Judas and the Black Messiah
Fucking J Edgar, he’s always there in the background somewhere, scheming, always on the wrong side of history. Fred Hampton was a party leader at 21 years old, fucking hell.
Fred’s crime was being to the left of say Jimmy Carter, and therefore, unacceptably radical in the eyes of nutters like Hoover. His policies were popular, but he was also pragmatic and sought coalitions with other leftist groups like the Puerto Rican ghetto leaders, and the Appalachian hillbillies.
The scene with the big confederate flag is very powerful. “What oppressor, my father was a sharecropper!”.
The reaction to this was very much expected, with the hardest criticism coming from (you guessed it) infighting within the Left. Christ, that article is so depressing, not sure if that wasn’t written by an FBI informant, diggin.
This photo should have been included in the end. Pay attention to the smile on the cops’ faces:
There are several moments left out of the film. The informant’s identity was unknown until a couple years later, when he helped another guy murder some dude and dump his body in the river. For helping killing Fred, the informant got 200 bucks monthly, while the FBI handler got 300! No honour among thieves…
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.