When Lakeith Stanfield heard he might be offered a role in Judas and The Black Messiah, he assumed he’d play Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. Although crestfallen at first when given the part of FBI informer William O’Neal, Stanfield soon understood that his was the more challenging of the staring roles and rose to the occasion of playing a complicated villain.
Judas and The Black Messiah is an imaginative yet factual dramatization of a particular chapter in the FBI’s COINTELPRO project, designed by the agency’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, to disrupt and discredit radical groups from across the spectrum. In the late 1960s he focused COINTELPRO on the New Left and Black organizations. He is the unnamed director (Martin Sheen) whose appearances are threaded through the film, the dark lord governing the shadow side of the American system. He keeps tabs on everyone and is concerned with the rising influence of a young Black Panther Party activist from Chicago, Fred Hampton.
Endowed with charisma and purpose by Daniel Kaluuya, Hampton is absolutely certain of himself, positive that he is on the rising tide of history. His hidden nemesis, O’Neal, is by contrast a man with no plan beyond survival. O’Neal is a brash criminal, a car thief who falls into the hands of FBI Special Agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons). The cherubic-looking agent makes the hustler an offer: infiltrate the Black Panthers or seven years in the pen. And we expect useful information!
O’Neal’s relationship with Mitchell is just as interesting as his relationship with Hampton. Mitchell is mild mannered and moderate in his views. He even invites O’Neal to his home, an unusual crossing of the racial divide in 1969, and mentions his role in arresting Klansmen in Mississippi a few years earlier. When he learns that another agent’s informant accused a Panther of spying for the FBI, and had the innocent man tortured and killed by his comrades, Mitchell winces but says nothing. He’s a company man; in his mind, a team player in a deadly contest for America’s future.
The Black Panthers were formidable opponents at their inception, tightly organized and disciplined. O’Neal is forced to do 10 push-ups for disrespecting a “sister.” The Panthers had style with their black berets and short leather coats, but they weren’t just posing for cameras or holding rallies. Along with public protests, they rolled up their sleeves and ran daycare centers, clinics and soup kitchens. The Panthers originated in California, where open carry laws allowed them to patrol inner city streets as vigilantes protecting black residents against the cops.
Quoting from Mao’s Little Red Book, the violence of the Panthers’ communist rhetoric collided with the intransigence of racism and an economy that benefitted the majority in those days. Their call for revolution was part of the era’s will to change, but most Americans wanted only small changes. Breaking with Martin Luther King’s carefully modulated moderation and appeals to the conscience of white America, the Black Panthers saw themselves as part of an international rising of the proletariat; Hampton’s Illinois “Rainbow Coalition” began to bring rival Black groups together with Puerto Ricans and white Southern migrants. This was what Hoover most feared—an uprising of the despised, the wretched of the Earth in his eyes.
When the Panthers targeted Chicago cops who abused Blacks, the police struck back with blunt force in well-orchestrated raids and shoot-outs. The FBI lurked in the background. For Hoover, a living martyr in prison such as Huey Newton represented an ongoing threat. A few days after the funeral, a dead martyr was just another name on a tombstone.
In Judas and The Black Messiah, Hampton is the heroic true believer determined to drastically change the world. His opposite, O’Neal, would normally be at home in the world as he found it. If the cops hadn’t caught him, he’d still be hot-wiring cars. Instead, O’Neal insinuates himself as a comrade of the Panther Party, rising in rank within their hierarchy while chanting revolutionary slogans with guilty eyes. Maybe he became a believer?
It ended well for no one and the story the Panthers told of institutional racism still has no conclusion. “You can kill a revolutionary, but you can’t kill the revolution!” Hampton chanted. To his surprise, the system managed to do both.
