Breaking The Cycle (October 1992 | Volume: 43, Issue: 6)

Breaking The Cycle

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Authors: The Readers

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October 1992 | Volume 43, Issue 6

About one week after the rebellion and looting that took place in South-Central Los Angeles as a result of the Rodney King verdict, I was watching the news when a young man was handcuffed and placed in a police car. The announcer said, “The son of slain Black Panther leader Fred Hampton has been arrested on charges of looting in last week’s riots.” For a quick moment my mind rocked. The son of Fred Hampton living and looting in SouthCentral L.A. How could this be? How is it that of all the people rebelling, the police were instantly able to pick out the son of Fred Hampton? I relived the past anger that seems constantly to be at the forefront of black people’s lives. Will society ever wake up? Will racism and inequality ever be abandoned? In the brief moment the son of Fred Hampton appeared on my television screen, I saw him as a nice-looking, angry black man and I wondered was he like his charismatic father? Did he stand for revolution? Did he hope to help the people? What has he been doing all these years? Questions I might never have answers to, yet, I will always wonder …

On December 4, 1969, Fred Hampton and his associate Mark Clark were slain execution-style in Chicago in a police raid dispatched by Cook County State’s Attorney Edward Hanrahan. I was a sophomore in a high school near there at the time. I recall entering their West Side apartment where the door, walls, windows, and mattresses were riddled with bullets and soaked with blood. I can remember my outrage and the outrage of my peers. In this case, as in the Rodney King trial, the policemen were tried by a jury with no black members and to this day no one has been held responsible for the deaths of two African-American men.

Twenty months before the Fred Hampton and Mark Clark raid, on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot to death. At that time, because of all the same pressures and frustrations, reasons and excuses, involved in the rebellion in South-Central L.A., we too reacted. I recall a long line of my high school peers running, screaming, looting, damaging buildings down Eighty-seventh Street on Chicago’s South Side. Many of those buildings stayed boarded up for years. I was among them and I too looted and destroyed and wanted badly to hurt anyone who dared to be white and in our path at that moment. Most of us from the 1968-69 era are now adults and parents. What legacy have we left for our children to follow? And what contribution could I make to end this perpetual cycle of negativity and destruction?

As I watched the rioting and looting from my safe home in Chicago, Illinois, during the week of April 29, I felt numb, almost unconnected to the events. I understood why it was happening, but I felt too helpless