The Black Panthers: Making Sense Of History
Exhibition Opens on April 23, 2010
DuSable Museum of African American History
April 1, 2010
http://www.dusablemuseum.org/news/the-black-panthers-making-sense-of-history-exhibition-opens-on-april-23-201/

The Black Panther Party was a progressive political
organization that stood in the vanguard of the most
powerful movement for social change in America. It was
the sole Black organization in the entire history of the
Black struggle against slavery and oppression in the
United States that was armed and promoted a
revolutionary agenda and it represented the last great
thrust by a mass of Black people for equality, justice
and freedom. The DuSable Museum of African American
History will present a new traveling exhibition, "The
Black Panthers: Making Sense of History," which will
open on Friday, April 23, 2010 and continue through
Sunday, August 8, 2010, at the Museum which is located
at 740 East 56th Place (57th Street and South Cottage
Grove Avenue) in Chicago.

At the core of the exhibition are forty-eight (48)
original photographs taken by Black Panther photographer
Stephen Shames. The exhibition will also feature
numerous historic Black Panther artifacts from private
collections in addition to the DuSable Museum archives,
including works of art, posters and other unique items
that help illustrate the history of one of the most
controversial groups of the Modern Civil Rights
Movement.

In the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, Huey P.
Newton and Bobby Seale founded the legendary Black
Panther Party, in 1966, in Oakland, California. The
Party, revered by some and vilified by others, burst
onto the scene with a revolutionary agenda for social
change and the empowerment of African Americans. Its
methods were controversial and polarizing, so much so
that in 1969, FBI head J. Edgar Hoover described the
organization as the country's greatest threat to
internal security. In April 1967, Stephen Shames, a
college student at the University of California at
Berkeley, met the Panthers at a rally to end the war in
Vietnam. He was invited to photograph them and continued
to do so until 1973. His close friendship with the
Panthers, and Seale in particular, gave Shames unusual
access to the organization, allowing him to capture not
only the public face of the Party--street
demonstrations, protests, and militant posturing--but
also unscripted behind-the-scenes moments, from private
meetings held in the Party headquarters, to Bobby Seale
at work on his mayoral campaign in Oakland.

Stephen Shames is an award-winning photographer and
social activist whose photographs on social issues have
been published in numerous major publications and are in
the permanent collections of the International Center of
Photography, New York; National Portrait Gallery,
Washington, D.C.; Museum of Photographic Arts, San
Diego; University of California's Bancroft Library,
Berkeley; and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He has
received awards from Kodak (Crystal Eagle for Impact in
Photojournalism), World Hunger Year, Leica,
International Center of Photography, and the Robert F.
Kennedy Journalism Foundation. Shames is one of ten
photographers featured in Tipper Gore's book on
homelessness, The Way Home.

"The Black Panthers: Making Sense of History," at the
DuSable Museum, is curated by Charles E. Bethea. The
National Advisory Committee includes: David Hilliard,
William Jennings (Bill X) and Yvonne King, Ph.D. The
Community Exhibition Advisory Committee includes: Carol
L. Adams, Ph.D., Ron Carter, W. E. Dunbar, Fred Hampton,
Jr., Njeri Hampton, William Hampton, Tracye Matthews,
Ph.D., Attorney James Montgomery, Barbara Ransby and
Congressman Bobby Rush.

The Chicago presentation of "The Black Panthers: Making
Sense of History," is made possible by Aperture-a non-
profit foundation dedicated to advancing photography in
all its forms. Additional support has been provided by:
the Chicago Park District; the Illinois Arts Council, a
state agency; Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs
CityArtsIII, WVON-AM Radio; and United Airlines, the
official airline of the DuSable Museum.

Note: Some portions of the exhibit reflect adult
language.

The DuSable Museum of African American History is open
Monday through Saturday from 10:00 Am until 5:00 PM and
Sunday from 12:00 Noon until 5:00 PM. Admission is $3
for adults, $2 for students and senior citizens,$1 for
children ages 6 through 12, and children under the age
of 6 are free. Sundays are FREE to all. The Museum may
be reached by CTA buses #3, #4 and #55 and free parking
is also available on the premises.

Fred Hampton's Legacy
Comment
By Jeffrey Haas
The Nation
November 24, 2009
This article appeared in the December 14, 2009 edition
of The Nation. 
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091214/haas

December 4 marks the fortieth anniversary of the raid on
a Black Panther apartment in which Chicago police shot
and killed Fred Hampton in his bed. Hampton was the
charismatic young chairman of the Chicago Black Panther
Party, and under his leadership the party's membership
and influence had increased dramatically. The party had
instituted a popular and expanding Breakfast for
Children Program and a police accountability project. At
the age of 21, Hampton was able to reach and influence
gang members and welfare mothers as well as college and
law students. Under his tutelage, the Panthers formed a
coalition with Puerto Rican and white activists.

The response of the Chicago police and the ambitious
Cook County state's attorney, Edward Hanrahan, the
likely political heir to then-Mayor Richard J. Daley,
was to harass and arrest the Panthers as often as
possible. The police even opened fire on Panther
headquarters.

Six hours after the predawn raid on Hampton's apartment,
conducted by fourteen Chicago policemen armed with
shotguns, handguns, a rifle and a .45-caliber submachine
gun, Hanrahan went on TV to give the police version. He
claimed the Panthers, and Hampton in particular, had
opened fire on the police, who he said were innocently
serving a search warrant for weapons, and that the
Panthers continued firing despite several police
attempts at a cease-fire.

I was the first person to interview the survivors in the
police lockup, where Hampton's crying and pregnant
fiancée told me that after she was pulled from the room,
police came in and fired two shots into Hampton and
said, "He's good and dead now." The autopsy showed he
had been shot twice in the head at point-blank range. My
colleagues went to the raid scene, examined the bullet
holes and found that the trajectory of all the bullets
except one was from the direction of the police toward
the Panthers. Later, an FBI firearms expert testified
that more than eighty shots were fired by the police at
the Panthers, with only one coming from a Panther. That
one shot was fired in a vertical direction by a falling
Mark Clark after he had been fatally wounded.

Two years after the murder, antiwar activists raided the
FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and found and
distributed documents that demonstrated that FBI chief
J. Edgar Hoover was conducting a secret war on the
left--the Counterintelligence Program, or Cointelpro.
Its most aggressive and lethal tactics were used against
the black movement, and the Panthers in particular.
Cointelpro mandated FBI agents in cities with Panther
chapters to "cripple," "disrupt" and "destroy" the
Panthers and their breakfast program and to prevent the
rise of a "messiah" who could unify and electrify the
black masses.

In 1969 I was a young, newly radicalized lawyer, one of
the founders of a collective called the People's Law
Office, which represented the Panthers. After
successfully defending the survivors of the raid against
bogus criminal charges, we filed a civil rights suit
against the police and the prosecutor, and later the
FBI. My book The Assassination of Fred Hampton
chronicles our long legal and political struggle to
uncover the truth about the FBI's role in the killing.
After thirteen years of litigation, we proved that the
raid was a Cointelpro operation. FBI agents in Chicago
gave Hanrahan and the Chicago police a floor plan of
Hampton's apartment, which included the location of the
bed where Hampton would be sleeping. They urged Hanrahan
to conduct the raid and later took credit for it in
internal documents. The FBI informant who provided the
floor plan was given a bonus because his information was
deemed to be of "tremendous value" to what one agent
referred to as the "success" of the raid.

Noam Chomsky has called the murder of Fred Hampton "the
gravest domestic crime of the Nixon Administration." It
is hard to imagine a more serious abuse by a government
than the deliberate assassination of a citizen for his
political beliefs and activity. But though we were
finally able to reveal that Hampton's death had been an
assassination, it has never gotten the attention it
deserves. The government's cover-up and stonewalling
basically worked.

Following Watergate and numerous revelations in the
early 1970s about intelligence agencies run amok, the
Senate's Church Committee was formed to investigate such
intelligence abuses as assassination plots and spying on
US citizens [see Christopher Hayes, "The Secret
Government," September 14]. After documenting
Cointelpro's secret and illegal attacks on the left, the
committee sought to guarantee FBI and CIA accountability
by requiring Congressional oversight, including
reporting of intelligence activities. The two strongest
opponents of this oversight in the Ford administration
were the chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, and Rumsfeld's
deputy, Dick Cheney. Together with Antonin Scalia, who
was then head of the Justice Department's Office of
Legal Counsel, they persuaded Ford to veto legislation
expanding the Freedom of Information Act to cover
intelligence documents. Fortunately Congress overrode
the veto.

Three decades later we are watching history repeat
itself. In the 1960s the enemy was domestic dissent;
today the enemy is international terrorism. In both
cases, however, the right used fear to increase the
powers of police and government agencies to operate in
secret and with impunity. Cheney and Rumsfeld used 9/11
to beat back Church Committee restrictions on
intelligence activities and reporting requirements. They
encouraged intelligence agencies to spy on US citizens
and to ignore international and US law forbidding
torture and kidnapping.

In 1978 the Justice Department argued that FBI
operatives were immune from liability for killing
Hampton because they were carrying out government
policy. An incredulous Judge Swygert asked the US
Attorney if he thought they would be immune if they had
given the police a gun and told them to murder Hampton.
The government retreated from the "good German" defense
at that point. In our own day, Attorney General Eric
Holder has appointed a special prosecutor to look into
the acts of torture carried out by CIA officers amid
claims they are immune because they were carrying out
government policy.

One lesson we should learn from the Hampton case is that
although it's important to put strong legal limitations
on what police and intelligence agencies are permitted
to do, that is not enough to prevent abuses. What's
required is accountability, in the form of criminal
prosecution, not only for those who carry out criminal
policies but for those who formulate them. Thus far
Holder's investigation is limited to those who carried
out the policy of torture and may have exceeded its
carefully hedged strictures. But the investigation we
really need will look at the policy itself, which by all
appearances was a criminal conspiracy by Cheney,
Rumsfeld and a group of administration lawyers to
subvert the Constitution.

Fred Hampton's legacy should be our continued vigilance
against government crimes and secrecy and our demand
that officials be held responsible and criminally liable
when they violate the law. This is about deterrence and
equal justice, not revenge.

Jeffrey Haas Jeffrey Haas, a civil rights attorney, is
the author of The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the
FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther,
published in November [2009].

_____________________________________________



for more of my work please go to:

http://www.redroom.com/author/rodney-d-coates


The man who has no imagination has no wings. 
Muhammad Ali


Rodney D. Coates
Professor


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