“I’m a cynical person,” says filmmaker Denis Mueller, “but it was much worse than I thought.” He learned about the systematic program of disinformation and repression launched against radical black groups in the late 1960s in the process of making a film.
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The term “black nationalist” should not be taken too literally here. By this time the FBI had already harassed Martin Luther King Jr., by no stretch of the imagination a black nationalist, for several years. (The FBI, confident of its ability to discredit King, had even–incredible as it seems–picked his successor, a man they wanted to groom to take his place as an inspiration to the black masses. Although rather obscure at the time, the person selected has become somewhat better known since: Samuel R. Pierce Jr., aka “Silent Sam,” Reagan’s Secretary of HUD.) And although the FBI did pay attention to nationalist and separatist groups like the Black Muslims, the bulk of their COINTELPRO resources were directed against the Black Panther Party, which far from being separatist went out of its way to make alliances with white radicals in what they regarded as a common struggle against the American power structure.
One instance of their methods can be seen in the case of actress Jean Seberg, a Black Panther supporter and financial contributor. In 1970, when Seberg was pregnant, the FBI began circulating rumors that the father was a prominent Panther. The item was printed, first by a Los Angeles gossip columnist, later by other newspapers, and finally by Newsweek. Seberg attempted suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills; she survived but the baby was born prematurely and died two days later. Seberg, never really recovering from these events and the press harassment that preceded and followed them, finally killed herself in 1979. These events are fairly well known, but equally vicious attacks (or worse) were made on hundreds, possibly thousands, of others, less well-known, who were involved in the struggle for black liberation in America.
And when we see Hampton talking, we see the power of the man, and perhaps begin to understand why the state felt it had to murder him. “We got to defend ourselves,” he says (not that he ever had a chance to do so). “In plain proletarian workers’ language, it takes two to tango. As soon as these motherfuckers go, we go.”
