If all you know about Fred Hampton is that decades after his death, cops still fear him this much, you know what a great man he was.

The only time republicans were for gun control. When black people took up arms in self defense.

We can only hope to live lives that leave fascists seething for generations after we die. Rest in power.

If it weren’t for the Black Panthers there wouldn’t be meal programs in public schools. The BP “Free Breakfast for Children” program was so popular and so effective at raising awareness and popularity for the BP party that the government became paranoid that they were constructing an effective “fifth column”. All of the sudden states started passing laws creating food programs for public schools in order to undermine their message.

Nothing good happens in this country unless the rich are scared. The same thing applied to the New Deal.

Jfc that’s dark. Fred Hampton was a badass who was murdered by the state. But that’s not enough and they shoot his fucking tombstone? Get the fuck over it! You already killed our guy to suppress a movement. You don’t have to be aggrieved any longer, you fucking pussies.

The rest of the story from Wikipedia:

During the raid, Panther Mark Clark was also killed and several others were seriously wounded. In January 1970, the Cook County Coroner held an inquest; the coroner's jury concluded that Hampton's and Clark's deaths were justifiable homicides.[14][15][16][17]

A civil lawsuit for wrongful death was later filed on behalf of the survivors and the relatives of Hampton and Clark.[18] It was resolved in 1982 by a settlement of $1.85 million (equivalent to $6.03 million in 2024); the U.S. federal government, Cook County, and the City of Chicago each paid one-third to a group of nine plaintiffs. Given revelations about the illegal COINTELPRO program and documents associated with the killings, many scholars now consider Hampton's death, at age 21, a deliberate assassination at the FBI's initiative. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton

Nobody actually knows who shot the headstone, it was discovered damaged in 2016:

Flint Taylor — one of the lawyers for Hampton’s family — recently journeyed to Haynesville to eulogize Fred Hampton’s mother, Iberia, a devoted mother and courageous activist who passed away in October 2016. He discovered this desecration of Hampton’s grave at that time.

As far as I can tell the notion that it's a police tradition seems to originate from a possibly sarcastic post on r/stupidpol on that other site.

But he was definitely assassinated by the police and the FBI, which is probably much worse.

Is the Black Panther party still around? Seems like it could be worth a revival.

It's neat that the wikipedia article about him seems to lack proper citations for the circumstances of his death, citing an archived court document that is no longer being hosted on archivedotorg.

Every news story from the time and the police themselves claim the panthers shot first, and they police did have a warrant to search the premises for illegal firearms.

I tend to treat the Black Panthers as a terrorist organization after reading about how they murdered their own secretary after she whistleblew some of their financial crimes. Yes, black people are victims in the USA. Yes, there is still to this day a strong bias against them and a structural inequality. Is that reason to support people who threaten violence, who reject the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr, and who have been manipulated into violence by the federal agencies in the past? No, fuck the black panthers.

Should make the headstone out of metal so it risks ricocheting onto the shooter.