interesting that no one else did. His Civil War and Reconstruction class is my all-time favorite class. It was hard if you had Larry not to love history because he did so much.
Darrel Dykstra was the opposite of Larry Balsamo. He was quiet, reserved, and meticulous when I learned about Middle East History. His attention to detail and material were some of my favorite of college including a book we had to read called “Guests of the Sheik.”
Fifteen years later, I had the pleasure of taking a class in grad school at NIU with the late Jordan Schwarz. Dr. Schwarz was a huge Cubs fan, but he taught me a lot about writing history. After the class ended, I played golf with him several times and all we talked about was the Cubs…nothing else. I have enough Andy Pafko stories to last me a lifetime.
Another professor who had a huge impact on my career was Bruce Field, now at South Carolina. Bruce engaged me to write the proper lesson plan (he would later speak at my wedding as he was friends with my wife before I met my wife). Later, Carla Shaw of NIU tapped into my creative side to get me to create my own teaching models/style for history. She had a huge influence on how I teach. Later, she would be my initial doctoral adviser before her retirement. She Skyped into my oral defense. I was really touched.
The Family
My older brother Mark had some influence on me when it comes to being an historian. He is five and half years older but he always used to have models he constructed of the space program. There used to be models of a Saturn V rocket, the lunar lander and the capsules on his shelf. I found them so interesting. I tended to build model battleships/aircraft carriers. But when he left for college in 1976, I had the bedroom to myself and one of the first things I did was to research the space program including each astronaut and Apollo mission.
My parents probably had the biggest role in me becoming an historian. In the early 1970s, they bought a set of encyclopedias and a set of World Book Year Books. They would keep adding the Year Books until I graduated. I found them fascinating and even read them throughout college. Having moved several times in my youth and young adulthood, the yearbooks were like my best friends as I read them constantly to find out what happened before I had memories, and to gather more data about what events I did remember from my youth. As I sit here and watch some football, I also remember using the yearbooks to look back at who won sports championships in those years.
Books on History
Beginning when I was in 5th grade and through my late 40s, I read a lot. It was not until 8th grade that I read my first historically tinged book. It was in 8th grade history class with Kent Crear at Polo Junior High School that I read “All the King’s Men” by Robert Penn Warren and it was stunning! Today, it is still one of my favorite books of all time ( I never did see the Sean Penn movie as I thought there was no way it could match the book). I think the book that got me hooked on history was “Ordeal By Fire (1st Edition)” by James McPherson. I read it when I was junior in college (1984) and I found it totally fascinating. Up to that point in my life, I loved short stories, science fiction, and 19th century literature. From that point on, it was all history for the next few years (along with Science Fiction). Today, I like Doris Kearns Goodwin and her writing style, Michael Beschloss is good, too, along with John Eisenhower, and I can read about the New Deal by Jordan Schwarz anytime.
Thinking about it, I could add baseball cards, being a Cubs and Bears fan, but whatever I get interested in, I learn the history about it. I know these things are what made made me an historian, but what keeps me an historian are the students that I teach. I still enjoy learning about history and sharing it with them. I don’t really consider it teaching, just sharing what I enjoy about the past and how I found it and experience it. In the present, my wife and I rarely plan a vacation unless it involves a historical site or two. In fact, that is my plan for this summer. I plan on going down to Nauvoo to see some Mormon history, over to Hannibal for Mark Twain, and then on to Kansas City for some Negro League Museum stuff. It is who I am. It is what I do. It is what I enjoy.
World War II and Christmas: Transforming Traditions
Many of the Christmas traditions we do today were established DURING World War II.The event truly reshaped how Christmas is celebrated in this country. A lot of the changes happened because of shortages, but even more happened because time and distance separated loved ones.
Early Christmas shopping, for example, began because of the time it took to ship things overseas. Packages sent to soldiers during the war had to shipped by the middle to late of October in order to make it to remote parts of the Pacific by Christmas.
The traditional Christmas tree also saw a transformation. Due to several shortages, the tree was affected by the war in several ways. First, glass ornaments originally made in Japan and Germany were no longer available. Instead, the Corning Glass Company of New York transformed their light bulb machines to make glass Christmas ornaments instead. In addition, ribbons and bows now used also changed because shortages of materials. Most surprising was the change of the tree. Trees and lumber were needed more for the war effort. So, artificial trees soon were produced to fill the gap and many families adjusted to the new tradition. Companies also began making cut out prints of ornaments for families to make from any material they could find in order to save things needed for the war effort.
Most of the songs we sing including “White Christmas,” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” “Let It Snow,” Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” and many more were written in this time period and worked into films during and after the war. Probably the most famous song from Christmas in the war was “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” The sentiments and longings in the lyrics made it an instant holiday classic.
Jim Kushlan, publisher of America in World War II Magazine stated this about the effect the war had on the holiday:
“Many of Baby Boomers [the generation born after the war] are parents or grandparents now. Our nostalgia for the Christmases our parents gave us have shaped our own celebration. In the process, we have given our youngsters memories of Bing on the stereo, piles of gifts under the tree, and the feel of ’40s yuletide. Odds are, that’s what they’ll be nostalgic for.”
The look of Santa during the War has remained constant since the early 1940s.Prior to the war, Santa took the form of the European version of Santa Claus. During the war, Jolly Old Saint Nick got a more American look.
However, some things have changed slightly since then, most notably the food. Here is the menu for what FDR and Churchill had one Christmas. You will notice some familiar items and some not so familiar items.
And this is what the One Hundred First Infantry Battalion had. Notice the oysters, but the turkey and all its trimmings are still there including my favorite, pumpkin pie!
So, as those soldiers came home, loved ones kept the traditions they started during the war and passed them on to their children and their children’s children. World War II truly transformed Christmas in America.
For further reading
http://www.battlegrounds-blog.com/2012/12/christmas-songs-from-world-war-ii.html
John Eisenhower: A Great Historian
Being born the son of Dwight Eisenhower was never easy for John Eisenhower. However, he staked out his own career in the military, and more importantly for me, as a military historian. In 1994, I was writing a 30 page paper of my own for a graduate class. Eisenhower’s book, Intervention, about the Wilson administration in Mexico was the foundation for my research paper. I still remember vividly sitting at the Holmes Student Center at NIU in the spring of 1994 and pouring over each page as it dripped with detail. I still have my notebooks of notes I took just from that one book. I scoured the bibliography to lead me to other sources including State Department memos. It was then I think I truly became a historian. Today, Mr. Eisenhower passed away at the age of 91.
I, for one, think he is one of the most under rated historians of the past 30 years. While Doris Kearns Goodwin, Michael Beschloss, David McCullough, Ken Burns, and Stephen Ambrose have gotten more press in the past 30 years, Eisenhower matched and surpassed them in analysis, research, and acumen when it came to his works.
When most people retire, they slowly fade away to a simpler life. For John Eisenhower, it became the time to follow his passion for history, more specifically, military history. He is best known for The Bitter Woods about the Battle of the Bulge and his classic So Far from God about the Mexican-American War.
Here are a few other works to seek out of his:
Allies: Pearl Harbor to D–Day. Doubleday. 1982.
Agent of Destiny: The Life and Times of General Winfield Scott. Free Press. 1997.
Yanks: The Epic Story of the American Army in World War I. Simon and Schuster. 2001.
Zachary Taylor. Macmillan. 2008.
A Morning in June: Defending Outpost Harry. University of Alabama Press. 2010.
Fred Hampton: An Assassination Gone Wrong
“So we say — we always say in the Black Panther Party that they can do anything they want to to us. We might not be back. I might be in jail. I might be anywhere. But when I leave, you’ll remember I said, with the last words on my lips, that I am a revolutionary. And you’re going to have to keep on saying that. You’re going to have to say that I am a proletariat, I am the people.” ~ Fred Hampton
Not many people today know who Fred Hampton was outside of Chicago. In 1969, not many knew either. At 21 years of age in 1969, Hampton and fellow Black Panther Mark Clark were assassinated by the Chicago Police Department and the FBI. The resulting investigation into their deaths would end careers but also shed light on the dirty tactics of J. Edgar Hoover and the cult of fear in white America surrounding the Black Panther Party.
The Black Panther Party did not begin in Illinois. It migrated there from California. Formed by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland in 1966, the original purpose of the party was to defend itself from police brutality and authority. Their ten point plan (see poster below) called for the taking back of neighborhoods through programs in the community. In White America, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was a cause for major concern as the party itself was an armed group. Photographs of armed black radicals caused the rise of fear in the public eye and in the halls of Washington, mainly the office of J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI. Hoover deemed the group too radical and went as far as calling them terrorists.
For Fred Hampton and many other black youth of the time period, the Black Panther Party attracted youth for their radical ideas of standing up to oppression in black communities. At this time, America was at war in Vietnam and here at home. The Civil Right movement that began in the south in the 1950s and early 1960s fought segregation. By the middle 1960s, the movement had come north but the goals were completely different. The movements in the South had fought for the extinction of the last vestiges of Jim Crow Laws. While in the North, unwritten forms of segregation were evident in housing, jobs, education, and opportunity.
Hampton grew up in Maywood, Illinois, and graduated with honors from Proviso East High School in 1966. He was a scholar and an athlete and dreamed of playing for the New York Yankees. In 1967, Hampton was arrested for allegedly robbing a Good Humor Ice Cream truck of $71. The case would take two years to get to trial.
In 1967 and 1968, Hampton was an organizer for the NAACP recruiting over 500 people to join the ranks. In addition, he tried to create more recreational areas for youth in the city. A pre-law major at Triton Junior College, Hampton was well aware of the brutality of the day as he and fellow NAACP would often follow police on their rounds to find instances of police brutality in the community. The non-violent structure of the NAACP was not enough for Hampton. He wanted something more.
In 1968, Fred Hampton joined the Black Panther Party. He rose quickly through the ranks. Hampton was a charismatic young leader. He was knowledgeable, well read, and commanded the microphone. He brokered peace deals between rival street gangs, and additionally coalesced several student and civil rights groups into what he called “the rainbow coalition” years before Jesse Jackson and Operation PUSH.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHzSdniqi4g
In 1969, Hampton ascended to be the head of the Black Panther Party in Chicago. With that title came scrutiny from within Chicago and Washington. The FBI actually opened a file on Hampton beginning in 1967. By 1969, the file was 4000 pages long. But as a Panther, Hampton’s so called “radical” activities included: starting a People’s Medical Clinic, education classes, a free breakfast program, police oversight, and holding weekly rallies in the community to raise awareness and inform the public. 
Throughout 1968 and 1969, leaders in this new era of the Civil Rights movement wound up either in dead or in jail. Some groups even fragmented. Hampton’s mentor, Bob Brown left to start a new group with Bobby Seale. Hampton knew his days as a free man were numbered. Hampton’s previous arrest from 1967 finally saw the inside of courtroom in May of 1969. He was found guilty and sentenced to 2-5 years. Hampton got out a $25,000 appeal bond.
Throughout 1969, confrontations between Chicago Police and the Black Panther Party grew with deaths on both sides. With urging from J. Edgar Hoover, the Chicago Police and the FBI stepped up their surveillance on Hampton, his new girlfriend, and their living arrangements. The FBI had grown tired of Hampton and saw him as a threat to stability. They got a warrant to search his apartment for weapons and were hoping to put him away on that charge since the burglary charge had not stuck yet. The FBI even had an informant, William O’Neal, infiltrate the organization. The night before the raid, O’Neal put a chemical substance into Hampton’s food and drink so that Hampton would be unconscious when the raid began in the morning.
December 4, 1969, the Chicago Police entered Hampton’s apartment expecting to find 20 Black Panther Party members in residence. Only Clark and Hampton were there. They were soon killed. The amount of fire power used to kill the two men was overwhelming and overpowering creating a bloodbath. State’s Attorney Edward Hanrahan claimed that Hampton and Clark fired first citing two holes near a door as evidence. They later turned out to be nails.
Hampton’s girlfriend, Deborah Johnson, who was present, describes the carnage and how the raid took place
“Someone came into the room, started shaking the Chairman, said, “Chairman, Chairman, wake up. The pigs are vamping.” Still half asleep, I looked up, and I saw bullets coming from, it looked like, the front of the apartment, from the kitchen area. They were — pigs were just shooting.
And about this time, I jumped on top of the Chairman. He looked up. Looked like all the pigs had converged at the entranceway to the bedroom area, back bedroom area. The mattress was just going — you could feel bullets going into it. I just knew we’d be dead, everybody in there. When he looked up, just looked up, he didn’t say a word. He didn’t move, except for moving his head up. He laid his head back down, to the side like that. He never said a word. He never got up off the bed.
The person who was in the room, he kept hollering, “Stop shooting! Stop shooting! We have a pregnant woman, a pregnant sister in here!” At the time I was eight-and-a-half, nine months pregnant. My baby was to be delivered in two weeks. Pigs kept on shooting. So I kept on hollering out. Finally, they stopped.
They pushed me and the other brother by the kitchen door and told us to face the wall. Heard a pig say, “He’s barely alive. He’ll barely make it.” I assumed they were talking about Chairman Fred. Then they started shooting. The pigs, they started shooting again. I heard a sister scream. They stopped shooting. Pig said, “He’s good and dead now.” The pigs were running around laughing. They was really happy, you know, talking about Chairman Fred is dead. I never saw Chairman Fred again.”
The police claimed they were fired upon twice by the Black Panthers and as a result, used excessive force to “protect and defend” themselves.
In the community, cries of a coverup and a conspiracy began as soon as the news hit the street. Hanrahan claimed,
“The immediate, violent, 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 the police officers when urged to do so several times.”
Hanrahan had been seen as an up and comer in the Daley Administration and the Democratic Party. His cover up of the investigation would result in the downfall of his political career and a Republican, in Chicago of all places, winning the next election for State’s Attorney. This newspaper article details some of the actions Hanrahan took in the cover up of the assassinations of Clark and Hampton.
No one was ever convicted for the crime of killing Hampton and Clark. In 1971, a raid in Pennsylvania on a FBI office there uncovered documents about O’Neal’s role in the assassination and the lengths the FBI went to in order to take Hampton. O’Neal later killed himself, despondent over his role in the assassinations.
In 1983, a civil suit ended with $1.8 million being awarded to the victim’s families.
Author and Hampton family lawyer Jeffery Haas states the assassination marked a turning point in politics between blacks and whites in Chicago:
Well, I think, for one thing, it marked the independence of the black political leaders in Chicago, who had, up until then, had been pretty much lackeys of the mayor and the Democratic machine. And a young congress — a young state senator named Harold Washington spoke out, and Danny Davis spoke out, and Jesse Jackson welcomed Bobby Rush. And all of a sudden you had an independent and much more progressive black political machine, or part of the machine, that was independent. And I think that group and white liberals were given credit for eventually electing Harold Washington mayor, as Chicago’s first black mayor.
Chicago and the Black Panther Party have never been the same since. Deborah Johnson (now called Akua Njeri) gave birth to Fred Hampton, Jr. a few weeks after the raid.
For Further Reading
Jeffrey Haas: The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther
Other Sources
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/12/4/the_assassination_of_fred_hampton_how
Chicago Tribune Newspaper Articles
Court Orders New Autopsy of Hampton; Chicago Tribune; Feb 7, 1970
Koziol, Ronald: Panther Slayings Split the City Into Name Calling’ Factions; Chicago Tribune, Dec 14, 1969
Lee, Edward: Hanrahan Backs Police; Gunfight Probe Urged: Praises Judgment: Chicago Tribune, Dec 9, 1969
O’Brien, John: ‘Let U. S. Probe Killing’–Hanrahan: Negro Lawyers Demand Action; Chicago Tribune, Dec 12, 1969
Hanrahan Actions Reviewed: Chicago Tribune, Nov 6, 1970
WHY JUDGE JAILED BLACK PANTHER AID: He Saw Hampton as ‘Dangerous’: Chicago Tribune, Dec 12, 1969
For Further Viewing
Picture of the Day
I guess this means I will have to do a review..but I’ll be happy to do so!
