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Almost exactly twelve years before the shooting death of Police Officer Daniel Faulkner, there was another shooting that led to the death of two young Black activists and that became famous and notorious to this day. In the early morning of December 4, 1969, fourteen cops of the Chicago Department of Police (CDP) broke into the Chicago Black Panther Party (BPP) chairman Fred Hampton's apartment on
Monroe Street which doubled as the local BPP's headquarter.During the raid that later on turned out to be organized by the FBI on false charges of the possession of illegal weapons based on reports by an informer who also supplied a floor plan of the apartment for the attackers, the police fired close to a hundred rounds whereas the lone person in the flat who was able to get off a single shot, BPP security officer Mark Clark, was already dying in a hail of police bullets as he reflexively pulled the trigger of his shotgun to defend himself and the other dwellers.
Hampton, who was sleeping in his bed, and Clark were killed, and four other Panthers were wounded. The seven survivors of the raid, including Fred Hampton's eight and a half months pregnant wife Deborah Johnson, were then brutally abused, arrested, and charged with the attempted murder of the attacking police officers.
But due to both the diligent efforts of the BPP to rectify the record and the brilliant work of some local journalists, the official story rapidly collapsed, and it became clear to all but the most blinded observers that the real victims in this case were the Panthers, and that they had been set up as the targets of a state operation that the famous linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky has called "a Gestapo-style murder." Not too long after the operation, it turned out that it had been organized not just locally, but on a national level, namely, by the FBI.
Shortly afterwards, on December 8, 1969, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), as it turned out later once again in conjunction with the FBI, mounted an eerily similar early morning attack on the LA offices of the BPP, including the party's main office on Central Avenue.
Once more the pretext was a search warrant gained on false information about guns and imminent danger, and once again the source was an informer who also supplied the attackers with a floor plan including the location of local BPP leader Geronimo Pratt's bed on which fire was to be concentrated according to the police plan. Luckily for Pratt, due to his painful back wounds suffered as a GI in Vietnam, he slept on the floor instead in his bed and was thus able to survive.
Different from Chicago, in Los Angeles the Panthers were able to fight back against the police, but of course they, too, finally had to surrender, with six occupants of their headquarters wounded and thirteen arrested. The above photograph shows how the office looked like after the LAPD and the FBI had finished their work.
A similar attack on Panther premises in Seattle, Washington, planned for January 1970 by federal agencies was canceled only after Seattle's Democratic Mayor Wes Uhlman blocked it, expressing concern over "Gestapo-type tactics" that could lead to a time when every citizen would have to fear "the knock on the door at 2 o'clock in the morning."
This was the situation when a young BPP member was assigned to report on the state terror directed against the BPP. This young Panther was none other than the then fifteen year old Mumia Abu-Jamal, then still carrying his original name Wesley Cook. In this function, he flew to Chicago, personally inspected the blood-soaked bed in which Fred Hampton had killed at point blank range by agents of the state, reported on the event for the party newspaper, and finally gave the keynote speech at the memorial for the slain Panther leader in Philadelphia in December 1969.
It was in this function that he talked to the Philadelphia Inquirer's reporter Acel Moore in an interview that was published on the paper's front page on January 4, 1970. And it was, quite obvious to anyone, in this interview that he approvingly quoted Mao Zedong's dictum that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, arguing that the recent events had indeed shown that Mao had been right about this. This is what Acel Moore reported:
""Since the murders,' says West [for Wesley] Cook, Chapter Communication Secretary, "Black brothers and sisters and organizations which wouldn't commit themselves before are relating to us. Black people are facing the reality that the Black Panther Party has been facing: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' Murders, a calculated design of genocide, and a national plot to destroy the party leadership is what the Panthers and their supporters call a bloody two year history of police raids and shootouts."
"Although there have been no shootouts between Philadelphia Panthers and police, Cook ["] says there could have been," continues the article, and the young Cook/Abu-Jamal is quoted as saying that during yet another raid carried out on weapons charges, this time in Philadelphia, the police "would have shot us then. Except we were all out in the community working at the time." Adds the reporter Acel Moore: "There were no visible weapons in the Headquarters, "but we can't hope to exist' he said "without some kind of protection.'"
From this, the contextual meaning of the "barrel of a gun" quote as an analysis of the brutal actions of the state that had happened so recently, together with conclusions about the necessity of self-defense, NOT as a strategic slogan guiding the actions of the Panthers, should be very clear.
But just this quote from exactly this article was brought in by prosecutor Joseph McGill during the sentencing hearing of Abu-Jamal's trial, when he started to cross-examine the defendant, and in the final parts of his Smerconish interview, he is still so proud of this that he drifts off in the fantasy mode with a vengeance and rhapsodizes about (1) Abu-Jamal being the author, not the interviewee of the article in question, (2) the Acel Moore article that quoted Abu-Jamal quoting Mao Zedong being a Panther publication authored by Abu-Jamal and most importantly (3) Abu-Jamal toting this slogan as a line of action for the Panthers, and particularly for himself.
The inevitable conclusion is that while (1) and (2) are just laughable -- and fantastic -- distortions, (3) is a deliberate and toxic lie which, it appears now, will be the core thesis of an equally mendacious and toxic film.
