Get to Know Me: Fred Hampton

It's the shortest month of the year, which means that it's Black History Month. So I'm going to devote the Get to Know Me's for February to African Americans you should get to know. (Don't worry, I'm sure I'll be back to educated white guys soon enough.)

Fred Hampton was a member of the Black Panther Party in Illinois. He was assassinated by the police, because, well, authoritarian police don't like radical politics. The police claimed that they were fired upon while trying to serve a search warrant, but we now know that this is false.

Everyone's heard of the Black Panthers (I hope), but just having heard of them does very little to communicate the actual, real challenge they posed to a violent government fighting a war of aggression internationally, and one of repression at home. They were teaching radical communism on the streets, while providing real services to poor people -- free meals, health care, social work, etc. They were not, as is popularly believed nowadays, anti-white black nationalists. They argued for all poor people, all people really, to unite and overthrow capitalism and were anti- black nationalism. (Though some individual members of the Black Panthers disagreed with the leadership.)

I don't agree with all their politics; I think Maoism and Vanguard Communism/Leninism more generally have a poor track record of leading to utopian anarcho-communism. I think anarchism gives a strong critique when it says that the intermediate stage Vanguardism/Leninism calls for of a dictatorship of the proletariat is unlikely to just up and "whither away" all by itself once it has absolute power, to say the least. Also, why not fight for the anarcho-communist utopia you want some day in the future rather than putting all your energy into fighting for a stage you only see as a means to an end?

But all these points are little quibbles when compared with how much I do agree with the message they had of empowering the people to change the government from one controlled by the powerful few to one controlled by the people.

So in honor of the Egyptian revolution, take a look at how surprisingly close we were just a few decades ago. Watch this video on Democracy Now on the fortieth anniversary of the assassination. Then watch this documentary made in the seventies about the Hampton's murder. The documentary drags in a few places, but it's well worth it to give a feel of the times.