Take the cumulative effect of American troops fighting “communism” in Vietnam, the fear of Russian influence and the House Un-American Activities Committee, Jim Crow laws, and overt institutionalized racial discrimination, and you have the perfect backdrop for a film like Judas and the Black Messiah. 

These tensions were extremely prevalent in Chicago in 1969, when the film takes place, yet are oddly familiar in our world today. Fred Hampton’s “message of grassroots liberation feels bold and current, as does his mistrust of the police and the state,” writes David Sims in The Atlantic. As an NPR report points out, “You could call these movies timely, except that the issues they confront, from the exploitation of Black American culture to white supremacy in law enforcement, have never not been timely.”

Much like in the film, the Panthers endured repeated harassment from the local police at the behest of federal law enforcement. Even before Hampton became involved with the activist group, he faced multiple arrests for things like traffic violations. But why were the Panthers seen as such a threat? 

The idea that communism and/or socialism could make its way into American society was the FBI’s public reasoning behind targeting the group. It’s unlikely, however, that a white activist group of the same ilk would have garnered such attention. 

Fred Hampton miraculously brought three activist groups together in Chicago: the white, Southern Young Patriots, a local Puerto Rican group called the Young Lords, and his Black Panther Party chapter. Together, they were officially known as the Rainbow Coalition of Revolutionary Solidarity. Like in the film, Hampton convinced the groups to work together for a common cause: to keep the Chicago police honest and to keep them from further degrading their communities. 

“We got to face some facts,” Hampton said in 1969, according to an article in the Journal of African American Studies. “That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I’m talking about the white masses, I’m talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too… We’re gonna fight racism with solidarity… capitalism with socialism.” 

Hampton, a self-proclaimed revolutionary, saw a common cause that many could not. The Coalition served as a model for future powerful diverse organizations, such as the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC). 

The Crowns are a black Chicago gang in Judas, but it turns out they were fictional. The gang was, however, meant to represent an array of real gangs in Chicago at the time, according to Republic World. 

Many activist groups crowded the Chicago streets in the late 1960s and would at times clash over simple methods and approaches of how to achieve the change they sought. Much like the distinctions between the peaceful protest leader Martin Luther King Jr. and the more militantly inclined Malcolm X, there was consternation among the Black community on whether they should use violence as a potential self-defense tactic where needed. 

The Crowns represented one of the gangs that followed King’s teachings, and the BPP were more inspired by Malcolm X. They’re used as a sort of foil in the film as an intimidating rival to the Chicago BPP. We are first introduced to them in a bar scene where Fred and a few of his fellow Panthers approach the leader of the Crowns to attempt to broker peace and possible collaboration. 

Eventually, Fred did succeed in a similar effort with local Chicago outfits. In a tense scene of the film, Fred and the BPP visit the Crowns’ headquarters and are met with suspicion, but Fred’s charm ultimately wins the day. 

Among Fred Hampton’s loyal fellow activists in the film, and in real life, was his girlfriend, poet Deborah Johnson. She continued to be an active member of Chicago’s BPP after his death and later changed her name to Akua Njeri. Her story is a breath of fresh air, as it not only further humanizes Hampton’s character, but it depicts a woman’s perspective amid the tumultuous backdrop. 

“[A] lot of times when we think about these freedom fighters and revolutionaries, we don’t think about them having families … and plans for the future,” director Shaka King stated, per Smithsonian Magazine. “It was really important to focus on that on the Fred side of things.” 

Unlike most of the people depicted in Judas and the Black Messiah, Njeri is still alive. Njeri gave actress Dominique Fishback free rein to portray her in the film how she deemed fit, albeit with two pieces of advice: “One, that she did not cry when they assassinated Chairman Fred,” Fishback told the Los Angeles Times. “And she talked about how the Panthers were a very disciplined people and they didn’t speak out of turn, so there were just certain things that she wouldn’t have ever said to Chairman Fred.”

In the film, and in real life, Njeri became pregnant just short of nine months before Fred’s assassination. She gave birth to their son, Fred Hampton Jr., 25 days after the infamous FBI raid that left Hampton and other fellow BPP members dead and more of them injured. 

There is hard evidence that the FBI was following Fred Hampton and that they ultimately bore responsibility for his assassination with cooperation from the Chicago police. J. Edgar Hoover honed in on Fred Hampton because he sensed his star power and ability to manifest change.

Hampton’s story, and the FBI’s guilt, is only coming to the nation’s public attention now, thanks to the film. While some may find it shocking that the Bureau would so brazenly carry out such an attack on a U.S. citizen, others are hardly surprised, given Hoover’s particularly menacing reputation regarding the lives and demise of many public figures, including Martin Luther King Jr. 

Hoover claimed, according to UPI’s archives, that “organized terror and violence” disrupted the operations of over 225 institutions of higher learning from 1968 to 1969. Hoover had no boundaries and used everything from surveillance to infiltration to “protect” Americans from “violence-prone black extremists.” Ironically, some Americans, particularly the Black community, needed protection from Hoover.