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Earlier this month, “Judas and the Black Messiah,” Shaka King’s chronicle of commitment, love, and betrayal inside the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, opened in theatres and began streaming on HBO Max. The film arrives at a charged moment, during a Black History Month in which the traumatic memories of the summer of reckoning are still fresh, and questions raised by the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of the police remain unresolved. King started work on “Judas and the Black Messiah” four years ago, but those same contemporary questions are an inescapable subtext to the film and the killing at the center of it. The thriller is also a stark departure from King’s début feature, “Newlyweeds,” an exploration of weed culture through the lens of a couple whose love of each other is equalled only by their love of marijuana. By contrast, “Judas and the Black Messiah,” which depicts the relationship between F
Judas and the Black Messiah misses the mark in its portrayal of Fred Hampton
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Judas and the Black Messiah misses the mark in its portrayal of Fred Hampton | Culture
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Fred Hampton led Illinois’s Black Panther Party from 1968 until his death the following year. His killing remains the subject of much scrutiny, as Hampton died after Chicago Police officers raided his West Side apartment on the morning of December 4, 1969. The police fired 99 shots, killing the 21-year-old Hampton and his fellow Panther, 22-year-old Mark Clark. The Panthers fired just once.
Shaka King s new biopic,
Judas and the Black Messiah, focuses on Hampton and the events leading up to his death, as well as the role paid informant William O’Neal a Black man who served as chief of security for the Black Panther Party played in helping the FBI infiltrate the Party and obtain information on Hampton, including the layout of his apartment. Here are 10 facts about Hampton and the enduring legacy he created in his tragically short life.
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My parents told me about Chairman Fred Hampton when I was a kid. I grew up in New York City in the 1980s and ’90s. The New York of Run-DMC, Jean-Michel Basquiat and the Limelight. But also of Michael Stewart, Eleanor Bumpurs, Bernard Goetz and Amadou Diallo. And Rudy Giuliani whom real New Yorkers have always hated. Police brutality was an inescapable though largely intellectual constant for me.
But beginning with Oscar Grant’s 2009 murder in Oakland, the ubiquity of cellphone cameras made police killings a visceral reality for white Americans, like me, who’d had the privilege of formerly considering them merely an upsetting conceptual fact. For Black Americans, of course, state-sanctioned and -condoned violence has been an immediate, chronic and existential threat for over 400 years.