Fred Hampton

Today is December 4, the forty-ninth anniversary of the assassination of Fred Hampton. In the predawn hours of December 4, 1969, a death squad from the Chicago Police Department, working with the FBI, shot up an apartment where members of the Black Panther Party were living. An undercover agent had drugged Fred Hampton, the 21-year old chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, so he was not awakened by hundreds of shots coming through doors and walls. The police dragged his pregnant girlfriend from their bed, then shot him again. She heard them say, "He's good and dead now."

I was a classroom teacher from 1975 to 2000 and I did not let a December 4 pass by without explaining this story to my social studies classes. After the second Eyes on the Prize series came out on public television I was able to use the episode titled "A Nation of Laws?" to do this better than I could with my words. For the last decade, or so, I have been posting about this on Facebook.

But this post isn't about the murder of Fred Hampton, it is about teaching and learning. I won't see it this year, because 49 years isn't a round number and there won't be a huge number of social media posts about him. I'll see it next year. I will see a former student posting, as a rhetorical question, "Why didn't they teach us this in school?"

Now I know very well why that individual, whoever it will be, will have forgotten that, yes, I did. Yes, I did teach you about Fred Hampton. It will be because they never quite heard it. There is a profound difference between what I say aloud in a classroom as a teacher (what I "teach") and what my students learn.

In the years after 1989 I worked hard to incorporate this understanding into my classroom practice. I still hear former students who remember things that I don't even remember happening and don't remember things that I truly emphasized. But I hear fewer of them from the students I taught in the last decade before I became an administrator.

I write this here. I don't know if anybody will read it. But on Facebook and Twitter I remind people about Fred Hampton. I put it up less than an hour ago. People are already seeing it. Still trying to teach.