After Fred Hampton's unjust murder, the police lied about his death immediately. At a press conference during the next day, the police said that the arrest team were attacked by the Black Panthers and defended themselves accordingly. This obviously wasn't the case. During the 2nd press conference on December 8, the police leadership praised the assault team for their "remarkable restraint", "bravery", and "professional discipline" in not killing all the Panthers present. Photographic evidence was presented of "bullet holes" allegedly made by shots fired by the Panthers, but reporters soon challenged this claim. Crooked, terrorist cops lied about what happened, because they have a callous attitude about black activists seeking real social change in society. There was an internal investigation that existed. The police claimed that their l investigation was undertaken, and the police claimed that their colleagues on the assault team were exonerated of any wrongdoing, concluding that they "used lawful means to overcome the assault." As time went on, we shall see that this distorted assumption was false. Five thousand people attended Fred Hampton's funeral. He was eulogized by many black leaders like Jesse Jackson and Ralph Abernathy, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s successor as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In his eulogy, Jackson said that "when Fred was shot in Chicago, black people in particular, and decent people in general, bled everywhere." On December 6, members of the Weather Underground destroyed numerous police vehicles in a retaliatory bombing spree at 3600 N. Halsted Street, Chicago. The police called their raid on Hampton's apartment a "shootout." The Black Panthers called it a "shoot-in", because so many shots were fired by police. On December 11 and 12, the two competing daily newspapers, the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times, published vivid accounts of the events but drew different conclusions. The Tribune has long been considered the politically conservative newspaper, and the Sun-Times the liberal paper. On December 11, the Tribune published a page 1 article titled, "Exclusive – Hanrahan, Police Tell Panther Story." The article included photographs supplied by Hanrahan's office that depicted bullet holes in a thin white curtain and door jamb as evidence that the Panthers fired multiple bullets at the police.
Jack Challem, editor of the Wright College News, the student newspaper at Wright Junior College in Chicago, had visited the apartment on December 6, when it was still unsecured. He took numerous photographs of the crime scenes. A member of the Black Panthers was allowing visitors to tour the apartment. Challem's photographs did not show the bullet holes reported by the Tribune. On the morning of December 12, after the Tribune article had appeared with the Hanrahan-supplied photos, Challem contacted a reporter at the Sun-Times, showed him his own photographs, and encouraged the other reporter to visit the apartment. That evening, the Sun-Times published a page 1 article with the headline: "Those 'bullet holes' aren't." According to the article, the alleged bullet holes (supposedly the result of the Panthers shooting in the direction of the police) were nail heads. Fred Hampton Jr. was born four weeks his mother (then Johnson) saw Fred Hampton's murder. Civil rights activists Roy Wilkins and Ramsey Clark, styled as "The Commission of Inquiry into the Black Panthers and the Police", alleged that the Chicago police had killed Hampton without justification or provocation and had violated the Panthers' constitutional rights against unreasonable search and seizure. "The Commission" further alleged that the Chicago Police Department had imposed a summary punishment on the Panthers.
A federal grand jury did not return any indictment against any of the individuals involved with the planning or execution of the raid, including the officers involved in killing Hampton. O'Neal, who had given the FBI the floor plan of the apartment and drugged Hampton, later admitted his involvement in setting up the raid. He committed suicide on January 15, 1990. The injury into a real investigation to the assassination of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark came in stages. Cook County Coroner Andrew Toman started to form a special six-member coroner's jury to the deaths of Hampton and Clark. On December 23, Toman announced four additions to the jury, who included two African-American men: physician Theodore K. Lawless and attorney Julian B. Wilkins, the son of J. Ernest Wilkins Sr. He said the four were selected from a group of candidates submitted to his office by groups and individuals representing both Chicago's black and white communities. Civil rights leaders and spokesmen for the black community were reportedly disappointed with the selection. An official with the Chicago Urban League said, "I would have had more confidence in the jury if one of them had been a black man who has a rapport with the young and the grass roots in the community." Gus Savage said that such a man to whom the community could relate need not be black. The jury eventually included a third black man, who had been a member of the first coroner's jury sworn in on December 4.
The blue ribbon panel started on January 6, 1970. On January 21, they ruled the deaths of Hampton and Clark to be justifiable homicides. The jury qualified their verdict on Hampton's death as "based solely and exclusively on the evidence presented to this inquisition"; police and expert witnesses provided the only testimony during the inquest. This ruling was wrong obviously. Jury foreman James T. Hicks stated that they could not consider the charges made by surviving Black Panthers who had been in the apartment; they had told reporters that the police had entered the apartment shooting. The survivors were reported to have refused to testify during the inquest because they faced criminal charges of attempted murder and aggravated assault during the raid. Attorneys for the Hampton and Clark families did not introduce any witnesses during the proceedings but called the inquest "a well-rehearsed theatrical performance designed to vindicate the police officers." Hanrahan said the verdict was recognition "of the truthfulness of our police officers' account of the events." Released on May 15, 1970, the reports of a federal grand jury criticized the actions of the police, the surviving Black Panthers, and the Chicago news media. The grand jury called the police department's raid "ill conceived" and said many errors were committed during the post-raid investigation and reconstruction of the events. It said that the surviving Black Panthers' refusal to cooperate hampered the investigation, and that the press "improperly and grossly exaggerated stories."
By 1970, the survivors and relatives of Hampton and Clark filed a civil suit saying that the police and FBI violated human rights. They sought $47.7 million damages. Twenty-eight defendants were named, including Hanrahan as well as the City of Chicago, Cook County, and federal governments. It took years for the case to get to trial, which lasted 18 months. It was reported to have been the longest federal trial up to that time. After its conclusion in 1977, Judge Joseph Sam Perry of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois dismissed the suit against 21 of the defendants before jury deliberations. After jurors deadlocked on a verdict, Perry dismissed the suit against the remaining defendants.
The plaintiffs appealed. In 1979, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago found that the government had withheld relevant documents, thereby obstructing the judicial process. Reinstating the case against 24 of the defendants, the Court of Appeals ordered a new trial. The Supreme Court of the United States heard an appeal by defendants but voted 5–3 in 1980 to remand the case to the District Court for a new trial.
In 1982, the City of Chicago, Cook County, and the federal government agreed to a settlement in which each would pay $616,333 (equivalent to $1.87 million per payee in 2022) to a group of nine plaintiffs, including the mothers of Hampton and Clark. The $1.85 million settlement (equivalent to $5.61 million in 2022) was believed to be the largest ever in a civil rights case during that time. G. Flint Taylor, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs, said, "The settlement is an admission of the conspiracy that existed between the FBI and Hanrahan's men to murder Fred Hampton." Assistant United States Attorney Robert Gruenberg said the settlement was intended to avoid another costly trial and was not an admission of guilt or responsibility by any of the defendants. The Chicago police was complicit in the murder of Hampton and Clark. Ten days afterward, Bobby Rush, the then deputy minister of defense for the Illinois Black Panther Party, called the raiding party an "execution squad." As is typical in settlements, the three government defendants did not acknowledge claims of responsibility for plaintiffs' allegations. Hampton was very close with Chicago Black Catholic priest George Clements, who served as his mentor and as a chaplain for the local Panther chapter. Hampton and the Panthers also used Clements's parish, Holy Angels Catholic Church in Chicago (now the parish of Our Lady of Africa), as a refuge in times of particular surveillance or pursuit from the police. They also provided security for several of Clements's "Black Unity Masses", part of his revolutionary activities during the Black Catholic Movement. Clements spoke at Hampton's funeral, and also said a Requiem Mass for him at Holy Angels.
Michael Newton is among the writers who have concluded that Hampton was assassinated. In his 2016 book Unsolved Civil Rights Murder Cases, 1934–1970, Newton writes that Hampton "was murdered in his sleep by Chicago police with FBI collusion." This view is also presented in Jakobi Williams's book From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago. According to a 2007 Chicago Tribune report, "The raid ended the promising political career of Cook County State's Atty. Edward V. Hanrahan, who was indicted but cleared with 13 other law-enforcement agents on charges of obstructing justice. Bernard Carey, a Republican, defeated him in the next election, in part because of the support of outraged black voters. Jeffrey Haas, with his law partners G. Flint Taylor and Dennis Cunningham and attorney James D. Montgomery, were the attorneys for the plaintiffs in the federal suit Hampton v. Hanrahan, conducted additional research and wrote a book about these events. It was published in 2009. He wrote that Fred Hampton would make Chicago's West Side become much better today with his leadership, programs, community development, and educating the people on solving problems. In 1990, the Chicago City Council unanimously passed a resolution, introduced by then-Alderman Madeline Haithcock, commemorating December 4, 2004, as Fred Hampton Day in Chicago. The resolution read in part:
"Fred Hampton, who was only 21 years old, made his mark in Chicago history not so much by his death as by the heroic efforts of his life and by his goals of empowering the most oppressed sector of Chicago's Black community, bringing people into political life through participation in their own freedom fighting organization."
We live in a new generation. As we approach 2030, health remains a very important part of human existence. There are tons of studies showing the benefits of exercising, reading literature, eating healthy, and socializing with fellow human beings (as we are social creatures as humans). Finding ways to co-exist among omnivores, vegans, vegetarians, and other people with diverse eating habits is important too. The problem is that we don't live in a meritocracy in society. There are food deserts, massive poverty, malnutrition, and other important complications. We can't solve these problems with laissez faire capitalism, naivete, or putting our heads in the sand. We can't solve these problems with bourgeoisie rhetoric (that is about poor shaming, dehumanization, and massive arrogance), materialism, and egoism. These issues must be solved or rectified by real solutions by changing laws and policies to fight poverty, investing in eliminating food deserts, encouraging compassion plus empathy in our society, advancing body positivity, and investing in the tons of health experts saving lives literally. In our time, there are so many unsung men and unsung women teaching people about health facts, giving motivation to allow people to fulfill their fitness aspirations, and breaking down the barriers in order for human beings to be their best selves. This is all about being our best in this life. These unsung fitness heroes advance aerobic exercise (which can decrease the risk of heart disease), strength training, improving mental health, HIIT workouts, and eating healthy foods that will increase human life expectancy, improve bone strength, make people look years of decades younger, improve cognitive thinking, and develop emotional health. True health care culture is about treating people with respect without respect to persons. That means that we don't believe in dehumanizing people of diverse physical appearances, colors, or backgrounds. Everyone is created equal, and they are born with the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Life is an unique journey. Subsequently, learning about health is also a journey that focuses on thriving to live the best life that you earnestly deserve.
For more than 2,000 years now, the Gospel of Jesus Christ has spread throughout the world. A lot of people don't know that millions of Christians have been martyrs of the faith. The New Testament is very clear that believers in God will suffer persecution. When I was a much young man, I know about the stories of the Christian martyrs found in the book of John Foxe and Thieleman J. van Braught (of his Martyr's Mirror book from 1660). Back then, devoted followers of the Lord Jesus Christ didn't have a quiet life. Many of them ran from country to country seeking survival literally from authoritarian empires, from mobs of people, and from folks who had a religious bigotry against Christians. The irony now is that many of the same ones who claim to embrace tolerance for all (like many New Age types) have an obscene hatred of the followers of Yeshua. Some of these haters blaspheme God's name by calling him a "sky daddy" and seek to shame anyone who believe in God. The truth is that there is no shame in anyone believing in God who created the Heavens and the Earth. It's our responsibility to not only show the truth for future generations. We have to live by what we stand for in spiritual terms. That means we should promote peace, have soberminded, control our tempers, seek justice, and follow a righteous life. The doctrines of the Holy Gospel are just as powerful now as it was thousands of years ago. During the days of Tiberius Caesar and Pontius Pilate (the governor of Judea), Jesus Christ established miracles, debated scholars, and saved souls. The apostles and other disciples grown. Later, Yeshua was crucified, rose from the dead, and rose into Heaven. Jesus Christ said that he wanted his disciples to teacher and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. One of the early converts to Christianity was a black man who was an Ethiopian (from Nubia) being baptized by Philip. The persecution started early and often, John the Baptist, son of Zacharias and Elizabeth was beheaded in the castle of Macharus at the command of the Edomite Herod Antipas in ca. 32 A.D. Stephen, one of the seven deacons of the church in Jerusalem was stoned to death. James, the son of Zebedee was put to death with the sword by Herod Agrippa in Jerusalem by 45 A.D. Paul and Mark including other early Christians were executed. Therefore, we are inspired by the stories of these early believers to be bold, wise, and true to the faith.
The events of the Normandy landings including D-Day was one of the most important parts of human history. This occurred in 1944 during the start of the end of World War II. America got into the War just a few years ago, and the Allied Powers needed American help to defeat the evil Axis Powers. By this time, there was a debate on how America should invade France. America repelled Nazi forces in North Africa with help from the UK and other nations. Hitler couldn't conquer Russia, and the Axis Powers were on the ropes. There were many debates on how the liberation of France ought to take place. Yet, Allied Powers including the Soviet Union agreed that D-Day must occur. President Franklin Roosevelt was running for President again, and his popularity was in incredibly positive straights. Codenamed Operation Neptune, this exercise was the largest seaborne invasion in history. General Dwight Eisenhower was a key human being who organized the strategies and logistics on how the landings would occur in a focused, comprehensive fashion. Without his leadership, D-Day would have never existed in a victory. D-Day helped to liberate France and Western Europe from Nazi oppression and fascism. The Nazis committed genocide, promoted anti-Semitism, followed authoritarianism, agreed with racism, and harbor anti-democratic policies (that is antithetical to the pro-democratic views that we stand for). Two of my relatives were active members of the D-Day Normandy landings, so this story has a very special place in my mind and in my heart. Liberating people from tyranny is always a blessing. The sacrifice of the heroes during that historic occurrence was priceless.
For over 10 years now, I certainly have written about popular culture in an indepth fashion. In our time, the symbolism and the other messages found in popular culture hasn't declined. They have increased. Many artists may not know what they mean, but many producers, directors, and other people in the industry know exactly the multifaceted meanings of symbols utilized in popular culture indeed. Now, we witness a new generation of younger people knowing the truth from the mysterious They Cloned Tyrone film to the many messages found in movies, music videos, and television shows. The mainstream corporate media is known for lying constantly. We all know that. Many decades ago, the corporate media claimed that the Vietnam War would be a quick American victory during the 1960's. We know that not only to be a lie as tons of Americans and Vietnamese people lost their lives (including many Vietnam War veterans suffering emotional trauma to this day along with poisons harming the Vietnamese landscape). We know that the Vietnam War is one event out of many that the corporate media has lied about like some in that space saying that Iraq had massive quantities of weapons of mass destruction, and some are bold to say that no conspiracies existed in human history. We know that Operation Mockingbird is real which is about the CIA using agents in trying to infiltrate major media outlets (the mainstream media is influenced from the CFR, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, etc.). Like always, we should embrace subsequent balance. It is false to assume that everything is a conspiracy, and it is also false that no conspiracies existed in the Universe. Investigating the mysteries of life is truly an important way to understand ourselves. Once upon a time, we didn't know a lot of facts about the unique characteristics of DNA. Now, we realize (via mainstream scientific studies) that DNA can record and transmit information, that human beings have electricity, and atoms of the Universe are filled with massive vibrating forms of energy (as proven by quantum physics). While our knowledge about the world has increased in the past 30 years, we should be humble. A long time ago, we didn't understand this complex information. Therefore, we must give people the opportunity to know about the real world with empathy and a selfless attitude.
The essence of human is complex and exciting to know about. We human beings are the most advanced species of life in world history. We are the most widespread species of verbally talking human beings with highly complex language in the world. We have bipedalism, high intelligence, large brains (with cognitive skills that can develop complex societies, advanced civilization, and form abstract thought), and are highly social beings. We can form families, kinship networks, political states, and other forms of social interactions. Our values, social norms, languages, rituals, religions, cultures, and other ways of living have been very diverse. Human beings want to understand and influence phenomena which is why we can study and analyze subjects of science (being the first species to travel into Space including the Moon by our own inventions), technology, philosophy, mythology, religion, and other concepts of reality. The paradox of Homo sapiens sapiens is that we survived so much and lived in a such small span of time as compared to the time from the start of the Universe. The Universe started in ca. 13.5 billion years old, but humanity existed for thousands of years. Genes and the environment can influence human biological variation in the visible characteristics, physiology, disease susceptibility, body size, mental abilities, and life span. Any two human beings are at least 99 percent genetically similar. Most human beings are omnivorous or capable of eating a wide variety of plant and animal life. We can use fire and other forms of heat to prepare and cook food. The advanced prefrontal cortex of human beings cause us to be very intelligent. Likewise, humans are capable to do good and evil as history and experience teaches us. We have to promote goodness in the Universe. We can have episodic memory, have flexible facial expression, self-awareness, theory of mind, introspection, private thought, imagination, volition, and form views of existence. With our language, art, and trade being part of human existence, we have a unique role in the Universe. The question is what is the future of us? We will travel in the Moon, Mars, or beyond or will be stay on Earth. Only God knows that answer. What we do know is that in order to survive in the near future, we have to devise solutions to our complex problems from climate change, health care disparities, institutional racism, sexism, xenophobia, and to poverty. I am realistic about the future, but I have hope and optimism too.
By Timothy
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