Forty Years Later, We Remember Fred Hampton’s Life and Legacy

http://www.racewire.org/archives/2009/12/forty_years_later_we_remember_fred_hamptons_life_and_legacy.html

By Juell Stewart

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the murder of Fred Hampton, a gifted leader and community organizer who was poised to become the Black Panther Party’s Chief of Staff before the Chicago Police assassinated him on December 4, 1969.

The late 1960s was a time of tremendous racial and economic upheaval in Chicago. Entire communities throughout the West Side of the city were completely devastated following the riots that were in response to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in April 1968. Four months later, the whole world watched as Chicago Police brutally assaulted protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Mayor Richard J. Daley and the City Council were systematically starving Black communities of resources like schools and jobs, which effectively served to disenfranchise an entire segment of the population and leave them out of

Hampton became involved with the Illinois Black Panther Party in November 1968, after completing a pre-law track at junior college and serving as a Youth Organizer for the West Suburban Chicago branch of the NAACP. He was a talented organizer who believed in the inherent power of the people to solve problems in their own communities. Despite the militant image the Black Panther Party has been saddled with in popular media, they were known throughout the Black community for providing free breakfasts for children, offering political education courses and monitoring police activity.

Above all else, Hampton and the Black Panthers believed that the only way to start a revolution was at the ground level. They were fighting against a reality that repeatedly pushed people of color to the margins and silenced any discourse they sought to have within the political framework of the status quo.

Hampton’s 1969 speech, “Power Anywhere There’s People” illustrates the urgency behind the Black Panther Party’s community organizing:

We got to face some facts. 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've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don’t fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don't fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism.

These are words that still ring true forty years later. They have particular resonance in this moment where immigrants and people of color are suffering in the aftermath of an economic meltdown that has pushed them even further towards the margins. Hampton’s legacy is one that reminds us that oppressed people can be empowered through activism and political participation. Though sometimes we may come up against challenges in the road to fixing this system, it’s important to always keep fighting.

Juell Stewart is a research intern with the Applied Research Center.

ebaadenews.blogspot.com