FIFTY YEARS AGO YESTERDAY

This sonnet is part of an unpublished memoir-in-sonnets that I've been working on for too many years. and I meant to repost yesterday, the 50th anniversary of Chicago Black Panther Fred Hampton's assassination on December 4th 1969.  I met Fred at various radical activist gatherings in Chicago in the late '60s, mostly thanks to Mike James, a radical organizer of RISING UP ANGRY and its newspaper, for which I wrote many articles under my own name or anonymously or using a pseudonym. Fred was a seriously intelligent young man, an inspiring leader who could connect with every kind of person, which obviously made him a threat to the powers that be. 

In early December Fred Hampton, a young

Chicago Black Panther leader I knew and

admired, was brutally slaughtered with

Panther Mark Clark, when police raided

Hampton’s crib, after firing hundreds of

bullets into it, and into him, asleep in his

bed. It was the last straw. I’d objected to

Panthers calling police pigs, thinking of

cops in my clan who were decent, but this

time it seemed insulting to the actual pigs.

I wrote a poem called DON’T LOOK NOW

with the end couplet: like this short ugly

knife you are mine/Black Panther Fred

Hampton murdered in bed by pigs 1969.

—(C) Michael Lally 2017