Michael Steven Smith’s Notebook

Michael Smith’s review of The Assassination of Fred Hampton
[From Law & Disorder on WBAI 99.5fm NYC]

THE ASSASSINATION OF FRED HAMPTON: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther

By Jeffrey Haas, Lawrence Hill Books, $26.95, 376 pages, index

This is a remarkable work, a well told tale, a true crime story, a page turning legal political thriller which is as important for us to comprehend now as it was in the sixties.

Forty years ago this December 4th, National Lawyers Guild attorney Jeffrey Haas was in a Chicago jail interviewing Fred Hampton’s fiancee Deborah Johnson.  She was in her nightgown, pregnant, shaking and sobbing, barely having survived  the hail of 80 bullets that came into her apartment and into her bedroom, just four hours before.   She had  been sleeping at 4 in the morning next to Fred Hampton, the extraordinary young leader of the Chicago Black Panthers. She described to Haas how the police pulled her from the room as Fred lay unconscious on their bed. She heard one of the officers say, “He’s still alive.”   Next, two gunshots. A second officer said “He’s good and dead now.” She looked at Jeff and asked, “What can you do?”

Haas tells the story, interwoven beautifully with his own personal and political biography, of a truly amazing piece of movement lawyering. It took thirteen years of grueling litigation and political agitation outside the courtroom.  Finally, after an l8 month trial, which they lost, and an appeal to the Federal Circuit Court (Hampton v. Hanrahan, 600 F. 2d 600), which they won in a famous civil rights decision,  Haas, Flint Taylor, his Peoples Law Office collective, Dennis Cunningham, and Morty Stavis from the Center for Constitutional Rights,  finally nailed the FBI, the Cook County States Attorney Edward Hanrahan, and the Chicago police for their summary execution of the exceptionally promising - he was only 2l at the time - young black leader. “Who knows what he may have become, if they hadn’t killed him,” his mother Iberia Hampton told Jeff.

FBI head J. Edgar Hoover had an idea of what Hampton might become. He was concerned, in his words written in a Cointelpro directive, about “the rise of a new black Messiah.”  King and Malcolm had already been murdered.   Haas and Taylor uncovered the story about how the government killed Hampton and remarkably, at the end of the day, made them all admit guilt by paying his parents a wrongful death settlement.   It took over 37,000 hours of work.  What a truly amazing piece of lawyering, especially since Jeff was barely out of the University of Chicago law school at the time he undertook to represent the family, and Flint was still a law student at Northwestern. And more amazing still, considering that their law collective had no resources to speak of and were up against a mendacious stalling government whose litigation fund was unlimited.

Lenny Bruce used to quip that “Chicago is so corrupt it is thrilling.” It was run by the machine of Mayor Richard Daley, head of the Cook County Democratic Party, his true source of power.  The machine appointed the judges, investigators, “independent panels”, prosecutors, and police.  But Jeff, just out of law school, and Flint, still attending Northwestern, with little financial resources,  took them on, exposing the conspiracy to assassinate Hampton, the raid and the subsequent cover-up.

Fred Hampton, even at 2l, was an accomplished person. He worked a factory job and saved money to pay his college tuition.  Like Malcolm, he wanted to be a lawyer.   Fred was by all accounts a master orator.  He studied Malcolm’s speeches.  While in high school he founded a youth chapter of the NAACP.   When he turned l8 in l966 he refused to register for the draft, like Muhammad Ali, who famously said, “I ain’t got no quarrel with the Vietcong.  No Vietcong ever called me nigger.”     Hampton was well read, rising at least two hours before facing the day to read Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Mao, Marx, Lenin and DuBois.  Like them, he understood that “a revolution is a class struggle.  It was one class - the oppressed - versus those other classes - the oppressor.  Indeed it was this sort of radicalism - the advocacy of black power and socialism - that made him dangerous.  And Hoover knew it.  Black power for Hampton, as Haas  observes, was “not a tool to attack whites, but … a concept to bring blacks together and build their confidence.”

Hampton was targeted by the police and arrested several times on technical traffic violations.  After being arrested for “mob action” he was put on the FBI’s Key Agitator Index, (more…)

Michael Ratner on Talking with Sartre, Conversations and Debates
[from the radio show Law & Disorder on WBAI 99.5fm NYC]

Michael Smith and I have been reading John Gerassi’s new book, Talking with Sartre, Conversations and Debates.[1] The book is a shortened form of three years of on and off conversations Gerassi had with Sartre in the early 1970’s.  The book is utterly remarkable. It is as if you are  seated at the table with Sartre and asking him and debating with him questions on Marxism, existentialism, his life with Simone de Beauvoir, his depression, his plays, novels, political activism, and views about anti-colonial and revolutionary violence both before and after a revolution. In this short piece I write only about this latter subject—taken from the book– in which he takes positions which are almost never found in writings on the political left in the United States today. Even if one disagrees with Sartre, which Michael Smith and I do, it is a timely discussion in today’s world.

What Makes a Revolutionary?

Gerassi and Sartre discuss what makes a revolutionary. Sartre had great respect for Che and seems to have agreed with Che that “a true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.” However, Sartre also said that a revolutionary was possessed of both “hatred and love.”  Hating injustice and hating the enemy. Sartre believed it was necessary to hate the enemy in order for a revolution to succeed. As Sartre said,

“That’s very important hatred. Without it one stops too soon.  It happened in the French Revolution; I think it happens in every revolution, when those who do not hate the enemy suddenly say, Enough already, and stop short of accomplishing the complete restructuring of society, and the result is that the revolution is betrayed.” (56)

Executions in Cuba After the Revolution

Sartre then applies some of his thinking to the Cuban Revolution—at least from an ethical point of view. Gerassi asks Sartre about Fidel putting on trial the Batista torturers where the evidence of their guilt was overwhelming. Gerassi says that even Time magazine claimed the trials were a catharsis and saved the country from a bloodbath of vengeance. Presumably, this was because the people would have taken justice in their own hands and enacted vengeance without trials. But then 365 torturers were executed and that showed that Fidel was “not just a bourgeois reformer but a genuine revolutionary” and Time and the United States condemned him.  Gerassi then asks what Sartre thinks of the executions when all knew including Fidel that the real culprits were the owners of United Fruit, IT&T and other corporations for who Batista exploited the people of Cuba.
Sartre answers “that under an ideal situation, the torturers could have been rehabilitated.” But he agreed with Fidel that at

“that moment a bloodbath had to be avoided, and these torturers were scum, after all, so if executing them for their proven crimes, even if the president of IT&T is ultimately responsible, will avoid that bloodbath, then ethically their execution was justified….”

However, Sartre points out that had the trials taken place a year later and there was no risk of a bloodbath, “then no, their executions would not have been justified.” (98-99)

Counter Terror Against Terror

Sartre was consistent on the question of the morality of counter terror against terror. (This is not to say he recommended it as a tactic.)  He supported the FLN in fighting the French for the liberation of Algeria even if that meant killings on the streets of Paris. In the context he even believed the Baader-Meinhof group was “totally justified.”  As Sartre says, (more…)

A Salute to My Friend Dianne Feeley on Her 70th Birthday:

I got to New York City from Detroit in l97l to work in the publicity and sales department of Pathfinder Press.   Dianne was already there.  She came to New York from California to work with The Catholic Worker people. She knew Dorothy Day.   She left the Catholic Worker movement on the issue of abortion, becoming a revolutionary socialist and early feminist.  She joined the Socialist Workers Party, which in those days was a pretty good and promising outfit, and went to work at Pathfinder.

Pathfinder published a number of early feminist titles on history, literature, and anthropology.  Dianne was there during its halcyon days.  George Novack, one of the “New York Intellectuals” that Alan Wald wrote about,  was an editor. He was very fond and admiring of Dianne.  His companion Evelyn Reed wrote Women’s Evolution, about the pre-history of women, and their great accomplishments in advancing humanity.  Also an editor was George Breitman, who had come from Detroit and had edited Malcolm X Speaks and written Malcolm X:  The Evolution of a Revolutionary.  He too greatly appreciated Dianne as a young and thoughtful comrade.

We published books on the labor movement, like Farrell Dobb’s 4 volume history of the l934 Minneapolis strikes and the rise of the Teamsters and Fred Halstead’s definited history on the anti-Vietnam war movement, Out Now, Ernest Mandel’s Introduction to Marxist Economic  Theory, and books on John Coltrane and Lenny Bruce.  We also published more pamphlets than practically any other publisher except the government.

It was Dianne’s job to promote the books and pamphlets and mine to sell them.

I remember my first day.  Alighting from the 9th St. cross town bus, and walking over to our building at 4l0 West Street, which had been  an old ship repair building next to an elevated highway. We had raised the money and bought and fixed up the place.  It was on l0th St. and the West Side Highway, which in those days was a seedy industrial venue.  Now of course the neighborhood is quite fashionable.  The old SWP headquarters has been knocked down and in its place sit two toney all glass buildings by the famed archetect Richard Meirs.

But back then,  we, because all the work was paid for and performed by party comrades, redesigned the 5 story wreck.  In it we had Pathfinder’s office, as well as the offices of the SWP, the Young Socialist Alliance, the International Socialist Review, the magazine we published, the editorial offices of The Militant, our newspaper, the editorial offices of Intercontinental Press, a weekly Marxist news magazine, and the editorial and business offices of Pathfinder Press.  Our warehouse from where we shipped cartons of books was next door in a separate outbuilding.  Dianne was part of what we all proudly thought was “the big red machine.”

I opened the door, there was but one small sign for security purposes, identified myself, and was buzzed in and told to walk up to the 4th floor.  There I found Dianne in an inner windowless office, sitting behind one of four desks. The two others were occupied by Karolyn Kerry and Louise Armstrong. They both smoked.  Alot.  Dianne had the third desk and the forth was mine.  All mine.  I entered the hazy room, introduced myself, and sat down amidst the cloud.  There we spent several years and got to be friends and comrades.  And we got out a lot of excellent literature to the movement across the country.  Tens of thousands of titles.

Dianne moved on to Pittsburgh, going into industry, and then on to Detroit, where you all were lucky to be with her.  I remained in New York CIty, where I am active with The Marxist School and the Center for Constitutional Rights and occasionally write for Against the Current.    We were both expelled in the early 80s by a degenerated SWP, an act of liberation as we now see it.  After we were kicked out the kicker outers adorned our building with a huge 4 story mural of various revolutionaries.   Dianne and I joked that it was sort of a Dorian Grey event, for as they grew more into a shriveled sect, their building was festooned by the working class’ finest.

Dianne went on to do fine work for the movement, in her plant as a union activist, and in Solidarity, as is being recounted tonight.  She is an admirable accomplished woman of grace and kindness and of superior intelligence.   She and my wife Debby have remained on the same political wavelegnth for all these years.  We so much enjoy seeing her and hosting her when she comes to New York City.  We are sorry not to be here with you.

Dianne, you’re wonderful.

With comradely greetings,

Michael Smith
New York, NY
November l5, 2009