Witness to the Revolution

by Clara Bingham

  At some point I felt like I became Viet Cong. My allegiance had switched. I thought, I would rather be with these people and lose, than be an American and win. And that’s when I realized that I was no longer an American. I was really a citizen of the world.

  I was of the opinion that any kind of demonstration against the war was important, but I just didn’t feel it was going to go anywhere. The war could carry on, and the demonstrations would be ignored. They could do that for the next ten years and it’d be the same thing. I had no problem with the demonstrations, they were my brothers and sisters out there, but I realized that I was in a very special place, because I didn’t have a family of my own and I wasn’t tied up in corporate America. I didn’t have a job. I felt like I wasn’t risking anything. I was a free actor, and I had a responsibility. I decided I would remove all the obstacles in front of me in order to help bring this war to an end.

  Credit 14.1

  One of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s several anti-Vietnam War campaigns, this Christmas 1969 message was posted on billboards in a number of American cities and London.

  DECEMBER 4, CHICAGO: FRED HAMPTON

  MARK RUDD (Weathermen leader)

  When Fred Hampton was murdered on December 4,*1 it confirmed our whole strategy, which was that a war was taking place already, and we’d better get ready to respond to it.

  BERNARDINE DOHRN (Weathermen leader)

  Fred Hampton had talked to his friends and to his mom about being a lawyer. He had Bill Kunstler’s book by his bed. He was one of those absolutely charismatic, magnetic people. He was young, twenty-one, but had a great sense of people, and a theatrical ability to make gestures that were very powerful—for example, commandeering ice cream trucks in the summer for kids, and then getting arrested for it. Even in his high school days with the NAACP he did things like demand access to segregated swimming pools on the west side of Chicago.

  By the time I knew him he was saying, “I’m high on the people. I’m high on freedom,” and he’d become the chairman of the Black Panther Party here in Chicago. We shared a printing press with the Panthers. They were down the block from us. We agreed about some things and disagreed about other things, but they knew us pretty well and we knew them pretty well. We had an intense relationship with the Panthers; we saw them all the time.

  Credit 14.2

  Charismatic and eloquent, the chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, Fred Hampton, was perceived as a particular threat to the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover because he appealed to both white and black leftists.

  FRED HAMPTON (1969 speech)

  A lot of people don’t understand the Black Panther Party’s relationship with white mother country radicals….What we’re saying is that there are white people in the mother country that are for the same types of things that we are for stimulating revolution in the mother country. And we say that we will work with anybody and form a coalition with anybody that has revolution on their mind.*2

  BERNARDINE DOHRN

  I knew the National Lawyers Guild people and the People’s Law Office people very well, so on December 4, when Fred was murdered, they immediately took charge of the situation and seized the crib—as the apartment was called—door for evidence of bullet holes. We, the Panther Party survivors, and the People’s Law Office responded in a way that kind of reenacted the murder of Emmett Till—with a massive, public, visual look at what the police had done. And of course the police and the FBI—who we now know conspired to murder him—were both on the scene, and participants.

  Credit 14.3

  On December 5, 1969, Fred Hampton, age twenty-one, was gunned down in his sleep in a predawn raid by the Chicago police with help from the FBI. Hampton’s colleague Mark Clark was also killed in the raid. The police claimed they acted in self-defense, but an investigation revealed that they fired ninety shots to the Panthers’ two.

  ERICKA HUGGINS (Black Panther Party member)

  When Fred Hampton was murdered, I knew immediately, even though I was incarcerated at the time,*3 that Fred did not die just at the hands of the police officers that invaded his home. It was a setup, and later it was proven that it was set up—that he was drugged. He was killed in his sleep in the middle of the night by the police who arrived in borrowed Chicago Phone Company trucks. So it was orchestrated. J. Edgar Hoover, who was the head of the FBI for forty-seven years, created COINTELPRO as the counter​intelli​gence program. You can read their mission online. I wish I was making it up; I wish it hadn’t occurred. But the fear that is at the root of racism will prompt people who have that fear to do very inhumane things.

  Fred was an amazing human being. He was very dedicated to working with all communities. If you just listen to him and just watch him on video, you’ll see why J. Edgar Hoover wanted him dead.

  FBI surveillance and harassment was something we were all used to. Our phones were tapped and we were followed all the time. They would leave notes on our car windows threatening us, “Hi John, hi Ericka. We’re watching you.” Every night when we would leave the party office in South Central, unmarked police cars would shine their floodlights on the windows and the doors of the office. This is how we left the office every night. We got used to it. I always remember that whole period in Los Angeles as living in a state of war. But we weren’t warring; something was warring against us.

  VIVIAN ROTHSTEIN (SDS organizer)

  I was organizing high school kids. They were all white, living in Berwyn and Cicero—very right-wing white communities in the Chicago suburbs. I got to know Fred Hampton in Maywood, where he was head of the NAACP chapter, and I invited him to come and talk to the students. These kids’ parents were so racist; they’d never talked to a black person before. Fred would sit with them for a whole evening and talk to them. He was so warm and understanding and charismatic. They fell in love with him. He was just wonderful.

  When he was killed, I took the students that I was working with to where his body lay in state in a Baptist church in Chicago. It was this incredible scene. The kids I worked with knew him before he was this big public figure. He was lying in state with a rifle by his side in the coffin, and beads, and the Black Panther Party newspaper. All these Black Panthers were standing guard around the coffin with their berets and their black leather jackets. I was with a group of white girls and we stood in line for hours, and then we finally went by his casket. I almost passed out in his casket because I’m Jewish and we don’t do viewings. But it was quite an experience having this gaggle of young teenage white girls going through a black church with all of these Panthers around, and they all loved Fred, so they were all crushed.*4

  Credit 14.4

  A young boy holding a copy of the Black Panther newspaper listens to Black Panther leader Fred Hampton speaking at the bandshell in Grant Park, Chicago, 1969.

  CATHY WILKERSON (Weathermen member)

  When Fred Hampton was killed it felt like the police were going to end democracy in the United States. It also felt like the warmongers, the “U.S. must rule the world” people, and anti-women and anti-black leadership of the country were going to win and solidify control. We were young. We were in a complete panic. It was pretty scary.

  MARK RUDD

  When the Panthers came along, and they were carrying guns and spouting “by any means necessary,” and the government reacted by taking them seriously, and murdering them, we said, “It’s war. And we’ve got to be out there, and not just applauding from the sidelines.” See, there’s always a tendency for white people to hold back and applaud from the sidelines, but we identified that as being racist, to not take any risks. We didn’t want to be liberals. To be a liberal was to be a hypocrite, and to be a betrayer. So part of our thinking was, Which side are you on? “Avenge Fred Hampton!” became our battle cry.

  Black power then became an enormous challenge to white kids. Would we be good Germans? Would we be racist and ignore what’s happening? Or would we support the people who are fighting and taking the
risks? That became the challenge for the Weathermen. Most young whites don’t understand the extent of the challenge that the black movement posed to the Weather Underground, and to the movement.

  MICHAEL KAZIN (Harvard SDS leader)

  The Panthers saw themselves as urban guerrillas. I mean, the whole carrying guns and taking them to the statehouse in Sacramento and taking on the police—they saw themselves as being in an almost fascist country. Huey Newton used to say, “If the pigs are going to act like Nazis, we’re not going to act like Jews.” Which, you know, for a Jew like me, made me feel a little strange. But I understood what he meant. If you didn’t have the Panthers on your side, then you were doing something wrong, because they were the black vanguard.

  BERNARDINE DOHRN

  It took seven more years to prove it in the court case Iberia Hampton v. Hanrahan, which the People’s Law Office represented. I always tell my law students Fed Supp. 600 is one of the most astonishing cases you’ll ever read, because the federal appellate court found that there was a conspiracy to murder Fred Hampton, and then an elaborate cover-up and the FBI and the Chicago Police Department had lied and withheld documents ordered by the court and had an informer present inside the Panthers who had given them a map of the apartment where Fred and his wife were sleeping. So it was a deliberate assassination. But we knew that; we assumed that from the beginning.*5

  JULIUS LESTER

  (writer, photographer, civil rights activist)

  It’s very interesting, the different reactions of whites and those of us who were in SNCC had to the murder of Fred Hampton. Our feeling at SNCC was that the rhetoric of the Panthers led to his death. The Panthers had this rhetoric of violence, and if it’s one thing that white America knows, it’s violence. You don’t challenge somebody on their strength. So you don’t get violent with white America, because they’re itching to kill you. Our feeling was that Fred Hampton did not have to die. That was the Panthers’ doing. So our response was very different than the response of SDS. The other deaths of the Panthers were senseless as far as we were concerned. You don’t challenge white policemen with guns; they’re eager to kill you.

  WESLEY BROWN

  (draft resister, Black Panther member)

  After Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were assassinated, I realized that I had implicated myself in the kind of rhetoric that could bring about my own undoing. We [the Panthers] got revved up in a frenzy of rhetoric and began to believe our own bullshit about revolutionary change. Huey Newton*6 famously called it “revolutionary suicide.” And so I think all of us had to acknowledge that we were in some ways collaborating in a presentation of ourselves in a flamboyant way that would bring the very thing that we said is going to happen, to us. And then we were surprised when they believed what we said we were trying to do. I didn’t even know if I believed it. I had to examine if what I was doing had contributed to an ongoing struggle for people to better the circumstances of their lives, and where that becomes less the issue, and more about whether you are going to try to kill the police, or bring revolution to the streets.

  To what end is it going to serve if I get up in the face of authorities where the pushback can be lethal? What does that achieve if confrontation and escalation of confrontation is the primary strategy to get attention for things that need to be paid attention to? So that’s what I had to ask myself.

  FBI REPORT

  December 6, 1969: Several Chicago Police cars parked in a precinct parking lot at 3600 North Halsted Street, Chicago, were bombed. No suspects have been developed in this matter and no organization claimed credit until almost five years later when the WUO [Weather Underground Organization] admitted that it was responsible in their book “Prairie Fire.” The WUO stated that they had perpetrated the explosion to protest the shooting deaths of Illinois Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark on December 4, 1969, by police officers.

  DECEMBER 6, NORTHERN CALIFORNIA: ALTAMONT

  PETER COYOTE (Digger, communard)

  The story of Altamont is that Sam Cutler,*7 the manager of the Rolling Stones, came to Peter Berg*8 and myself, because we were known for throwing these huge parties, where there was no violence, no trouble, no nothing. The reason there was no violence and no trouble was because we never made the concerts hierarchical—there was never one stage, there were multiple stages. If you throw a party for the summer solstice, everyone is equal under the sun, so what’s to fight about? You can be exactly who you want to be. You’re not taking anything away from anybody.

  Peter and I both said the Rolling Stones are not an occasion for a party. There will be one stage, the Stones will own it, and everyone else will be the audience. That’s not the spirit of San Francisco. We’ll have a party, we’ll have six stages, and the Rolling Stones can have one of them. We’ll give everybody redwood trees to plant and yards of silk and this and that, and come up with a party. And Sam said, “Oh, no, we can’t do that for the Rolling Stones.”

  We also knew by that time that the Rolling Stones were going to make a documentary, so it’s not a free concert.*9 The audience was going to be extras. So free doesn’t mean there’s no admission ticket. Free means the audience are co-creators of the event. You don’t need security. You only need security when there’s a treasured space that has to be kept clear of everybody else. So the idea of bringing in the Hells Angels*10 was a terrible mistake. We said, wrong place, wrong time, there’s going to be trouble, and none of us went, and there was trouble.

  Credit 14.5

  Billed as “the Woodstock of the West,” the Altamont Speedway Free Festival in Alameda County, California, drew three hundred thousand fans on December 6, 1969, to see Santana, Jefferson Airplane, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and the Rolling Stones.

  PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT ALTMAN.

  GREIL MARCUS (Rolling Stone music critic)

  I went to Altamont, December 6, with a couple of friends, but I went there as a Rolling Stone writer, to write about it. We drove to the Altamont Speedway in Northern California and got there with no problem. Somehow we missed all of these horrible traffic jams. We knew that the Hells Angels were going to be there providing security. You could tell from the minute you got there—it was quite early, nine in the morning—that the crowd was angry, unfriendly, and pushy. Nobody made room for you—and that was before the Hells Angels started beating people up.

  There was this big Hispanic guy, probably six four, very fat, and he took off all his clothes and started dancing. This is right in front of the stage where I was sitting. And he was acting like, “Oh, we’re all free, and I’m dancing to the music, and I’m full of enthusiasm,” but people began to move away because he was trampling people. So the Hells Angels leaped out and started beating him, and they beat him to the ground, and kept beating him. The crowd just immediately clears this huge area. They finally drag him backstage and the crowd comes back like some gigantic insect colony. From that day on it was just ugly. And it was angry. And it was mean, and there were a lot of crazy fucked-up people there.

  The Hells Angels killed Meredith Hunter [who was black], because he was right at the front of the stage with his white girlfriend, and they didn’t like that, and they jumped off the stage and started chasing him and beating him. He was stabbed before he pulled a gun out, but he did pull a gun.

  MICHAEL RANDALL (Brotherhood of Eternal Love acid dealer)

  I was at Altamont. I left before all that happened. You could’ve been there and not known it was going on. It was really huge, three hundred thousand people. I was there for the music, but I had a meeting that I had to go to and one hundred and twenty million doses of acid to sell all over America, so I was busy.

  Credit 14.6

  The Rolling Stones (lead singer Mick Jagger, left) stopped playing “Under My Thumb” when the Hells Angels, who were providing security for the concert, stabbed Meredith Hunter to death.

  PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT ALTMAN.

  GREIL MARCUS

&
nbsp; For all of us involved, we understood it as the end of something, as this overwhelmingly symbolic end of so much that we had believed in and invested ourselves in. And it just so happened that the Rolling Stones had put out an album at that time, Let It Bleed, and the album was about the end of the sixties. That was its explicit subject. “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”—what an ultimate anti-sixties thing to say. That song and “Gimme Shelter” were about the moral collapse of the counterculture, just to put it in a nutshell.

  When they were playing “Gimme Shelter” at Altamont, which was in the middle of their set, I was pushed off the stage, and later I was on top of the VW van behind the stage when the van collapsed. I could tell that something terrible was happening, because you heard screaming, and you heard Keith Richards berating the Angels, and Mick Jagger pleading with them. I said, “The hell with it,” and I left. I started walking away in the dark to go back to my car. At one point I tripped, because it was pitch dark. I was lying on the ground and I could hear them playing “Gimme Shelter,” which at that point I’d heard on the record, and had been overwhelmed by. I heard them playing it and I thought I’d never heard anything sound as good as this sounds. It was so powerful.