Judas and the Black Messiah film changes a false narrative
Judas and the Black Messiah film changes a false narrative
The American media has attempted to define the Black Panther Party as a terrorist Black racist organization hell-bent on killing police officers and “Getting Whitey!” Judas and the Black
Messiah destroys that intentional distortion created by the status quo that ignored the assassination, the false imprisonment and the show trials brought about by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s COINTELPRO program. This is all embodied in the tragic murder of Fred Hampton, brilliantly portrayed by Daniel Kaluuya in this film under the nuanced direction of Shaka King.
The movie opens with a 1989 Interview from the documentary Eyes On The Prize of an obviously deluded William O’Neal, former Security Captain of the Illinois State chapter of the Black Panther
Party and a paid FBI Informant. It seemed like he was coming to grips for the first time with his role in the murder of Deputy Chairman of the Illinois State Chapter of the Black Panther Party, Fred Hampton. This was his first television interview on the subject after entering the FBI’s witness protection program. He appeared conflicted when asked how he would explain to his young son his activities on behalf of the federal government that led to Hampton’s assassination. Actor LaKeith Stanfield brilliantly captures O’Neal’s inner turmoil.
The film flashes further back in time to the late 1960s, when William O’Neal is a petty car thief posing as an FBI agent, until he is actually caught by real FBI agents and is offered a deal he could not refuse. Law enforcement’s usage of such strong arm tactics was common in the Black community, and was intended to cultivate confidential informants with the threat of prison time.
It has been reported that FBI Special Agent Roy Mitchell, O’Neal’s handler, had also cultivated nine other informants inside of the Chicago office of the Black Panther Party. But this movie only focuses on O’Neal’s activities and how he helped the federal government assassinate a 21-year-old charismatic community leader just a year and eight months after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; less than a year after the UCLA murders of two charismatic and effective Southern California chapter Black Panther Party leaders, Al Prentice “Bunchy” Carter and John Jerome Huggins.
In 1969, there was a huge leap in the number of confrontations between the Black Panther Party and local police agencies and their surrogates. These confrontations resulted in the death, imprisonment, or exile of party members across the United States, most notably in Los Angeles and Chicago.
The movie makes the direct link between FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his counterintelligence program COINTELPRO, whose mission was to “disrupt, discredit and destroy” progressive organizations including the Black Panther Party. Out of 295 COINTELPRO operations as revealed by the 1975 Sen. Frank Church committee hearings, 233 were directed at the Black Panther
Party. Jesse Premons, who depicts Special Agent
Roy Mitchell, effectively illustrates the FBI tactic of using informants to cast suspicion on innocent party members as informants. In one scene, Mitchell is disturbed to find the FBI turning a blind eye to the fact that their own informant, George Sams, tortured and killed Black Panther Party member Alex Rackley, after accusing him of being an informant. Sams was the FBI’s key witness against Bobby Seale when he went on trial with Ericka Huggins in New Haven, Connecticut for the murder of Alex Rackley.
Black Messiah makes clear that Fred Hampton was a victim of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program and that his assassination was ordered by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover himself. At the time of the making of this film, Hoover’s involvement in Fred Hampton’s murder was not proven. But recently released documents have directly linked Director Hoover in Hampton’s assassination.
While watching this film, it’s easy to forget that the average age of a typical Black Panther Party member was 19 years old. Many were as young as 16. Fred Hampton was only 21 years old. How did a 21-year
old become a first-rate orator, community organizer and effective leader of the Illinois State Chapter of the Black Panther Party? We know that he had been a NAACP youth leader in nearby Maywood, Ill. But what got him involved in politics? The radicalizing event for a whole generation of Black youth took place in 1955 with the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi.
The murderers, two white racists, were found not guilty by an all-white jury with the excuse that they did not believe that the body that Mrs. Till buried was the body of her son, but a corpse that she had dug up and that her son was alive in Detroit. It’s hard to imagine people can be so brazen. But then again, there are people today who believe Donald Trump is secretly fighting a criminal network of Hollywood elitists and Democratic Party members who are pedophiles and Satan worshipers who kidnap children and drink their blood and eat them to gain immortality.
A few weeks after their acquittal, the two white racists, sold their story about how they killed Emmett Till to a national magazine where they all but boasted about their role in his murder. This murder not only shocked the nation but devastated the Black community in Chicago. Fred Hampton’s mother had babysat Emmett Till. This might explain Fred Hampton’s early involvement with the NAACP in Maywood, which acted as a training ground for his activities with the Black Panther Party. As Dr. Huey P. Newton once said, “Without the NAACP there would have never been a Black Panther Party.”
But Hampton does not do this all by himself. The personalities of Bobby Rush and Ronald “Doc” Satchel should have been developed more. After Hampton’s assassination, Rush led the chapter for many years. The People’s Free Breakfast Program, The Jake Winters People’s Free Medical Clinic, the formation of the Rainbow Coalition that eventually led to the election of President Barack Obama, are all legacies of not only Fred Hampton’s leadership, but of the many people who worked, sacrificed and risked their lives as members of the Black Panther Party.
Party members became servants of the people in order to fight for a better life in unity against a white supremacist status quo that keeps us fighting each other over scraps and viciously attacks us when we move toward unity. Black Messiah accurately depicts Fred Hampton as a visionary who saw something better for all people and worked in unity for a better place in this world. The film gives a more realistic understanding of the Black Panther Party’s ideology, rather than the myths and hearsay that’s out there. And certainly
more realistic than the “police version” of events.
Black Messiah was well acted and well-written. Some of the interior shots were too dark for my taste, but I guess they were trying to set the mood. The tight editing and the music score created a stylized depiction that seemed to catch the feel of the community that Hampton was trying to build as he reached out to other communities to show them that we have a common struggle and that we can win if we fight together.
The movie also showed love and respect for the party’s work in our Black community — organizing and uniting us to work together to feed our children, to provide access to medical clinics and to realize the power of the people in unity. The party believed that people learn from example. That theory came with practice — not talk. We didn’t talk about hungry children in our community. We organized a breakfast program to feed hungry children in our community and showed the community that they could do this themselves.
This fact about the Black Panther Party was beautifully depicted in the scenes in which Bobby Rush rallies party members to rebuild their office that had been destroyed by the Chicago Police Department and community members come out to help. The movie tears apart the myth of the Black Panther Party as merely a Black nationalist-hate-white-people group. Or as Special Agent Mitchell says of the Panthers in the film, “they’re just like the Klan” — a false equivalency used by right-wingers and police to demonize the Black Panther Party and sow mistrust and confusion. Former members of the Black Panther Party that I’ve talked to enjoyed these points of authenticity, as did I.
At the end of the film, we return to William O’Neal’s interview with Eyes On the Prize as he tries to avoid the obvious. His role in the Black Liberation Movement was that of a “rat” working for the FBI as its instrument to assassinate Fred Hampton. When Eyes On the Prize aired nationally on Martin Luther King’s birthday, William O’Neal committed suicide. I imagine that that was the first time he actually saw himself. It appears he couldn’t stand what he saw and what his son was going to see — a personal myth destroyed.
Robert Lee Johnson is the author of Notable Southern Californians in Black History. He was formerly a leading member of the Compton branch of the Black Panther Party, a founding member of the Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA) in the 1970s. Johnson was a named plaintiff in CAPA v. Gates, a lawsuit filed against the LAPD on First Amendment grounds, exposing unlawful harassment, surveillance and infiltration of the progressive movement by LAPD agents.