December 4, 2020
Fred Hampton still deserves to be listened to
Fifty-one years ago today, Chicago police and FBI assassinated Fred Hampton and Mark Clark of the Black Panthers. If it happened in Central America, we’d call it “a right-wing death squad,” but it happened in the middle of Chicago, so today it would be called a “police-involved shooting.”
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had said “the Black Panther Party without question represents the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” They treated Hampton as such, and if you listen to him speak and see what he was doing, it’s obvious why he frightened them so much.
Hampton was 21 years old.
All Power to the People
Transcript:
https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/fhamptonspeech.html
Recitation (by Michael B. Jordan):
https://web.archive.org/web/20160123022140/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnCK8wBAiKw
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.
We ain’t gonna fight no reactionary pigs who run up and down the street being reactionary; we’re gonna organize and dedicate ourselves to revolutionary political power and teach ourselves the specific needs of resisting the power structure, arm ourselves, and we’re gonna fight reactionary pigs with INTERNATIONAL PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION. That’s what it has to be. The people have to have the power: it belongs to the people.
Akua Njeri, Widow of Fred Hampton, talking about the night of the assassination
Later the shooting stopped, “but Fred was not moving.”
“They (the police) grabbed my robe and started laughing, ‘Well what do you know, we gotta broad here!'”
“I was very pregnant. They grabbed me by the hair and slung me into the kitchen area. I heard them say, ‘He’s barely alive’ or ‘He’ll barely make it.’ Then the shooting started again and then they said, ‘He’s good and dead now,’ and I knew they had murdered Fred.”
Fred Hampton on Revolution And Racism
When you leave here, leave here saying, the last words, before you go to bed tonight, say, “I am a revolutionary.” Make that the last words in case you don’t wake up.
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