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    Ed Bullins, Leading Playwright of the Black Arts Movement, Dies at 86

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    He wrote not for white or middle-class audiences, but for the strivers, hustlers and quiet sufferers whose struggles he sought to capture in searing works.Ed Bullins, who was among the most significant Black playwrights of the 20th century and a leading voice in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ’70s, died on Saturday at his home in Roxbury, Mass. He was 86.His wife, Marva Sparks, said the cause was complications of dementia.Over a 55-year career in which he produced nearly 100 plays, Mr. Bullins sought to reflect the Black urban experience unmitigated by the expectations of traditional theater. Most of his work appeared in Black theaters in Harlem and Oakland, Calif., and perhaps for that reason he never reached the heights of acclaim that greeted peers like August Wilson, whose plays appeared on Broadway and were adapted for the screen (and who often credited Mr. Bullins as an influence).That was fine with Mr. Bullins. He often said that he wrote not for white or middle-class audiences but for the strivers, hustlers and quiet sufferers whose struggles he sought to capture in searing works like “In the Wine Time” (1968) and “The Taking of Miss Janie” (1975).“He was able to get the grass roots to come to his plays,” the writer Ishmael Reed said in an interview. “He was a Black playwright who spoke to the values of the urban experience. Some of those people had probably never seen a play before.”Though Mr. Bullins was a careful student of white playwrights like Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill, he rejected many of their conventions, pursuing a loose, rapid style that drew equally on avant-garde jazz and television — two forms that he felt put him closer to the register of his intended audiences.He won three Obie Awards and two Guggenheim grants, and in 1975 the New York Drama Critics’ Circle named “The Taking of Miss Janie” the best American play of the year.Not everyone was enamored of his work. Some critics, including some in the Black press, believed he focused too heavily on the violence and criminality he saw in working-class Black life, and reflected it too brutally — “The Taking of Miss Janie,” for instance, opens and closes with a rape scene.But most critics, especially in the establishment, came to respect Mr. Bullins as an artist who was both passionately true to his source material and nuanced enough in his vision to avoid becoming doctrinaire.“He tackled subjects that on the surface were very specific to the Black experience,” the playwright Richard Wesley said in an interview. “But Ed was also very much committed to showing the humanity of his characters, and in doing that he became accessible to audiences beyond the Black community.”Genia Morgan, left, and Alia Chapman in a 2006 production of Mr. Bullins’s “The Taking of Miss Janie,” which was named the best American play of the year by the New York Drama Critics’ Circle in 1975.Gerry GoodsteinEdward Artie Bullins was born on July 7, 1935, in Philadelphia and grew up on the city’s North Side. His father, Edward Bullins, left home when Ed was still a small child, and he was raised by his mother, Bertha Marie (Queen) Bullins, who worked for the city government.Though he did well in school, he gravitated toward the North Side’s rough street life. He joined a gang, lost two front teeth in one fight and was stabbed in the heart during another.Mr. Bullins dropped out of school in 1952 and joined the Navy. He served most of the next three years as an ensign aboard the aircraft carrier Midway, where he won a lightweight boxing championship.He returned to Philadelphia in 1955 and, three years later, moved to Los Angeles. He attended night school to earn a high school equivalency diploma, then attended Los Angeles City College, where he started a magazine, Citadel, and wrote short stories for it.In 1962 he married the poet Pat Cooks. She accused him of threatening her with violence, and they divorced in 1966. (She later remarried and took the surname Parker.)Mr. Bullins’s later marriage, to Trixie Bullins, ended in divorce. Along with his third wife, he is survived by his sons, Ronald and Sun Ra; his daughters, Diane Bullins, Patricia Oden and Catherine Room; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Four other children, Ameena, Darlene, Donald and Eddie Jr., died before him.Restless and unhappy with his work in Los Angeles, Mr. Bullins moved in 1964 to San Francisco, where he plugged into a growing community of Black writers. He also switched from writing prose to writing plays — in part, he said, because he was lazy, but also because he felt that the theater gave him more direct access to the everyday Black experience.His first play, “How Do You Do,” an absurdist one-act encounter between a middle-class Black couple and a working-class Black man, was produced in 1965 to favorable reviews. But he remained unsure of his decision to write plays until a few months later, when he saw a dual production of “The Dutchman” and “The Slave,” two plays by Amiri Baraka, then known as LeRoi Jones, a leading figure of the Black Arts Movement.“I said to myself, I must be on the right track,” Mr. Bullins told The New Yorker in 1973. “I could see that an experienced playwright like Jones was dealing with these same qualities and conditions of Black life that moved me.”In 1967, Mr. Bullins became artist in residence at the New Lafayette Theater in Harlem. The work he produced, mostly there, over the six years represented the peak of his career.The Black Arts Movement, then still primarily an East Coast phenomenon, was a loose affiliation of novelists, playwrights and poets whose work sought to reflect the modern Black experience on its own terms — written and produced by Black people in Black spaces for Black audiences.Mr. Bullins had found his community and, through it, his voice. He fell in with a circle of Bay Area writers, actors and activists, who began performing his work in bars and coffeehouses.Among them was Eldridge Cleaver, who, after his release from prison in 1966, used some of the proceeds from his memoir “Soul on Ice” to found Black House, an arts and community center in San Francisco, with Mr. Bullins as its chief artist in residence.Black House also became the city’s headquarters for the Black Panther Party, founded by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton. Mr. Bullins became the party’s minister of culture.But his role in the Black Panthers was short-lived. The party, from his perspective at least, saw art solely as a weapon, and he chafed at Mr. Seale’s insistence that he create didactic, often explicitly Marxist plays. He also grew frustrated over the party’s interest in building a coalition with radical white allies, when what he sought was a movement wholly independent of white culture.“I have no Messianic urge,” he told The New York Times in 1975. “Every other street corner has somebody telling you Christ or Mao is the answer. You can take any Ism you want and be saved by it. If you’re part of some movement and it fulfills you, that’s cool, but I like to look at it all.”He left the party in late 1966, just before Black House shut down.Mr. Bullins considered moving to Europe or South America, but he changed his mind when Robert Macbeth, the founder of the New Lafayette Theater in Harlem, invited him to be the artist in residence there.He arrived in New York in 1967, and the next six years of work, mostly at the New Lafayette Theater, represented the peak of his career. The theater was a complete package: a 14-member acting troupe, 14 musicians, several playwrights and directors, and an affiliated art gallery, the Weusi Artist Collective, that produced sets.Mr. Bullins also led workshops for aspiring playwrights, many of whom, like Mr. Wesley, went on to become significant voices among the next generation of Black theater artists.Kim Sullivan and Shirleen Quigley in the New Federal Theater’s 2013 production of “In the Wine Time.”Gerry GoodsteinA year after arriving, he completed “In the Wine Time,” his first full-length play and the first of a series he called his “Twentieth Century Cycle” — 20 plays that told the story of postwar urban life through a set of friends. In 1971 he won his first Obie, for “The Fabulous Miss Marie” and “In New England Winter.”He left the New Lafayette Theater in 1973, shortly before it closed for lack of funding. His work in the 1970s appeared in the New Federal Theater, La MaMa Experimental Theater Club, the Public Theater and elsewhere.In 1972 he got into a war of words with the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, which was putting on his play “The Duplex.” Though he had initially endorsed the production, he later said in an interview that “the original Black intentions” of the play had been “thwarted” and “its artistic integrity stomped on,” turning it into a “minstrel show.”He traded attacks with the producer, Jules Irving, and the director, Gilbert Moses, in The Times and elsewhere, but in the end the play went on. It received mixed reviews.That episode, fairly or not, gave Mr. Bullins a reputation for being hard to work with, one of the reasons he cited for returning to the West Coast in the 1980s. He continued to write plays, but he also produced work by others, including Mr. Reed, at his Bullins Memorial Theater in Oakland, named for his son Eddie Jr., who died in a car crash in 1978.Mr. Bullins returned to school, receiving a bachelor’s degree in English from the San Francisco campus of Antioch University in 1989 and a master’s in fine arts in playwriting from San Francisco State University in 1994.Mr. Bullins in 1999, when he was a professor in the theater department at Northeastern University in Boston.Wendy Maeda/The Boston Globe via Getty ImagesThe next year he moved to Boston, where he became a professor in the theater department at Northeastern University. He retired in 2012.By then he had long since changed his mind about his audience, in large part because he and others in the Black Arts Movement had succeeded in their mission to build a Black cultural canon.“Of course Black writers can write for all audiences,” he told The Times in 1982. “My feeling is that the question of whether Black theater should appeal to whites was more valid a decade ago. Since then, Black theater has taken off in all directions.” More

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      'Judas and the Black Messiah' Is the Latest Film to Punt on Politics

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s Notebook‘Judas’ Is the Latest Political Movie to Punt on PoliticsBoth “Judas and the Black Messiah” and “BlacKkKlansman” are rooted in issues of radicalism vs. the system, but the dramas rely on morally opaque characters that undermine the stories.Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya) onstage, and Bill O’Neal (Lakeith Stanfield), an F.B.I. informant, in beret. Was O’Neal actually a supporter of the Black Panthers?Credit…Glen Wilson/Warner BrosMarch 5, 2021Updated 5:43 p.m. ETAt the beginning of the fact-based drama “Judas and the Black Messiah,” an F.B.I. informant named Bill O’Neal (Lakeith Stanfield), wearing a slate gray suit and matching tie, sits in front of a camera. He’s being interviewed for the documentary series “Eyes on the Prize II,” and an unseen questioner asks, “Looking back on your activities in the late ’60s, early ’70s, what would you tell your son about what you did then?” What he did then was abet the police killing of the Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. O’Neal’s expression is guarded; his eyes flit to the right and his lips part ever so slightly, but no words come out.The film thus begins with an open question: How does O’Neal account for his actions?It’s a question the movie examines but doesn’t actually answer; “Judas” does not even give an indication that it has its own take. Despite the great performances and otherwise entrancing narrative, there’s a flaw in the storytelling: The moral opacity of the character of O’Neal fails to give us any true sense of the personal stakes involved and hinders the film’s ability to connect to current politics. In this way, “Judas” recalls another recent biographical drama about an undercover agent that punts on politics: Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman,” from 2018.In that film, a Black detective named Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) teams up with a white Jewish officer (Adam Driver) to infiltrate a local Ku Klux Klan chapter in 1970s Colorado. When Ron goes undercover at a Black Panthers rally, he gets involved with a student there named Patrice, who eventually discovers, to her disgust, that he’s a police officer. “Ron Stallworth, are you for the revolution and the liberation of Black people?” Patrice asks, but Ron deflects, saying, “I’m an undercover detective with the Colorado Springs police. That’s my j-o-b, that’s the truth.”As an undercover police officer, John David Washington, right, with Adam Driver, deflects questions about his beliefs.Credit…David Lee/Focus Features, via Associated PressBut that’s not just a deflection on Ron’s part; it’s a deflection by the film as well. Though Ron insists that he nevertheless cares about the Black community, Patrice has a point. As a Black police officer, how complicit is he with the system? His politics aren’t spelled out, and Washington’s acting is too wooden to reveal what Ron thinks of the radical Panthers.At the rally he watches intently, but it’s unclear whether his gaze reflects his attraction to Patrice, a real interest in the politics or a shallow admiration for the pageantry of the proceedings, the flair of the rhetoric and the energy of the participants. There’s a sense that both Ron and the film see the Panthers and the Klan as comparable political extremes, just positioned at opposite ends of the spectrum, and that neither is righteous or effective — though the film shies away from conveying this with more confidence and clarity.As a director known for taking risks, Spike Lee is surprisingly moderate when it comes to this film’s politics, never allowing his protagonist to cross over to the side of the revolution. In an effort to remain faithful to the conventional cop-film genre, “BlacKkKlansman” embraces the belief that not all cops are rotten. Ron has faith in the system; he has his buddies, and they’re fighting a group of violent white supremacists, so we too invest ourselves in these good cops and their fight for justice. But of course, by the end, when Ron’s superior tells him to drop the K.K.K. case, Ron is surprised to find that the institution of which he’s a part is fundamentally flawed.While “BlacKkKlansman” maintains faith that the system might prevail thanks to a few good cops, “Judas” openly recognizes that the system is broken and veers more closely to sympathy for the Panthers’ cause without explicitly promoting or denouncing it.“Judas” distinguishes itself by providing a nuanced look at the Panthers, not simply their militant actions but also their community initiatives. And like many of the characters themselves, the film is captivated by the charisma of its Black messiah, Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya, who won a Golden Globe on Sunday for his performance). He brings his usual steely intensity to the role; it’s like watching a game of chicken between him and the camera, so resolute is his gaze and so palpable his attention when he cocks his head to the side like a challenge.Hampton is not the real focus of the film; Shaka King’s direction and Kaluuya’s performance give him such depth and appeal that he steals the spotlight. But the film begins and ends with Bill O’Neal. He is our eyes, his path is what leads us to Hampton — he should be the film’s real focus. And his ambivalence and internal conflict about betraying Hampton, despite his being the propulsive force behind the film’s tension, lack a clear motivation.Bill dances around the issue of his motives and politics, whether he’s working for the F.B.I. or the Panthers. The agent he reports to, Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons), interrogates Bill about his stances on the assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, but Bill shrugs off the questions, saying he’s never thought about them. Whether he’s in earnest or lying to stay safe is unclear. In a later scene, an undercover Mitchell observes Bill at a rally and concludes that this operative must actually be invested in the movement — either that or he’s a terrific actor.Daniel Kaluuya, left, Ashton Sanders, Algee Smith, Dominique Thorne and Lakeith Stanfield in a scene from “Judas and the Black Messiah.”Credit…Glen Wilson/Warner Bros.And that’s part of the problem too — that Bill does seem to be an Academy Award-worthy actor, and Stanfield, who is such a careful, cerebral actor, delivers a performance that is almost too perfect. With just a sideways glance or a subtle movement of his mouth he immediately conveys a switch of role, cluing us in yet again that despite Bill’s seeming devotion to the Panthers, this is all a performance, one that confounds not just Agent Mitchell and Fred Hampton but us as well.It’s possible that we’re meant to see Bill as an opportunist, so politics are irrelevant. But for a film so blatantly political, that seems unlikely.It’s strange that these dramas opted for noncommittal protagonists because both clearly want to engage with the real world — with history and modern-day events. “BlacKkKlansman” includes footage of the deadly Charlottesville Unite the Right rally the year before the movie was released, and the epilogue of “Judas” includes details about Hampton’s partner and son and their continued involvement with the Panthers, along with footage of the real O’Neal from “Eyes on the Prize.”Perhaps one reason these otherwise politically outspoken (and liberal-leaning) films are reluctant to take a stance involves actual history, a fear they might misrepresent the real flesh-and-blood men they depict. And perhaps it is symptomatic of a lack of imagination that despite their gestures toward the present, “Judas” and “BlacKkKlansman” don’t dare expound on Black radical politics or negotiate what these politics — or even ambivalence — could mean in the context of the real-life climate in which the films were released.O’Neal with his F.B.I. handler, played by Jesse Plemons.Credit…Warner BrosEither way, the films underestimate the depth of their protagonists and the awareness of the audience. In the argument between Patrice and Ron or the meetings between Bill and his F.B.I. handler, King and Lee could have forced their respective protagonists to confirm their views on radical activism vs. the law enforcement system and negotiate their positions in the larger narrative of the history within that divide, but “Judas” and “BlacKkKlansman” shuffle away, tails between their legs.In the “Eyes on the Prize” footage, the real O’Neal sits in front of the camera, in that slate gray suit and tie, and is asked the question we heard in the beginning: “What would you tell your son about what you did then?” There’s the pause and the eyes shifting to the right. His response, when it comes, is indecipherable: “I don’t know what I’d tell him other than I was part of the struggle, that’s the bottom line.” He then says that “at least” he “had a point of view,” though he doesn’t state exactly what that was.That O’Neal, who committed suicide in 1990 on the same day “Eyes on the Prize II” premiered, is the film’s Judas is appropriate. In the Bible, the end of Judas’s story is unclear. In one gospel he hangs himself out of guilt for betraying Jesus. In another there’s no account of his guilt, but he dies in what seems an act of divine punishment. Did Judas betray the Messiah for those 30 pieces of silver alone, or did he have other reasons? Did he regret the action afterward, and if so, was it for his role in the murder of another human being or for a more personal betrayal of his own beliefs, that he offered up the man he honestly believed was the messiah?O’Neal’s final words in the clip are, “I think I’ll let history speak for me.” That’s where O’Neal and these two otherwise good films were wrong. History has no mouthpiece of its own; it can only speak through the interpretations of those who tell the stories of the past. And if those stories intend to also speak to our present, they must speak with conviction. They must take a stance.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      'Judas and the Black Messiah' Is Hollywood at Its Most Radical

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookIs This the Most Radical Film Ever Produced by Hollywood?“Judas and the Black Messiah” is the rare Hollywood film to explore a vision of Blackness that has nothing to do with white audiences.Daniel Kaluuya as Fred Hampton in “Judas and the Black Messiah.”Credit…Glen Wilson/Warner Bros. Pictures, via Associated PressFeb. 16, 2021, 3:13 p.m. ET“Judas and the Black Messiah” is a very good — nearly great — movie about the charismatic Fred Hampton and the way the Black Panther Party was targeted by the United States government. Yet neither the standout performances from Daniel Kaluuya and Lakeith Stanfield nor the sensitive and insightful direction by Shaka King are the most remarkable aspects of the film: Not since Spike Lee’s 1992 biopic “Malcolm X” has there been a mainstream American film this thoroughly Black and radical.Black History Month was a mystery to me as a kid. I could never understand why we were taught some Black history but not nearly enough, not even close. We would learn about Frederick Douglass but not Nat Turner. Booker T. Washington but not W.E.B. Du Bois. Our teachers made a point of telling us about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. but completely neglected Malcolm X. With this approach, they tacitly communicated that only the Black historical figures who included white people doing the work of Black liberation were the ones worthy of remembrance. This was especially true when it came to Black radicals. The Panthers, who were important to my community when I was growing up, and the Black power movement were never part of the narrative at school. The same can be said of Hollywood.Hollywood has long told Black stories from the perspective of white people. Think of Oscar-winning dramas like “The Blind Side” (a white adoptive mother comes to the aid of a Black football player), “The Help” (a white journalist awakens to the injustices Black maids face in the civil-rights-era South) or “Green Book” (a white chauffeur helps a Black classical pianist): Instead of exploring what Black characters endured, these movies catered to white audiences, giving them lessons on how to better perform their whiteness while in proximity to Blackness.This tradition of making Black films about white people thus makes the mere existence of “Judas and the Black Messiah” shocking and exhilarating. The movie, available on HBO Max and distributed by Warner Bros., is not exactly hostile to white people, but for a mainstream movie likely to garner Oscar attention, the version of Blackness it depicts, one rooted in an unapologetic love of the descendants of enslaved people, is rare. Surprisingly, it does not apologize for Hampton’s embrace of Blackness nor his deep suspicion of capitalism. It also does not sugarcoat the depiction of the Judas of the title, the F.B.I. plant Bill O’Neal. In another era, if a studio film tackled the material at all, Hampton would have been secondary in the story of a sympathetic informant. Instead, King is intentional about putting us on the side of the Black radicals, and we see the government for what it was: a destructive force.The movie isn’t perfect. Hampton was a fiery speaker, yes, but to fully understand him and his appeal, one must see him in action — a vantage the movie does not afford its viewers. What made him a legend in Chicago was his organizing skills and his undeniable charisma. But his most important achievement was bringing together the Rainbow Coalition, an alliance of the Black Panthers; the leftist, mostly white Young Patriots Organization; and the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican gang that was concerned with human rights. This is not really given much screen time. Instead, the film shows us a Hampton who has already reached his zenith — it does not show us the work he did to get there. Obviously, a film is not a history lesson, but a bit more time could have been devoted to Hampton’s ideas.Recent documentaries like Stanley Nelson’s “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution” and Göran Olsson’s “The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975” have examined the Panthers’ history and what they stood for. There have been a handful of features about the Panthers, most notably the beautiful and intimate “Night Catches Us” (2010), which depicted what happened to former members who tried to make a life outside the party. Perhaps the drama that comes closest to what “Judas” has achieved is a movie about Black nationalism, Lee’s “Malcolm X.” The politics of the two films are similar in that they both depict men who are vocal in their vision of Black self-determination. Yet “Judas” is more explicit about how Hampton married his racial critique with an economic one.It’s clear why we finally got a film like this. Black protesters have forced this country and its cultural creators finally to pay attention to its vicious legacy of white supremacy. Not only have people been in the streets for the past few years chanting “Black Lives Matter,” but Hollywood has also been an explicit target for criticism. It was only a few years ago that #OscarsSoWhite forced the academy to do some serious soul searching about how the industry marginalizes Black talent. More still needs to be done to make the industry an equitable place for all stories and creators, but the work so far is already having an impact.And it’s important to see a film telling a story about Black figures who have been neglected by America’s history books. If nothing else, the movie might inspire viewers to dig deeper and learn more about the Black radicals it depicts. Hampton and the Black Panther Party were always heroes to me; this is a film that does justice to their memory.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Judas and the Black Messiah’: What to Know About the HBO Max Film

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Judas and the Black Messiah’: What to Know About the HBO Max FilmThe Shaka King movie dramatizes the life and death of Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party. Here’s a guide to the people and the issues of the day.Daniel Kaluuya, top, as Fred Hampton, and below him Lakeith Steinfeld as the informant William O’Neal  in “Judas and the Black Messiah.”Credit…Glen Wilson/Warner BrosFeb. 12, 2021, 12:18 p.m. ETTo Black Americans in the 1960s who were targeted and harassed by the police, 21-year-old Fred Hampton was an empowering figure.To the F.B.I. and its director, J. Edgar Hoover, Hampton, the chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, was a radical threat.Hampton was killed by Chicago police officers early on the morning of Dec. 4, 1969, during a raid on his West Side apartment, which was a block south of the Black Panther Party’s Chicago headquarters. The ambush, and the months of F.B.I. surveillance of Hampton and the Panthers that preceded it, are dramatized in Shaka King’s film “Judas and the Black Messiah,” which begins streaming Friday on HBO Max.At the time of Hampton’s death, Chicago was the site of political protests and violent clashes with law enforcement. The infamous trial of the Chicago 7, a court battle that involved seven Vietnam War protesters charged with conspiring to incite riots during the 1968 Democratic National Convention (a saga chronicled in Aaron Sorkin’s recent film “The Trial of the Chicago 7”), had been underway for a little over two months.King, who co-wrote the script with Will Berson, drew mostly from fact while taking viewers inside the Black Panther Party in the months leading up to Hampton’s death, though they took a few dramatic liberties. For instance, the film’s star, Daniel Kaluuya, is a decade older than the 21-year-old Hampton was when he was killed.Here is a guide to the real-life people, groups and events that feature in “Judas and the Black Messiah.” Be warned, there are spoilers, if such a thing is possible when speaking of history.Who were the Black Panthers?Bobby Seale, left, and Huey P. Newton at the Black Panther Party headquarters in San Francisco.Credit…Ted Streshinsky/Corbis via Getty ImagesThe Black Panther Party was founded in 1966 in Oakland, Calif., by a pair of Black college students, Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, to oppose police brutality and racism in local neighborhoods. The Panthers, who were known for their military-style black berets, leather jackets and raised-fist salute, believed in removing abusive officers from communities by any means necessary, including armed resistance.The F.B.I. viewed the Panthers as a radical group capable of galvanizing a militant Black nationalist movement. (Hoover, the bureau’s first director, called the Black Panther Party “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country”). But the Panthers also launched a number of social initiatives: Members ran medical clinics, provided free transportation to prisons for family members of inmates, and started a free breakfast program that fed thousands of schoolchildren.Who was Fred Hampton?Fred Hampton at the “Days of Rage” rally in Chicago, less than two months before he was killed.Credit…David Fenton/Getty ImagesThe charismatic community organizer enjoyed a meteoric rise that took him from campaigning for an integrated community pool and recreational center in his hometown, Maywood, Ill., to preaching to thousands as the chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party.In 1969, a few months after helping to found the party’s Illinois chapter, the 20-year-old Hampton brokered an alliance he called the Rainbow Coalition, which united the Black Panthers, the Young Patriots (Southern white leftists) and the Young Lords (a Puerto Rican civil and human rights organization) in an effort to combat poverty and racism in their Chicago communities.Hampton’s rapid ascent through the ranks of the Black Panther Party landed him in the cross hairs of a secret F.B.I. counterintelligence program, known as Cointelpro, that Hoover formed to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize the activities of Black nationalist, hate-type organizations.” Targets included both the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Ku Klux Klan. Hoover declared in an internal memo that he sought to prevent the “rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify and electrify the militant Black nationalist movement.”Under Cointelpro, the F.B.I. tried a number of tactics to sow discord within the Black Panther Party at the national and local levels, including sending bogus letters to two of its leaders, Eldridge Cleaver and Huey P. Newton, which claimed that each sought to depose the other. Authorities also arrested Hampton and several other Panthers in an effort to publicly discredit the group. In the months before the raid on Hampton’s apartment, the Panthers and the police also faced off in two gun battles: One in July 1969 at the party’s West Side headquarters in which five police officers and three Panthers were injured, and a South Side fight that November that left two officers and one Panther dead.Who was William O’Neal?At 17, O’Neal (Lakeith Stanfield) already had a criminal record when the F.B.I. agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons) tracked him down after he stole a car in 1966. But O’Neal soon took on a new role: F.B.I. informant. Given the choice between facing felony charges or agreeing to infiltrate the Panthers, he opted for the latter: as a security captain in the Illinois Black Panther Party, he infiltrated Hampton’s inner circle.In 1969, O’Neal sketched a floor plan of Hampton’s West Side apartment, including where everyone slept, which the F.B.I. then shared with the Chicago Police Department, the agency that conducted the fatal raid. But unlike the character in “Judas and the Black Messiah,” the real O’Neal did not see his actions as a betrayal of Hampton or the Panthers. “I had no allegiance to the Panthers,” he recalled in an interview for the PBS docuseries “Eyes on the Prize,” which chronicled the history of the civil rights movement in the United States.What happened the morning Fred Hampton was killed?Demonstrators in Boston in 1970 protested the killing of Fred Hampton. Credit…Spencer Grant/Getty ImagesFourteen Chicago police officers showed up before dawn on Dec. 4, 1969, at Hampton’s apartment, acting on the orders of Edward V. Hanrahan, the Cook County state’s attorney. Over the course of about 10 minutes, more than 80 shots were fired. When the smoke cleared, Hampton, 21, and another party leader, Mark Clark, 22, were dead, and four other Panthers and two police officers were wounded.At first, the police claimed they killed Hampton in self-defense after people in the apartment began firing shotguns at them as they tried to execute a search warrant for illegal weapons. But ballistics experts determined that only one of the bullets was probably discharged from a weapon belonging to an occupant of the apartment. A federal grand jury investigation also revealed that the “bullet holes” in the apartment’s front door, which officers had cited as evidence that the Panthers had shot at them, were in fact nail holes created by police.Though the Chicago Police Department had led the raid, the grand jury concluded that it had been coordinated by the F.B.I. as part of Hoover’s mission to cripple the Black Panther Party — and an F.B.I. memo later revealed that the bureau had authorized a bonus payment to O’Neal.The first federal grand jury declined to indict anyone involved in the raid, and though a subsequent grand jury indicted Hanrahan and the police officers who participated in the shootings, all the charges were dismissed. In 1982, without admitting any wrongdoing, the federal government, the City of Chicago and Cook County agreed to pay $1.85 million to the families of Hampton and Clark and to survivors of the raid.Clarence M. Kelley, who succeeded Hoover as head of the F.B.I. in 1973, issued a public apology three years later for the bureau’s abuse of power in the “twilight” of Hoover’s career. “Some of those activities were clearly wrong and quite indefensible,” Kelley said. “We most certainly must never allow them to be repeated.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More