So much baloney has been ground out about the political and cultural climate of the 1960s, it’s impossible for those who weren’t there to comprehend why anyone should care about its legacy. A stroll through the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and a perusal of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test can give you an accurate portrait of the music, fashions and intoxicants favored by your parents. The Vietnam War has been examined exhaustively.
But the war at home has been dealt with in a far more cursory manner. Radical groups didn’t exactly welcome filmmakers in to document their strategy sessions and political debates. So the access granted Mike Gray and Howard Alk during the filming of The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971, $24.95, ***) and American Revolution 2 (1969, $24.95, ***) was extraordinary. Looking back after 35 years of great social upheaval and middle-class retrenchment, these vérité studies of a revolution in the making reflect an urgency and commitment to ideals sadly missing today. The Murder of Fred Hampton also demonstrated what was at stake when threats of violence were met with real violence. Hampton, one of the most charismatic Black Panther Party leaders, made no secret of his willingness to use arms against the police and FBI. It was Gray and Alk’s original intention to showcase Hampton’s speeches and the less-threatening programs of the Illinois BPP, but a murderous police raid forced them to focus on the investigation into his death instead. The result was a damning indictment of vengeful cops, a deceitful state’s attorney and media only too willing to perpetuate an official account so flimsy that nail-heads were identified as Panther bullets.
In American Revolution 2, Gray documented how Chicago’s blacks, Latinos and whites came together to fight prejudice and injustice. Also included with the Hampton doc is Cicero March, a short film about blacks who marched into a predominantly white suburb. You can almost taste the venom of the residents’ racism.