Fred Hampton, Barack Obama, and the American Urban Poor
http://www.hnn.us/articles/121038.html
By Simon Balto
12-07-09
I remember moving to Chicago in the summer of 2007, a city and moment
charged by the excitement of the presidential candidacy of one of its
owna young, intelligent, and handsome African-American man committed
to organizing for the improvement of the social conditions facing the
Black community. For reasons that many of us within the progressive
community may recall, it was an invigorating time and
atmosphere. While living in the city, and in what now strikes me as
a fortunate coincidence, I spent my time studying another of its
native sonsalso young, Black, and handsome, and in similar
possession of an astute intellectual drive and devotion to his
community and his people.
December marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination of the
latter of these two profoundly impassioned and inspiring figures:
Black Panther Party (BPP) leader Fred Hampton, who was shot in his
bed in 1969 by Chicago police, with intelligence assistance provided
by the FBI. Within the Chicago community and among those who
struggled in efforts to combat the nation's glaring racial and
economic inequalities that remained intact despite the promises of
Civil Rights and the Great Society, Hampton was a brilliant and
heroic figure: a 21-year old self-described revolutionary who quite
literally spoke truth to power and inspired people who had been all
but abandonedor worse, condemnedby a large and powerful section of
broader America. His ability to organize and inspire people who were
often assumed to be beyond either organization or inspiration was
legendary to those around him. As activist and Party leader Elaine
Brown recalled, "You could not not be moved by Fred Hampton."
Contemporary and modern renderings of the Panthers as fundamentally
violent, racist, and incoherent dogmatists prove almost uniformly
false, and nowhere are these caricatures more glaringly inaccurate
than in the character of Fred Hampton. In Chicago, Hampton served as
chairperson of a BPP branch that organized some of the most
successful of the Party's Free Breakfast for Children programs in the
country. Under his leadership, Panthers there organized a free
medical health clinic for the impoverished Black community and forged
cross-racial solidarities with members of Chicago's other
underprivileged communities. Hampton was fond of extending the
traditional Panther slogan of "Power to the People" to an explicitly
inclusive level: "All Power to all people. White Power to White
people; Brown Power to Brown people; Yellow Power to Yellow people;
Black Power to Black people." And despite caricatures of Party
leaders and members as prone to violent criminality, when Hampton
went to prison, it was for allegedly stealing ice cream and
distributing it to neighborhood children.
The promise and the hope that Fred Hampton embodied for so many poor
people in Chicago and elsewhere, both of color and not, is, I fear,
difficult to locate in today's America; and for that, sadness around
the theft of his life must endure. For many of those who would be
left behind as the nation continued to abandon Chicago and its other
inner cities, the Chicago police literally shot dead one of the last
great sources of hope while it slept on that December night. In the
forty years since, the residents of those inner cities have been
increasingly marginalized, demonized, terrorized by a Reagan-era
military approach to crime control, devastated by Clinton-era attacks
on social welfare programs, and blamed for the "decline" of the
cities that segregation, deindustrialization, underemployment,
selective policing, overaggressive incarceration, and non-investment
have wrought.
When I had the opportunity to meet Fred Hampton's brother Bill
Hampton during my time in Chicago, one of the things that he offered
was a photographed image of a picture of his brother and Jesse
Jackson together at a Chicago-area gathering shortly before Hampton's
death. I thought back to this image last November as television
camera crews repeatedly turned to Jackson standing in Grant Park with
tears streaming down his cheeks as he listened to Barack Obama's
victory speech. I thought of tortured hopes and murdered young men,
a list to which the federal government and Chicago police added Fred
Hampton forty years ago. And I thought of a chance to begin a
restorative process, a chance to make government good again. I
believed in changes and hopes promised, and as I watched Jesse
Jackson, it looked like he did, too.
Of course, Barack Obama is not Fred Hampton, nor does a narrow
paradigm of "young, Black, intelligent, Chicago-area community
organizer" capture the social circumstances or personal
considerations of either. Late-1960s Chicago is not modern-era
Chicago, less so is it modern-era America. Hampton's Chicago public
school education was not Obama's Ivy League, nor was the Chicago
Black Panther Party's Madison Street office the White House.
And maybe some would say that, in an era of continued imperialism and
international warfare, and in a nation with economic, climatic, and
health care crises alike, there are bigger concerns than dwelling on
the condition of America's urban poor; there are certainly louder and
more powerful voices drawing attention to those other issues. But
roots run deep, and Hampton's and Obama's cross and intertwine at
important places, one of which was a crucial understanding that the
nation's poor had few others who would speak for them.
So, finally and in memoriam, here's to a hope that, nearly a year
into Obama's presidency and forty years after the killing of Fred
Hampton, the President will find strength to excavate those roots,
and extend his hand once more to those who haven't been offered one
in so long. It is, admittedly, but a moment of reflective optimism
in an era of understandable cynicisma hope that, in regard to the
nation's poor, everything's not lost, and that the community
organizing beginnings from which Obama came still resonate within his
consciousness and political agenda. It is a hope that he will
remember those on Chicago's south and west sides and in similar
circumstances across this nation, and revive the spirit and promises
of midcentury social progressivism. It is, ultimately, a hope that
he will, as Fred Hampton once said, "[go] into the valley knowing
that the people are in the valley, knowing that we originally came
from the valley
.Our friends are in the valley, and even though it's
nice to be on the mountaintop, we're going back to the valley."
--
Mr. Balto is a graduate student in History and Afro-American Studies
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He may be reached for
comments at [email protected]).
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