You can jail a revolutionary: the Black Panther Party's 1969 poster for Fred Hampton

A 1969 memorial poster from the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party in Chicago. A large portrait of Fred Hampton, the chapter's deputy chairman, sits beside a line of slogans, and the caption says he was "Murdered By Fascist Pigs Dec. 4, 1969." Library of Congress, item 2015648390.

Content note: this poster mourns a man killed in a police raid and calls the police "pigs." The words are quoted as printed.

The poster

Blue rays fan out behind a large portrait of a young man. A second, smaller figure speaks into a microphone. The slogans run up the left edge in capitals, three sentences built on one pattern, and a caption block gives the man's name, office, birth date, and the date and manner of his death as the party saw it. The chapter's street address on West Madison is partly illegible.

YOU CAN JAIL A REVOLUTIONARY, BUT YOU CAN'T JAIL THE REVOLUTION. YOU CAN RUN A FREEDOM FIGHTER AROUND THE COUNTRY BUT YOU CAN'T RUN FREEDOM FIGHTING AROUND THE COUNTRY. YOU CAN MURDER A LIBERATOR BUT YOU CAN'T MURDER LIBERATION.

Fred Hampton Deputy / Chairman Illinois Chapter / Black Panther Party

Born August 30, 1948

Murdered By Fascist Pigs

Dec. 4, 1969

I AM A REVOLUTIONARY

Who made it

The Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party in Chicago, which printed its own name and address. FRAME classes the source as openly identified. The Library of Congress copy is recorded as a U.S. publication without a copyright notice, with no known restrictions on publication. By the dates it prints, Hampton was twenty-one when he died.

How to read it

FRAME tags the poster name-calling, and the tag is accurate. "Fascist pigs" is an epithet for the police who carried out the raid, and "murdered" is the party's verdict on a death that the poster does not otherwise describe. The record here goes no further than that: it says Hampton died in a police raid on 4 December 1969. It does not say what happened in the raid, who planned it, or what any court later found, and those gaps stay open here. A reader should take "murdered" as the charge of the people who lost him, made in the open under their own name.

The slogans are a different kind of claim. They argue that a cause outlives its members, a claim movements often make over their dead. The rhythm is the method: three pairs, each turning a verb from the person to the idea.

Two things can be said plainly. First, the poster is protected speech. A party that calls the police pigs and its dead leader a martyr is saying something many readers find ugly, and the First Amendment protects it anyway. Second, when police kill a citizen in a raid, the public is owed a full and independent account, whatever it thinks of his politics. The same rule this site applies to the FBI's covert programs, which by 1968 ran a Black Nationalist program in 41 field offices, applies here. Hampton's name does not appear in the record cited there, so no link between the two is drawn. The poster closes the period gathered on US civil rights era messaging, 1954–1969, which opens with a 1954 government poster of Lincoln and a promise of equality.