In February, the biographical film “Judas and the Black Messiah” was released. The film focuses on the events and betrayal leading up to the death of Fred Hampton (portrayed by Daniel Kaluuya).
Fred Hampton was the chairmen of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party who was assassinated while he slept in his home in December of 1969.
Before viewing the movie, I had very briefly learned about Hampton in history classes, but I was not aware of the details of his death or the law suit that followed the shooting. As I watched the film, I was struck with how similar the portrayal was to another shooting that happened.
March 13 will mark the one year anniversary since Breonna Taylor was shot in her home.
The shootings of Taylor and Hampton have some shocking similarities.
The first and foremost being that both parties were killed in their homes. Hampton had been drugged, and originally was wounded in the shoulder before having two shots fired at him that ultimately killed him. Taylor was hit six times by officers who fired their guns in her home, killing her.
The second similarity that I learned about was that in both shoot outs, the people in each respective household only shot one shot.
Mark Clark was on security duty when the officers entered Hampton’s home and his gun discharged once, but there are varying accounts of when the gun went off. Kenneth Walker fired one shot when he thought the officers entering his and Taylor’s home were intruders, injuring one of the officers.
The third similarity is that both of these shooting resulted in lawsuits that ended in payments to the families of the victims. In 1982, a settlement of $1.85 million was reached for the survivors and family members of Hampton and Clark, and in September of 2020, a settlement of $12 million was reached for Taylor’s family.
The death of Fred Hampton is now regarded as an assassination according to the FBI and he is considered to be a “victim of a COINTELPRO hit” which applies to the series of covert and illegal operations the FBI ran under the Counter Intelligence Program. The program aimed to surveil, discredit and infiltrate American political organizations, such as the Black Panthers.
Following the release of grand jury recordings in the investigation of the Breonna Taylor shooting, multiple news outlets reported that jurors accused Daniel Cameron, the Kentucky Attorney General, and the Louisville Metro Police Department of covering up the actual events leading up to Taylor’s death. The AP News article can be found here: https://apnews.com/article/breonna-taylor-louisville-shootings-kentucky-4936db1c4c4c3844dba1197c89833242
Fifty-one years after Hampton’s murder, Taylor was killed in a strikingly similar way. As the history is portrayed in the film, it’s disturbingly easy to see how little has changed when it comes to the treatment of Black people by police.
