The online angst among white nationalists and other far-right extremists was neck-deep Tuesday following Derek Chauvin’s conviction for the murder of George Floyd.
“God help you if you’re a white male in this anti-white country,” wrote Andrew Torba, founder of the white nationalist-friendly chat site Gab, to his 3.2 million followers.
Many of the reactions were collected by Chuck Tanner at the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, who noted that “the response across the far right and white nationalist movement demonstrated its base lack of compassion and lack of mooring in reality.”
“Does anyone really see a way out except Civil War/secession?” asked Peter Brimelow, founder/publisher of the white-nationalist site VDare, on Twitter. Brimelow quote-tweeted an article he wrote in 2017 predicting that “it will come to blood.”
Michelle Malkin, the so-called “Groyper mommy,” wrote on Telegram: “Chauvin was sacrificed.” Another Groyper figure, America First students head Jaden McNeil, chimed in: “He never stood a chance.”
The police murder of George Floyd added jet fuel to a nationwide push to defund the police. We go to Minneapolis to speak with Kandace Montgomery, co-executive director of Black Visions Collective, about their response to the guilty verdict for former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd and an update on the push to divest from Minneapolis police and invest in communities.
Brett Wilkins, staff writer
Rep. Cori Bush, the amendment’s author, noted that “97 Democrats stood up for our community members who are incarcerated” and vowed to “keep up this fight.”
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
The U.S. tops any other country in the world for its number of prisoners – over 2,300,000. China, by contrast, has roughly 200,000 prisoners. But the U.S. general population is only 330 million, while China’s is 1.4 billion. American prisoners constitute a much larger percentage of the population than those in any other nation. The U.S. has clung to this dubious distinction for decades.
Equaling the Soviet gulag at its height in the 1950s in numbers of prisoners, the U.S. also locks away 61,000 of them in the torture called solitary confinement and 2700 in the terror called death row. These are not the policies and actions of a civilized society. This is barbarism. As long as this continues, any American politician who climbs up on a high horse about government abuse of citizens in another country is a pathetic hypocrite who deserves to be laughed out of public life.
Privatization of prisons has made things worse. Of federal prisoners, 19.1 percent are in private prisons, as are 6.8 percent of those in state prisons. These privately run hellholes turn a profit by jacking up fees for inmates from everything from phone calls to mail to video-conferencing with a lawyer. They also make money by skimping on decent food and proper medicines and have lots of other ingenious ways to squeeze dollars out of their captives. Politically, private prisons are a reactionary force, promoting, naturally, tougher crime laws and longer sentences. Because that’s how they make money – for them, the more prisoners, the better. Private prisons contributed to the 408 percent increase in the U.S. prison population from 1978 to 2014.
Originally, Quakers advanced prisons, as a reform, an alternative to the horrors of corporal and capital punishment. But, as abolitionist Mariame Kaba argues in her new book, We Do This Till We Free Us, prisons became their own kind of nightmare. The introduction quotes Ruth Wilson Gilmore: “We live in the age of human sacrifice.” Prisoners are our human sacrifice: people locked away in tiny cages for decades. In response, Kaba would abolish prisons and the police. She advocates transformative and restorative justice, which would impose consequences on those who harm – such as reparations, public apologies, loss of any position of power or privilege, counseling, etc. – but not destroy them. Kaba writes: “Prison is simply a bad and ineffective way to address violence and crime.”
Unsurprisingly, her prescriptions would necessitate a social and economic revolution, for which Kaba, who is anti-capitalist, has worked for years. “Harm originates from situations dominated by stress, scarcity and oppression,” she writes. “Our punishment system, which is grounded in genocide and slavery and which has continued the functions and themes of those atrocities, can never be made just.”
Like many abolitionists, Kaba drew hope from the George Floyd rebellion last summer and joined those calling for defunding the police. Here’s her list of police “reforms” to be avoided: “1) reforms that allocate more money for the police; 2) reforms advocating for more police; 3) technology-focused reforms; 4) individual dialogues with individual cops funded by tax dollars.” Instead she supports: “1) reparations to victims and families of police violence; 2) decreasing policing and prison funding and redirecting it to other social goods; 3) elected independent civilian police accountability boards with power to investigate, discipline and fire cops and administrators; 4) disarming the police; 5) simplifying dissolving police departments; 6) data transparency (stops, arrests, budgeting, etc.)”
Kaba is against police or prison reform. She does not describe policing as broken, because that reaffirms reform and undercuts abolition. Police kill about 1000 people a year, she notes, but since 2005, there have been only 110 prosecutions of officers who shot people, with convictions in less than 42 cases. But Kaba also notes abolitionists’ successes: removing former Illinois state’s attorney Anita Alvarez; helping to win reparations for torture victims during the reign of “infamous police commander Jon Burge in Chicago – a city that has, over the past two decades, become a hub of abolitionist organizing;” and several campaigns to free women imprisoned for self-defense against sexual abusers.
Women’s right to self-defense against abuse, whether it’s a wife and her husband or a sex worker and a client, is central to Kaba’s thinking. In fact, she titled one chapter, “Organizing to End Sexual Violence Without Prisons.” She describes the abuse survivor’s position thus: “I was hurt. Somebody did it. I want them to know that they did it. I want to see that they have some remorse for having done it.” That’s a far cry from tossing the abuser in a cage for decades, so that by the time he’s free, he’s elderly and unemployable.
But the even deadlier consequence of the current criminal justice approach is that women who defend themselves land in prison. “Prosecuting and incarcerating survivors of violence,” Kaba writes “puts courts and prisons in the same punitive role as their abusers.” Here she reviews several prominent cases, for instance, Cyntoia Brown who, aged 16, “shot and killed Johnny Allen, a 43-year-old Nashville resident who picked her up for sex.” Brown explained she shot him in self-defense. She was “tried as an adult and was convicted of first degree premeditated murder and ‘especially aggravated robbery.’” With concurrent life-sentences, she would have been eligible for parole after 51 years in prison. However, Brown’s case drew much media attention, and she was pardoned. Kaba cites other such cases.
“In 2017, there were 219,000 women in U.S. prisons and jails, most of them poor and of color,” Kaba writes, observing that the incarceration rate for black women is double that for white women. She argues that abuse survivors are systematically punished “for trying to protect themselves and their children,” that it is “hurt people who hurt other people,” and that prison simply should not figure in the equation.
This book recounts terrible stories of women punished for defending themselves, but one, from Florida, presents a very bitter irony: Marissa Alexander fired a warning shot into the air to force her violent husband to back off. For this, she faced 60 years in prison. She would have seemed a likely candidate for Florida’s infamous “stand your ground law” – right? But the judge said no, because she had not demonstrated fear. She was found guilty and sentenced to 20 years in prison. (After three years in prison and two under house arrest, she was released, thanks to a national campaign to free her and to some very effective lawyers.)
One cannot help wondering, had Marissa Alexander been male and white, like George Zimmerman, who shot and killed Trayvon Martin – how would the judge have ruled then? Would he have let her go, like the judge who let Zimmerman off? Because apparently, at least in Florida, what’s self-defense for a man is outright attempted murder for a woman.
Following several nationally publicized police killings of unarmed Black Americans in the United States, Eva L., a fitness instructor who identifies as Black, started to experience what she describes as “immense paranoia.” She would often call in sick, because she feared risking an encounter with police upon leaving her house. She also started to second-guess her and her husband’s decision to have children.
“Seeing Black bodies murdered and physical/emotional violence online and on the news” was a trauma she could no longer bear, Eva says. “I was terrified of bringing a child into the world we live in and experience as Black people. I thought not having kids was a truer sign of love than risk them being harmed by this world.”
A recent study sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania — released just before the anniversaries of the deaths of Eric Garner (2014), Michael Brown (2014), John Crawford (2014), and Philando Castile (2016) — found that there could be millions like Eva, for whom these killings have been a mental health trigger.
Research included data from theMapping Police Violence Projectdatabase for police killings between 2013 and 2016 and information from theBehavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Systemof over 103,000 Black Americans. The results indicate that police killings of unarmed Black Americans are having a population-level impact on the mental health of Black Americans.
According to researchers, the incidents may contribute to 1.7 additional poor mental health days per person every year, or 55 million more poor mental health days every year among Black Americans across the United States. That means the mental health burden for African Americans caused by police killings of unarmed Black victims is nearly as great as the mental health burden associated with diabetes. African Americans have some of thehighest rates of the disease, which contributes annually to 75 million days of poor mental health among them.
African Americansmake up13 percent of the US population but they accounted for 26 percent ofpeople fatally shot by policein 2015 and 2016. While the death of a loved one can be tragic for the family and community of any police-shooting victim regardless of race, the study reveals that there is a deeper trauma for African Americans, related to the victim or not.
Eva started seeing a therapist who diagnosed her as having generalized anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s been two years now, and she admits that her progress toward healing has been slow, yet steady.
Jacob Bor, co-author of the study and assistant professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, says the responses in his social circle to police killings of unarmed Black victims is what interested him in conducting this study. Bor noticed that White people were able to comprehend “the injustice on an intellectual level but did not experience the same level of trauma.”
The study findings confirmed Bor’s personal observations. The research team did not observe spillover mental health effects in White respondents from police killings. It should also be noted that among respondents of either race, there were no spillover effects for police killings of unarmed White people or killings of armed Black people.
The research is essential in considering our own personal experiences, says Bor, adding that the findings speak to the overall “value of different people’s lives.” This society “has a long history of state-sanctioned violence” toward racially marginalized groups, he says.
The mental health sector is only now researching the impact of police brutality, a concern that has affected African Americans for decades. “Clinicians can go through medical school without [gaining] any experience in treating the effects of racism,” Bor says. Studies like his, he adds, can help to create long overdue critical mainstream discussions about the effects of racism on mental health, such as, “How do we in public health, society, and among the clinical and mental health services support people when these incidents occur?” and “Can aprofession dominatedby White providers effectively treat the emotional struggles of ‘living while Black’ in this country?”
According to Bor, these discussions are needed to implement change. “Among many White Americans, there is an empathy gap … and a failure to believe when people of color say ‘this hurts me,’” he says.
Adding to the deficiency of culturally competent therapists, poverty and other formidable socio-economic challenges — also stemming from structural racism — remain steadfast barriers to African Americans accessing mental health care, according to the American Psychological Association.
New York City’s first lady, Chirlane McCray, has also become a passionate advocate for what she describes as a movement for “culturally competent mental health care.”
“When you talk about people of color, who are obviously facing discrimination and legacy of racism and poverty in huge numbers, you are talking about something that is really tough to overcome,” McCray says.
Inadequate care undermines benefits from policies and resources designed to mitigate the burdens of systemic oppression. “Mental illness along with substance abuse disorders are hardship multipliers,” she says. Struggling unsupported with “mental illness can make everything that much harder.”
For example, holding on to affordable housing, staying enrolled in college, and even surviving encounters with law enforcement can be extremely more difficult for those suffering from mental illness or trauma, McCray says. In fact, the mostrecent annual numbersfrom the Washington Post’s database of fatal police-shooting victims indicate that “nearly 1 in 4 of those shot was described as experiencing some form of mental distress at the time of the encounter with police.”
“Mental health is the ultimate intersectional concern,” McCray says. “It is reflected in all of our policies … education, housing, school, relationships.”
In 2015, she and her spouse, Mayor Bill de Blasio, launched Thrive NYC, a $850 million mental healthprogram that incorporates 54 initiatives. Among the program’s several core objectives is the aim to address the stigma around mental illness and increase access to treatment across the city. McCray believes that ThriveNYC’s community focused approach is one of several necessary steps toward reaching historically under served groups.
“Culturally competent care to me is all about trust,” McCray says. “It improves early identification, accessibility, and outcomes.” Also, she says, “People have to be seen.” From her advocacy experience she has observed that “people have to feel that they can turn to someone that they trust.”
Connecting people with the appropriate resources, however, means surmounting many challenges. “There is great deal of work to be done to eliminate the stigma,” McCray says. There is also the matter of affordability and infrastructure. “We’ve never had a well-coordinated mental health system in our country — ever. People who have the money find ways to manage.” She says she wants to fight for everyone to get the resources they need to cope.
Eva recognizes that her path to healing has taken a significant amount of work and support beyond the means of many African Americans. “Access to therapy is a privilege,” she says. “I know that most people can’t afford weekly sessions at $150-plus.” Yet, she adds, “[going through therapy] is the only reason why I’m OK planning for kids at 32.”
Tensions were higher than usual at Donaldson Correctional Facility in Alabama early on the morning of January 30. A couple of days prior, guards had attacked and choked an elderly incarcerated man, Cat Diamond, in the cafeteria under the reportedly false pretense that he had gotten in line for a second meal.
That morning, Robert Earl Council, an incarcerated organizer who is also known as Kinetik Justice, questioned Officer Griffin about the beating, witnesses said. Officer Griffin called for reinforcements and Sgt. “Shakedown” Brown, Sgt. Binder, and Officer Milton liberally maced the area.
They beat Ephan Moore, a Black man who had filed a lawsuit against Sgt. Binder previously, with a meat cleaver, splitting his skull open. Four to five guards stomped Moore while he was unconscious, and then again once he was handcuffed in a wheelchair at the prison’s infirmary.
Witnesses told the Free Alabama Movement, a group organizing against prison slavery and mass incarceration in Alabama, it would be “a miracle” if he survives. His injuries include an orbital and nose fracture, a broken jaw, and two broken hands. He has at least 10 staples in his head, Moore’s cousin told the podcast Abolition Today .
Then, witnesses say the officer unit descended on Kinetik Justice, a well-respected organizer and whistleblower, and beat him with their metal batons as he lay defenseless on the ground. After the attack, at least two other incarcerated people, Wilbert Smith and Detrol Shaw, were badly beaten while the prison was on lockdown.
The aftermath was akin to a scene from a horror film: a tooth, and large puddles and streaks of blood painted across the floor, showing where guards dragged bodies.
Kinetik Justice and Moore were airlifted to the trauma center at UAB Hospital in Birmingham. Worried loved ones staged a protest at the hospital with the demand that officials allow Kinetik Justice’s family in to see him — a demand which has been unmet.
Moore underwent surgery, while Smith and Shaw’s conditions are unknown. Moore and Kinetik Justice have been moved to the Kilby infirmary, where they reportedly are not receiving basic medical care or ice for their wounds.
In a press release, the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) said it called on the FBI to assist in an investigation, and claimed that both guards and incarcerated people sustained injuries.
Nikki Davenport, a prison abolitionist with the support coalition known as the Free Alabama Movement Queen Team and a close friend of Kinetik Justice, told Shadowproof that guards had beaten Kinetik before, but this was the worst incident.
“His eyes are glued shut, he has three broken ribs, and his head is busted open in three places,” Nikki said.
“Because he tends to expose the things [ADOC does] that are dehumanizing, they retaliate on him,” she explained. “Whenever they get a chance. And he doesn’t go about it the wrong way. That’s the thing. He follows their policy. They don’t follow their own policy.”
Kinetik Justice has spent a majority of the last five years in solitary confinement. As a former member of the Free Alabama Movement, he played a key role in organizing work strikes in 2016 and 2018. ADOC put him in solitary and beat him for his involvement.
“He’s just a genuinely good person that everybody cares about, like, you won’t really meet anybody across the state of Alabama in the prison system that has anything negative to say,” Nikki said. “He helps everybody that he came across, teaches them to read, teaches them to write, you know, helps them with their legal work, helps them with whatever they needed help with. That’s just him.”
In 2019, Kinetik helped expose and end a tortuous practice at Limestone Correctional Facility known as “bucket detail,” whereby guards shackled incarcerated people to buckets for days on end in cells without running water until they defecated in the bucket several times. He sued Alabama Department of Corrections employees in September, 2020 for alleged retaliation he faced after speaking out against gambling rings run by a captain and sergeant at Limestone.
He was transferred to Donaldson, a facility with a well-doumented culture of horrific violence, sexual assault, and deliberate indifference toward the needs of incarcerated people.
In October 2019, prison guards at that facility beat 35-year old Steven Davis to death. “They beat him so badly his head was misshapen. He looked like an alien, or a monster,” Davis’ mother said. ADOC never provided her with information about the murder beyond a notification that her son was in the hospital.
In June of last year, guards at Donaldson used ‘Cell Buster,” a potent chemical agent, on Darnell McMillian’s cell while he was on suicide watch. An employee said Darnell yelled that he couldn’t breathe. He died shortly after.
Tommy Lee Rutledge, a man who struggled with mental health issues and spent a majority of the last several decades in solitary confinement, was cooked to death in an overheated cell on December 7. Unable to turn down the heat, he died from hyperthermia when his core body temperature rose to 109 degrees.
The most recent round of beatings follows a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice (DOJ) against ADOC on December 9. The DOJ wrote that Alabama “fails to provide adequate protection from prisoner-on-prisoner violence and prisoner-on-prisoner sexual abuse, fails to provide safe and sanitary conditions, and subjects prisoners to excessive force at the hands of prison staff,” in its prisons for men.
Professor Robert Chase, Associate Professor in the Department of History at Stony Brook and author of We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners Rights in Postwar America, explained how history is repeating itself. From 1965 to 1995, federal courts found eight of the eleven states of the U.S. South — including in Alabama — as having unconstitutional conditions in prisons, he told Shadowproof.
Incarcerated people organized labor strikes, filed a flurry of civil rights lawsuits throughout this period, and, Chase said, “were susceptible to accelerating levels of targeted violence and brutality meant to silence their public outreach campaign for civil and human rights.”
Alabama’s solution, again, is to spend an estimated $3 billion on two new mega-prisons, a move solidified on February 1, when Governor Kay Ivey signed two 30-year leasing contracts with private prison company CoreCivic.
CoreCivic will construct the prisons and serve as the landlord for the government. Such a “public-private partnership” (sometimes called a ‘P3’) allows Alabama to skirt incurring debt in the short-term, but will be substantially more costly for taxpayers in the end.
Advocacy groups quickly criticized Gov. Ivey’s plan. “The ACLU of Alabama condemns Governor Ivey’s reckless decision to put the state of Alabama into a multi-billion-dollar lease to build new prisons, despite overwhelming opposition from community members and state leaders of both parties,” the organization wrote in a statement.
“Prison construction is not and has never been the answer to the unconstitutional conditions in Alabama prisons, and the Department of Justice said as much when it issued the first report in April 2019.”
Nikki isn’t sure what Kinetik will say about the recent assault, but she thinks he will continue struggling. ADOC, she says, should probably expect yet another lawsuit.
In March 1976, we sat in a cavernous Chicago courtroom while FBI agent Roy Martin Mitchell testified in the federal civil rights case that we and our partners at the People’s Law Office had brought on behalf of the families of slain Illinois Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark and the seven survivors of the murderous pre-dawn Chicago police raid on their West Side apartment.
Thanks to the liberation of FBI documents from the Media, Pennsylvania FBI offices, the revelations of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities and our own hotly contested pretrial battles to uncover the truth about the raid, we had been able to document the local FBI’s central role in setting up the raid as part of the Bureau’s secret and highly illegal COINTELPRO Program. This program had previously targeted Black liberation leaders including Malcom X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Elijah Muhammad and the organizations that they led. As the Senate Select Committee would later find in its April 1976 report, the FBI had more recently turned its attention to “destroy[ing] the Black Panther Party.”
Roy Martin Mitchell was an integral member of the Chicago FBI office’s Racial Matters Squad and the control agent for a prized “asset”: informant-provocateur William O’Neal, who was the captain of security of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP). As such, O’Neal had ready access to the local BPP chairman, the dynamic Fred Hampton, who had garnered particular attention from Mitchell, his Racial Matters Squad and the COINTELPRO program.
At the time Mitchell testified, we had documentation of the FBI’s secret role in setting up the raid, including a detailed floor plan of the Hampton apartment — designating the bed on which Hampton would later be slain — that Mitchell and O’Neal had drawn up, and which Mitchell had supplied to the Chicago police raiders and their state’s attorney supervisors, including Cook County State’s Attorney Edward V. Hanrahan, who utilized this invaluable information to execute the murderous pre-dawn raid on December 4, 1969.
We also had obtained two other damning FBI documents: a December 3, 1969, document that claimed the impending raid as a COINTELPRO project, and a post-raid document that set forth the outlines of the conspiracy to cover up the FBI’s involvement in the raid.
Concluding from the Senate report and the liberated media documents that the raid and its coverup had to have been approved and ratified at the highest levels of the Bureau, we had sought, months earlier, to join as defendants in our suit FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Director of Domestic Intelligence William C. Sullivan, and George Moore, who, as boss of the Extremist Section of the Domestic Intelligence Division, had the Black Panther Party directly in his administrative sights. We had also journeyed to Washington to question Sullivan under oath in a pre-trial deposition, but his Department of Justice lawyers thwarted our efforts to probe the Bureau’s knowledge of the raid and COINTELPRO, and our overtly hostile federal trial judge, J. Sam Perry, acted similarly by denying our request for relevant documents and to bring Hoover and his crew on board as defendants.
So it was in March 1976 when Mitchell set about to meticulously slander Hampton and the BPP through the reports of his informant O’Neal. An instinctively cautious witness, Mitchell nonetheless made a crucial mistake, and in the process, revealed that the FBI and its government lawyers had suppressed 200 volumes of FBI files that pertained to Hampton, Clark, O’Neal, the seven survivors of the raid, and the FBI’s cover-up investigation — files that the judge had previously unwittingly ordered produced.
The Court held in no uncertain terms that we had amassed a powerful record of two successive police, prosecutorial and FBI conspiracies.
The government rushed Mitchell off the stand with the judge’s blessing, and, over the next two months, its lawyers produced (several files at a time), the 200 volumes of documents. The files contained a great deal of information relevant to our claims of FBI conspiracy, but the FBI and its government lawyers, perhaps hoping to stave off the inevitable, saved the smoking gun for last: a pair of documents to and from the Bureau in Washington and the Chicago office that were buried in O’Neal’s personnel file and which requested and obtained for O’Neal a $300 bonus for furnishing “a detailed floor plan of the apartment” that “subsequently proved to be of tremendous value” and “was not available from any other source.”
Incredibly, Judge Perry shrugged off the damning government misconduct, refused to grant a mistrial and forced us to continue with the trial as we attempted to read and digest the deluge of documents that we were receiving on a daily basis.
The trial lurched forward for another 15 months, making it the longest civil trial in federal court history. Both of us spent time in the federal lockup for protesting the outrageous rulings of the judge and the blatant misconduct of the defense. After the jury heard 18 months of damning evidence, the judge absolved not only Mitchell, O’Neal and their Chicago bosses, but also State’s Attorney Hanrahan and the 14 raiding cops who fired more than 90 bullets from a machine gun, a rifle, shotguns and handguns at the sleeping Panthers by entering a directed verdict in their favor.
Despite its relevance and our repeated discovery requests, the FBI and its lawyers never produced Mitchell’s personnel file as part of the 200 volumes, nor were we permitted to recall Mitchell to the witness stand in order to question him about the O’Neal bonus document and whether he had also been rewarded for his central role in setting up the raid and subsequently keeping the FBI’s role under wraps.
Thankfully, the litigation did not end with Judge Perry’s baseless and vindictive ruling. We appealed to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which rendered a landmark 70-page opinion on April 23, 1979. The Court of Appeals granted us a new trial, ordered a hearing on the government’s misconduct and absolved us of our contempt citations. The Court held in no uncertain terms that we had amassed a powerful record of two successive police, prosecutorial and FBI conspiracies.
The first conspiracy, which was grounded in the COINTELPRO program and featured Mitchell and O’Neal’s central roles, encompassed the planning of the raid and the raid itself, and was designed, as the Court found, “to subvert and eliminate the Black Panther Party and its members, thereby suppressing … a vital, radical black political organization.” The second conspiracy, which included the post-raid coverup and legal harassment of the plaintiffs, was, as the Court further stated, “intended to frustrate any redress the Plaintiffs might seek and, more importantly, to conceal the true character of the pre-raid and raid activities of the defendants involved in the first conspiracy.”
The newly released file provides the first direct documentation that Sullivan, Moore and even Hoover ratified, celebrated and rewarded O’Neal and Mitchell’s integral roles in the Hampton raid.
We successfully withstood the defendants’ attempt to have the U.S. Supreme Court overturn the Court of Appeals’ decision, and the case was returned to another federal judge for retrial. We pressed for additional FBI documents to join Hoover and Sullivan (both of whom were deceased), as well as Moore and several other high-ranking FBI and Department of Justice officials as defendants, and pursued the misconduct hearing. In order to avoid judicial condemnation of their suppression of the FBI files and, as it later turns out, discovery of additional documentation of the FBI’s role in the raid, the government joined with Cook County and the City of Chicago to settle our case for what was, at that time, the largest police violence settlement in federal court history.
At that point, in 1983, after 13 years of litigation, it seemed as if the historical record was complete and the true narrative of the raid established: Chicago police officers, under the command of the Cook County state’s attorney, and at the behest of the FBI and its COINTELPRO program, targeted BPP leader Fred Hampton, and assassinated him while he lay asleep as part of a murderous pre-dawn raid during which the police fired more than 90 shots that also killed Panther Mark Clark and left several other survivors badly wounded.
And so stood that record, until December 4, 2020, 51 years after the raid, when historian and writer Aaron Leonard received from the FBI a redacted copy of Mitchell’s personnel file in response to his 2015 Freedom of Information Act request.
Involvement of Hoover and FBI Officials
The newly released file, containing several hundred pages of FBI memos and reports, provides substantial evidence that would have contributed significantly to our examination of Mitchell and his Chicago supervisors. It also provides the first direct documentation that Sullivan, Moore and even Hoover were aware of Mitchell and O’Neal’s Black Panther activities; that they ratified, celebrated and rewarded O’Neal and Mitchell’s integral roles in the Hampton raid; and that they were involved in the early stages of the cover-up of the FBI’s involvement. Here is some of the key information contained in the documents:
On June 27, 1969, in apparent recognition of O’Neal’s role in a June 1969 FBI raid of the Chicago BPP offices, Hoover commended Mitchell’s “very capable manner in which [he] performed in a matter of intense interest to the Bureau in the racial field … and for his “effective, skillful guidance of a confidential source who furnished valuable information.”
On November 24, 1969, only days after O’Neal and Mitchell drew up the Hampton floor plan and initiated Mitchell’s plan to convince the Chicago Police Department to execute the raid, Chicago Special Agent in Charge (SAC) Marlin Johnson, who was a defendant in our suit, sent a memo to Hoover’s desk cataloging O’Neal’s important BPP-related activities, and recommending O’Neal for an incentive bonus. O’Neal’s activities are deleted from the document.
On December 2, 1969, while the actual planning for the raid was in its final stages, Bureau Extremist Division Chief George Moore sent a memo to Bureau Director of Domestic Intelligence William Sullivan recommending that Mitchell receive an incentive award for “outstanding performance in the development of a highly productive informant in the Black Panther Party.”
On December 4, 1969, only hours after the pre-dawn raid, the Bureau’s administrative division concurred with Sullivan, Moore and Johnson that the “performance of SA Mitchell in developing and guiding informant merits incentive award” in the amount of $200.
On December 5, 1969, SAC Marlin Johnson “advised informant” (O’Neal) about an unknown topic; the remainder of this paragraph was redacted from the document, but it seems likely that it was to inform O’Neal that Johnson would be recommending him for a $300 bonus. Neither Johnson nor O’Neal ever admitted in sworn testimony that they met or had any discussion with each other on December 5 or any other time.
On December 10, 1969, a memo sent from the personal desk of J. Edgar Hoover to SA Mitchell reads: “I am certainly pleased to commend you and to advise you that I have approved an incentive award in the amount of $200 for your outstanding services in a matter of considerable interest to the FBI in the racial field.… Through your aggressiveness and skill in handling a valuable source he is able to furnish information of great importance to the bureau in this vital area of our operations. I want you to know of my appreciation of your exemplary efforts.”
On December 24, 1969, Mitchell sent an evaluation of O’Neal to Hoover stating, “He has been instrumental in the Chicago Office’s success in handling the Bureau’s interests regarding an extremist party in the nationalist field.”
On November 6, 1970, Hoover provided Mitchell with another $200 incentive award for his handling of O’Neal, stating: “The manner in which you have developed and handled a source of information of great importance to the Bureau in the racial field is certainly commendable.… A great deal of the information which has been furnished by this individual has been of material assistance to the FBI in fulfilling its responsibilities.”
On December 11, 1970, the Chicago FBI office sent a teletype to the FBI director marked “urgent,” which was initialed in Washington by George Moore, and discussed a redacted FBI agent’s (most likely Mitchell’s) potential testimony before a special state grand jury that was investigating the raid. At this point, O’Neal, Mitchell and the FBI’s role in the raid was still highly secret, and the teletype instructed that “any information dealing with [redacted]” — most likely the FBI’s role — “not to be touched upon” and “if any questions were asked in this area, [the redacted witness] is to immediately leave.”
While the official COINTELPRO program was terminated soon after it was discovered, government attacks on today’s radical movements have continued and intensified.
As lawyers who were deeply involved in the Hampton litigation for 13 years, we view these documents as vehicles that would have opened up new avenues of questioning, led us to additional documents to pursue, deepened our proof of the assassination and cover-up conspiracies, and provided compelling proof that the highest level of Bureau officials, including Hoover, were partners in the conspiracies. As historians who have extensively written and lectured on the assassination, we welcome this unexpected trove of documents as further proof that the search for past truths continues into the future. We hope to assist Aaron Leonard — who has previously chronicled FBI surveillance and harassment of other 20th-century leftists — in his efforts to compel the FBI to reveal the redactions in the Mitchell files, and the pursuit of the secrets that still remain ensconced in the bowels of the FBI files will continue.
This search for historical truths about the government’s repressive tactics and programs continues to be of crucial importance to this day. While the official COINTELPRO program was terminated soon after it was discovered, government attacks on today’s radical movements have continued and intensified. The use of private security forces such as TigerSwan at Standing Rock; the utilization of more sophisticated spying and military technology (including drones, sound canons and concussion grenades) in Ferguson, Missouri; the targeting of the Movement for Black Lives as “terrorists” under the heading “Black Identity Extremists”; and the nationwide violent and coordinated law enforcement attacks on peaceful Black-led demonstrations in the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, as well as the most recent government-inspired white supremacist Capitol breach all demonstrate not only that the government’s repression mechanisms are alive and well, but also that law enforcement continues to be closely aligned with the emboldened forces of the violent and racist far right. The cold-blooded assassination of Fred Hampton provides an ongoing and detailed lesson about the illegal and violent lengths to which the government will resort to in its efforts to destroy social movements and young leaders of color when they pose a threat to its white supremacist power and control.
The authors gratefully acknowledge the invaluable work of Aaron Leonard, whose dogged pursuit of the Roy Martin Mitchell file uncovered the newly produced FBI documents detailed above.
Law enforcement officers from around the country attended and supported last week’s rally in support of President Trump that sparked a riot.
Police in the United States are more likely to use force against left-wing protesters than they are against right-wing protesters, according to new data analyzed by The Guardian, corroborating observations repeatedlymadeby the left.
The Guardian’s analysis showed that police used force at 4.7 percent of left-wing protests versus 1.4 percent of right-wing protests — 511 left-wing protests and 33 right-wing. When looking at protests that didn’t involve looting or vandalism, the disparity grew: Police were about 3.5 times more likely to use force at left-wing protests than right-wing protests, 1.8 percent and 0.5 percent, respectively.
The report also found that police were more than doubly likely to intervene or break up a left-wing protest than a right-wing one, using tactics like arrests. A similar analysis of the same data by FiveThirtyEight found the same thing.
These analyses can potentially explain why the violent Donald Trump-inspired mob was able to overcome Capitol Police on January 6, as former president Barack Obama tweeted last week.
For those who are wondering why so much attention has been focused on the response of the Capitol Police to the Trump-inspired riots, here’s a data-driven article that provides some useful frame of reference. https://t.co/MAdlWGRd23
“No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they wouldn’t have been treated very, very differently” than the Trump loyalists at the Capitol, Joe Biden said in a speech on January 7.
Following the attack, right-wing outlets have been reporting misinformation about the disparity between the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests from last year and last week’s attempted coup.
The graphic is part of a larger push by the right to downplay the violent attempted coup on January 6, despite the demonization of BLM protests; Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said that impeaching Trump for his role in the coup is just “cancel culture”; many Republicans have been calling for “unity” to distract from the issue at hand; RedState published an article claiming that the coup simply didn’t happen.
The report on the disparity between the police responses to left- versus right-wing protests further underlines the disparity with the political responses to recent events — as The New Republic notes, “Republicans Want Impunity, Not Unity.” And while, as some have argued, the Trump militants were successful in intimidating members of Congress, many in the BLM movement are still fighting for justice.
On Thursday, the New York State Attorney General Letitia James announced a lawsuit against the New York City police department for excessive police force against BLM protesters last summer.
“[The Attorney General’s office] found that the NYPD arrested or detained hundreds of protesters, legal observers, medics and others without legal justification,” she said in a press conference. “In total, we found over 155 incidents of officers using excessive and unreasonable force against protesters.” James’s office’s findings line up with the data on the policing disparities from Thursday.
Call from the Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement (RAM) for the creation of a network of self-defense groups. Our communities are under attack. We have fought and defended ourselves against a complex, multi-faceted and growing onslaught from the forces of white supremacy and capitalism. As the United States continues its descent into a failed state and a… Read Full Article
