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

Forty years since Fred Hampton’s murder

http://www.greenleft.org.au/2009/821/42212

Ben Courtice

5 December 2009


“I’m gon’ die for the People. ’Cause I live for the people. ’Cause I love the People. Power to the People!” — Fred Hampton.

40 years ago on December 4, 21-year-old Black Panther Party (BPP) leader Fred Hampton was murdered in his bed by the Chicago Police Department in an FBI-orchestrated raid.

Apparently drugged by a police agent who had been acting as his bodyguard, Hampton never woke up during the raid, despite police claims of a shoot-out.

This was at the height of the FBI’s campaign of violent repression against the BPP.

The BPP were founded in Oakland in 1966 as a response from radical Black youth to police violence — and to fight for Black liberation and socialism. The Panthers grew in popularity among Black youth and were targeted by an FBI campaign of infiltration, sabotage and violence. Dozens of Panthers were killed, or framed and jailed.

A brilliant orator and organiser, Hampton was one of the Panthers’ most effective young leaders.

Before his death, he had created alliance of groups called the “rainbow coalition”. This included Chicago’s largest street gang, the Blackstone Rangers (now known as Black P. Stone Nation), minority community groups, like the Puerto Rican Young Lords and the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

The Panthers captured the imagination of Black youth by standing up to the racist police that brutalised Black communities. BPP activists carried weapons openly as they “patrolled” the police to observe and prevent police brutality.

The popular image of a BPP activist remains one of a militant with a gun-in-hand, symbolising armed revolution. Yet, Hampton’s example shows the reality was different.

Hampton was a strong supporter of the rounded political approach the Panthers were developing. Not long before his murder, he denounced a rampage of vandalism in Chicago organised by the ultraleft Weathermen group in SDS, which wasfollowed by brutal police raids in the Black community.

White leftist Steve Tappis said that Hampton “told them to go off and organise breakfast programs or something”.

When BPP members patrolled the police, they did so with a gun in one hand (as they were legally entitled to do) and the law book in the other. Such audaciousness caught people’s imagination.

But their real support base developed in tandem with their programs of political struggle — mass rallies and electoral campaigns — and their Survival Programs, such as breakfasts for school children, buses for the elderly, and sickle-cell anaemia testing.


The Panthers also ran programs providing free food, clothing and shoes, legal aid, employment, and many more. BPP founder Huey P. Newton wrote that the programs were “not revolutionary nor reformist but a tactic and strategy by which we organised the people”.

Hundreds of thousands benefited from the Survival Programs.

Hampton explained Panther strategy in a 1969 speech: “A lot of people think [the Breakfast for Children program] is charity, but what does it do? It takes the people from a stage to another stage. Any program that's revolutionary is an advancing program. Revolution is change.

“Honey, if you just keep on changing, before you know it, in fact, not even knowing what socialism is, you don’t have to know what it is, they’re endorsing it, they're participating in it, and they're supporting socialism …

“And a lot of people will tell you … the people don’t have any theory, they need some theory. They need some theory even if they don't have any practice …

“We say that the Breakfast For Children program is a socialistic program. It teaches the people basically that by practice, we thought up and let them practice that theory and inspect that theory.

“What’s more important? You learn something just like everybody else.”

At their height, the Panthers were a force to be reckoned with. They had chapters in 47 cities around the US and their weekly newspaper reached a circulation of over 200,000 copies.

Despite FBI’s intense campaign of repression, the Panthers lasted through to the end of the 1970s.

In recent years, much of the often forgotten history of the Panthers has been published. In memory of Hampton, and all the other Panthers killed, exiled or jailed for decades (some are still there), it is a good time to re-read their history.

One recent book is The Black Panther Party Service to the People Programs, edited by David Hilliard (a founding BPP member) and Cornel West, published in 2008 by University of New Mexico Press.

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