Guerrilla History - The Fred Hampton Assassination & Judas and the Black Messiah - From the Archives

Episode Date: September 2, 2022

Guerrilla History "From the Archives" is a series of episodes, consisting of previously patreon-exclusive episodes that we are unlocking for the general public after one year.  This From the Archives episode was originally released on Patreon on April 2, 2021, and is about the Fred Hampton assassination, some new information that had come out around the time of the recording of the episode, and the docudrama Judas and the Black Messiah.  Join us for this very fun conversation! You can support Guerrilla History by joining us at patreon.com/guerrillahistory, where you will also get bonus content!

Hello, guerrilla history listeners. This is Adnan Hussein, one of the co-hosts of guerrilla history. Every month, as you know, we record a reconnaissance report, a major episode with a guest about their historical work, as well as an intelligence briefing, a shorter discussion, usually among the three of us. Occasionally, we also post a dispatch from the field of contemporary left history, often with a guest about a breaking story or a recent set of events or issues, and provide some historical analysis. We also typically record a second intelligence briefing as an exclusive episode for patrons, subscribers at patreon.com slash gorilla history.

We have decided to unlock an intelligence briefing each month after a year has passed as special from the archive episodes for you to enjoy. We hope you'll find these a useful resource. Of course, if you'd like to subscribe and have early access to intelligence, and all the other additional content like readings and discussions of classic texts, primary sources, reviews and discussions, do become a patron at patreon.com slash gorilla history with our gratitude. We do this because we love to make history a resource in our political education as an activist global left and in our struggles for justice. So we're happy to share

these older episodes with you in this series from the archive. As ever, Solidarity. You remember din bamboo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to guerrilla history.

Today we're having an intelligence briefing. This is going to be a Patreon exclusive intelligence briefing on Fred Hampton and the assassination of Fred Hampton. And it's going to be pretty short for you listeners because our co-host Brett has done some excellent content on Fred Hampton in the past that we're going to be directing you to a lot. But we just wanted to take this opportunity to have a conversation between the three of us on Fred Hampton and his assistant. assassination, especially considering there's a new movie out on him and some new documents that have been released via FOIA requests that Brett has also covered. So, as always, I'm your host, Henry Huckimacki, and I'm joined by my co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada.

Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm well. Great to be with you, Henry. Always nice to see you as well. And I was joined by Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio. and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett.

How are you doing today? I'm doing great. Always happy to talk about the wonderful Fred Hampton. Oh, you know it. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while, and I'm very glad to be able to talk to you both about Fred Hampton, especially you, Brett, because you really have done some great work in highlighting the life and legacy of Fred Hampton in the past.

So, of course, listeners, I'm going to give you the 15-second convincing. condensed version of who Fred Hampton was because if you want Fred Hampton's life, go to the Revolutionary Left radio episode that highlights Fred Hampton's life. And you'll get a more in-depth look there. But in brief, Fred Hampton was the chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. He was deputy chairman of the National Black Panther Party. And he was the founder of the Rainbow Coalition, which of course was the group that brought together these radical groups from different ethnic groups.

So you have your Black Panthers, you have your young lords, you have your young patriots, trying to bring them together to fight for societal change in a way that would be equitable for all of those involved. And of course, Fred Hampton achieved all of this before the age of 21 because he was assassinated by the government of the United States at the age of 21, murdered in his sleep by the state. So Brett, I'm going to turn it over to you since you've already done a couple of episodes on Fred Hampton in the past to give us kind of however much you want to lay out Fred Hampton's legacy and any initial thoughts that you want to get the conversation rolling with. And again, listeners, if you haven't listened to the two episodes that Brett has done

on Fred Hampton for Revolutionary Left Radio, go back and listen to those before you get into this conversation because it'll give you a good grounding for the conversation that we're going to have. Yeah. So, I mean, I think most people listening will probably have some familiarity with Fred Hampton so we don't need to retread all the basics and there's plenty of resources out there and it's interesting with this new film plenty of critiques abound and obviously those are always going to be fair and fascinating to dive into but it is this it's it's in this larger movement especially after the the protests of last summer in which many of these black leaders who for decades were suppressed fringe figures that you know probably only people really in the black

community knew about, loved, preserved the memory of, and continue to be inspired by, but mainstream popular culture ignored for obvious reasons, not least of which is because the American government killed figures like Fred Hampton and had their hands in killing people like Malcolm X and MLK, etc. But there is this now, this revisiting of race and inequality. And a lot of the problems that Fred Hampton and others like him were trying to address at the time are coming back up. And therefore, these figures are coming back. back up into mainstream American culture in ways that I don't think that they really ever have been in the past, at least not in the robust way that they are. I can't imagine, for example,

a big publicly accepted film about a black radical that doesn't, in many ways, I don't think de-radicalize, right? Like, there wasn't a complete whitewashing. You can critique some elements of it, for sure. But there was, like, this presentation of his radical politics that is pretty interesting And previous times wouldn't have been allowed. But again, I just think it's really important to remember. He was only 21 when he was assassinated by the U.S. government, the FBI working with informants and the local police department in Chicago, taking him out. He was obviously shot and killed in bed after being drugged by an FBI informant next to his pregnant fiancé.

And that's horrifically brutal and inhuman and goes to show the inhumanity of the American government at the local and federal level. But just to imagine, like, you know, how quickly he was taken away from us. His entire life, even through high school, was dedicated to other people, was dedicated to education, was dedicated to serving, was dedicated to organizing. This is somebody who was really selfless in a profound way, which is alien many people a living today to be that invested in liberation for other people, that it becomes your entire life. and I would also before I before we hand it off and talk about a bunch of other elements of him in his life you know I said I think of him as an organic intellectual in the Gramscian sense somebody who you know did not have the advantages of wealthy white people in a white supremacist society in fact had every disadvantage levied against him and still at such a young age was able to educate himself and then importantly turn around and educate other people in a way that connected with them that spoke to the

their actual experiences, and that inspired them to get involved in their own liberation. And that element of being an organic intellectual and being able to put that intellect in service of liberation for other people, end up and against the dominant hierarchies and power structures at the time is not only utterly necessary, but profoundly courageous. And also in the Lenin sense of being a professional revolutionary, this idea of people who, you know, in a party apparatus are funded by the party to go out, agitate, and organize for the advancement of revolution. Fred Hampton is a sort of archetypal figure of, I think, what Lennon had in mind when he talked about a professional revolutionary and what we should all have in mind when we think about a revolutionary leader, somebody that is a leader not because he wiggled his way into someplace in the hierarchy or because there's corruption and nepotism, but solely based,

on his own virtue, his own talent, and importantly, the credibility that he had from the community from which he arose. That's what made him a leader. And that's the sort of leadership structure and archetype that I think we should promote and want amongst our midst. Speaking of leadership, I'm going to jump in here for a second. I just want to re-raise the Rainbow Coalition for a second because I have always, thought of the Rainbow Coalition as an organization or a system of organizations that really could have pushed for revolutionary change if it hadn't been for some, of course, factors that prevented it from really gaining any sort of traction in the long term. So, of course, when we're talking about

the Rainbow Coalition here, we're not talking about Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition. We're talking about Fred Hampton's rainbow coalition of socialist organizations in Chicago of different racial groups coming together to fight oppression of the state. And I think that it's important for us to understand that the oppression of one group is key to the oppression of the working class as a whole. In many cases, the oppression of blacks is you. this fodder for the state to turn other groups against one another. And this is why individuals that have fought for true revolutionary change, and I'm thinking here of Fidel Castro, for example, they were fighting for only one quarter of Cuba was black at the time. But by emphasizing the

struggle of blacks within Cuba, when the revolutionary change in Cuba took place, blacks actually had power in Cuba for the first time ever, at least since colonization, of course. That's why Stokely Carmichael called Fidel one of the blackest men in the Americas. And this was beautifully grounded in Walter Rodney's groundings with my brothers. Fred Hampton and the leaders of the young lords and leaders of the youth patriots were attempting to do the same thing. They were standing together across racial lines and standing up to the state apparatus as a whole, saying that not only is the state oppressing us as working class people, poor people, but the oppression of these different racial groups is a component

that is being used to divide us from one another. And by coming together, we are able to fight the oppression both of racial groups and of the working class at the same time. And it's really this struggle against both forms of oppression that could have in my eyes, and I'm not an expert scholar of this, but in my eyes, this dual battle against the oppression of racial groups and the oppression of the working class is necessary and essential to any sort of revolutionary change within society. And this rebel coalition was a method that they were looking at,

that would have had the kind of infrastructure in a place where they would have had these groups, these different racial groups coming together and fighting that two-line struggle, as it were, against this dual oppression. And the fact that Fred Hampton was assassinated about six months or seven months after the Rainbow Coalition was founded

really left it in, I don't want to say a leader, fearless state because of course there were other leaders and we have to view this as a movement rather than you know a cult of personality but the force of fred hampton force of fred hampton's ideology the force of fred hampton's leadership abilities the ability to bring in people and really coalesce around an idea rather than around a person was lost when he was assassinated and this rainbow coalition that was founded by fred hampton it fell apart to as well. And I think that if he had not been assassinated, of course, it might have still

fallen apart. It might have ended in nothing. But I think that the fact that he was associated guaranteed more or less that it was going to fail. I don't know if either of you guys want to want to say anything about that. Well, I think you're right to point out that there was a huge missed opportunity. This is part of the tragedy. It was already a tragedy when a great black leader was cut down in this way, especially one so young with so much potential. But I think it goes beyond just the black liberation struggle because, as you're pointing out, he had forged alliances and created solidities with other groups like the young lords, young patriots. I mean, we're struggling right now with thinking, how do we engage people who are left out of

contemporary consumer capitalist society, working? class people who are white. And we've talked a little bit about the January 6th insurrection or at least the attempted insurrection, the failed assault on the Capitol as expressing that there is discontent all across the United States. But yet on the left, we have not found ways to be able to mobilize and create those links so that we can create a genuine, broad-based movement. And instead, you know, we see the forces of reaction of neo-fascism gaining from the conditions

of a divided, fragmented left that no longer has a base in the working class with the rollback of unions and union power. And so we're struggling right now with exactly what it was he, Fred Hampton, seemed to be capable of creating, which were alliances across these lines that divide people. So that is a huge loss and something that we can learn from, you know, his example, but these are very fragile relationships, you know, to forge and create and to sustain. And so

even though I wouldn't want to say that Fred Hampton was the black Messiah as he was characterized rather fearfully by Jay Edgar, Hoover, and the FBI as potentially being and needing, you know, needed to be stopped. And we shouldn't imagine that it's just a cult of charismatic personality. That kind of thinking, of course, doesn't lead us in a positive direction. But at the same time, there's a reason why he was assassinated, is to put a halt to and to undermine these kinds of potentially transformative alliances and relationships that the Rainbow Coalition seems to suggest. So we had a wonderful episode with Vijay Prashad about Washington bullets. And just as the United States, through the CIA, has cut down popular leftist leaders

that had the chance in the third world to make extraordinary gains for their people and for a global you know, a globally just system, those people's movements were endangered by their leaders being killed. And that's the case domestically as well. There's a reason why Fred Hampton was assassinated because he was seen as a threat to the system. So even though we have to think in terms of movements, we also know that leaders with the proper vision and the capacity to create those alliances, and really foster that movement are not easy to come by. And so that's one of the tragedies of his assassination. Yeah, I'll just retread and elaborate on some of the points that you all made

because I think they really are the crucial points, which is one, first and foremost, the Rainbow Coalition, representing this effort to unite seemingly disparate struggles and importantly using class as the bridge to connect different, struggles often rooted in identity. So it's important to understand in the 60s, the rising up of the counterculture. You think of the 60s as the hippies, but that's a cultural thing. Politically, the 60s were very radical. And the things that came out of the 60s in the U.S. were these more militant formations, often rooted in some form of Marxism, and these subsequent

and synonymous and parallel movements of identity-based concerns. the generation of, you know, LGBTQ identity of women's liberation, of black liberation, the American Indian movement around indigenous liberation, the young lords, brown berets, right, all members of the Rainbow Coalition more broadly. And so there was this attempt to unite against all those struggles and to do both, right? You take the identity-based struggles, which are absolutely crucial and important and very much essential, and you unite them through a class struggle against the overarching political structures. Now, what has happened, and doing that, by the way, and this is what was made Fred Hampton so wonderful,

he united with somebody like the young patriots without diluting black liberation one bit, right? There's not an ounce of dilution that came with this Rainbow Coalition. And that also is very important because there is a fear, often based in reality, that black and brown identity struggles when united with white people, sometimes the chauvinism inherent in whiteness in a white supremacist society will come to dilute or even denigrate and prevent, put limits upon at the very least, if not straight out, prohibit the actual revolutionary and liberatory edge of some of these more repressed,

marginalized groups. And I think what the Rainbow Coalition represented was an attempt and an achievement of being able to do that to some extent, as short-lived as it was without that dilution. And that's what we should fucking aim for, 100%. But anyways, in the 60s, this struggle comes out of both ends. And then what happens in the subsequent decades, you have the Reaganism reaction and the dormancy of the 90s.

And then the Iraq War and the Great Recession is coming back of left-wing militancy in its various forms. But now liberalism has co-opted the identity part generated from the 60s and has actually been able to formulate it into a weapon, against the class part that was, you know, the class militancy that was not generated in the 60s because, of course, it was way before that, but in the way that it manifested in the 60s. And so now you do have this liberal co-option of identity to be used as a bludgeon against class politics and anti-imperialist politics, which is an adaptation made by the left

wing of liberalism, right, to protect capitalism overall. And this is done subconsciously, unconsciously at a more collective level. It's not like individual, although some do exist, but it's not like individual liberal politicians and media pundits think through this conscious strategy. It's just, well, the identity thing can be used and be melted into capitalism just fine without threatening my position in the hierarchy, but the class stuff can't. So how can we use those two things against each other? And I think that's something that we're still struggling with. And then I'll let somebody else talk, but I did want to say something about Adnan's point about leaders in movements, but I'll shut up for a second.

I'll just chime in for one second before I turn it over to Audenon. Brett, thank you for articulating what I was trying to say much better than I did in terms of not co-opting black revolutionaries and dropping the racial component of the struggle. What we need to be looking for is bringing in white groups, other racial, minority groups into the struggle for black power in addition to fighting for economic justice and systemic justice. We have to bring those people into black power. We can't take black groups into the fight for economic justice and leave them alone fighting for black power or telling them table that for now until we have economic justice. The struggle for black power

is a multi-ethnic struggle. And one of the ways I think to do that structurally is to have Black leadership, indigenous leadership in revolutionary struggles as a structural preventative barrier against the dilution or the reemergence of white chauvinism, etc. And I think you see movements that are not black and indigenous led and you compare them with movements that are and you do see a real difference in how effective they can be and how they can maintain a revolutionary sharp edge and marry it to a certain sort of efficacy that largely white-led movements or white-dominated movements are unable to generate. Well, that's what's so impressive about Fred Hampton's example is that, as you pointed out,

Brett, it was not compromising in any way. Quite the opposite, what it seems to have achieved is that it helps start transform the nature of the politics of the young patriots to be able to move beyond a kind of white supremacist and white nationalist racist basis for their own politics and advocacy is it kind of helped transform them into allies working against racism and that's what you want is you can start with things that and an analysis where they can see the commonalities and that should be the basis for transforming some of these false consciousnesses and said it seems that on the left these days instead of having that courage or maybe we've just lost the ability to communicate effectively about those common goals and our analysis of

the situation is that instead we're afraid to actually engage because we're not actually maybe prepared to be able to help transform other people in their thinking. We don't have the confidence that that might be possible to do. That's a sort of sad reflection on where the direction of identity politics under the neoliberalism that you out. that historical process has turned us in the exact opposite direction you know this what you should have been a basis for building some kind of solidarity so anyway but maybe it's time to turn a little bit toward the actual details of the assassination and what we've learned recently and I have to frame it all in a way

with a question of what's really new about what has come out because consider me a bad historian for a moment, but with or without the documentation, I kind of always believed and understood, and I think it was kind of common understanding on the left that the FBI, even if we didn't have the documents to exactly establish the nature of their involvement, that they were complicit somehow in the threat and because they were involved across the United States in various ways of attempting to suppress the black freedom struggle and particularly identifying the Black Panther Party as the most sort of vanguard element of the Black liberation struggle in its time that they had a hand somehow in its suppression so I'm wondering you know especially

Brett since you've you've talked with people who have done the investigation and unearth these historical documents. How does this change really our sense of the assassination of Fred Hampton? I think you're right in suggesting that it doesn't change it, but it just confirms what we suspected. And so I think the big thing with the FOIA documents that Aaron Leonard and his partner put on the show and talked about, the big thing was this confirmation that Hoover gave a bonus to the agent assigned to Fred Hampton in the wake of the assassination. We knew that the FBI agent assigned to Hampton gave a bonus to the informant after the fact, right? But I don't think it was known that there was actually money given from the highest levels of the FBI to the agent seeming to show

that this was not a local base thing. It's not just like one FBI agent and the informant and the local police doing this, but it actually had legitimacy and direction to the highest levels of the FBI at the time, which is, again, something we always suspected, just another little shred of evidence to say that that was true. And then the other element that I think you wanted to talk about and highlight with the FOIA documents is how co-intel pro works, particularly there's this sort of lazier idea that it's like these groups form and then co-intel pro infiltrates or the state infiltrates. And what documents seem to point toward is actually it's more complicated and often and what happens is groups will be generated by the state and infiltrated from the very beginning by informants

so that those informants can make their way up to higher levels of leadership that often comes with the trust you get when you form an organization with certain people. It's like, okay, we haven't had the opportunity to be infiltrated yet. So these people we know are safe, right? But that's actually not true. So don't rest on that assumption. Those two things, I think, are what really can be taken in as lessons from these new documents. Yeah, I'll just say, yeah, sorry, Adnan, I was just going to say that my reading of this is the same as both of yours. We already knew all of this. Really, all that these documents did for me is highlighted the fact that, you know, the FBI was giving bonuses to people for for the assassination of Fred Hampton.

But other than that, you know, other than the fact that now we have concrete evidence that they were giving bonuses for the folks that were associated with the infiltration for the drugging, for the killing, you know, and that there was a celebration,

more or less, directly from Jay Edgar Hoover after the assassination. Now we have documents showing that, but I don't feel like I learned anything from the new documents that we didn't already know other than like, oh, now we have proof that there was a bonus given, but you know, you would have assumed that, hey, Fred Hampton was assassinated. That was what they wanted. We already knew that that was what they wanted. The people that were involved with that were

bound to get a bonus. So, you know, I've seen in some, and I'm not denigrating the work that the journalists did in unearthing these documents via their FOIA requests. I mean, that's the bedrock of good investigative journalism, these FOIA requests, and being able to put these documents to light is very important. So yeah, I don't want to like diminish the role that these individuals that you interviewed, Brett, had in this. But I was seeing news articles saying like shocking new evidence of the FBI's involvement in the Fred Hampton assassination from even, you know, left publications like Jacobin and places like that, you know, shocking new evidence. unearthed documents are showing that the FBI was highly involved in the assassination.

We all knew this. And there was already plenty of documentation out there to show this. We just didn't know that, you know, we didn't have the slip that says, yeah, here's your bonus and woohoo, he's dead. We didn't have that before, but everything else was more or less known. So, yeah, I just wanted to highlight that, Adnan. Yeah, just, I mean, I think the issue. is at the time of course it would have been really valuable to have these documents when there was an active court case going on and obviously these were kept from there was a cover-up that's i think the

important point here is that the FBI's involvement was covered up because they wanted to immunize their agents from public accountability and legal responsibility for these nefarious activities in the murder of two people so that's the problem is that it took 13 years of litigation and they still didn't get you know documents that established the responsibility through these financial transactions that could have been made available should have been made available needs to be made available we're doing it now for the sake of history the only thing we can gain from it however at this point since these people are dead they're you know both the victims have never been you know there were there were court cases that settled on a financial level compensation but we haven't held accountable the

decision makers and those decision makers are gone what remains however is the system that institution that has to be held responsible so that's where the activism really has to be it seems to me is less on the shocking revelations of filling in the story now that it's too late to actually do anything about William Sullivan or George Moore in the FBI or, you know, J. Edgar Hoover. But I think the indictment of the FBI as a corrupt institution, well, not that it's a corrupt institution, is that its job is to suppress these kinds of movements in order to maintain the people in power. that's what we need to i think focus on now and if there's any ammunition we have to be able to document that it's not rogue agents but that it's a systemic problem i think that's to that's that's

to the good however what i think uh government uh discourse would be on it was that yes hoover you know was a problem and now we have to have more responsible leadership so we just have to keep chipping away at the impression that the FBI is a law enforcement agency on behalf of public good and public welfare and security and really make the systemic argument that it's about suppressing freedom, you know, equity and, you know, black liberation and that it's not going to be, you know, dealt with through the court cases of trying to, you know, make people legally responsible. That clearly they found ways to defer and delay and cover up so that it's not irrelevant, it's not relevant to the judicial sort of process. I guess maybe the last

thing on this is also, now that we're thinking about how high up, you know, some of these placed agents and informants was, I'm wondering what you think about that. I mean, we knew about William O'Neill, I suppose, for a while. But this ground-up perspective that you were mentioning, Brett, you know, what can we learn from that, from that history? I mean, should we just be paranoid about, like, you know, that now we don't think we can trust anybody when we're forming our, you know, groups of activism and campaigns? What should we do with this knowledge and this information? I think there should always be an attempt to synthesize. that information while remaining reasonable and rational about still being able to push for

progressive politics and liberatory politics. These things are a fact of life when you're engaged in political struggle, but by understanding them and more importantly, understanding how they work, how they function, like a program like Cointel Pro, which some version of it certainly still exists today. Understanding how they work can just help you better navigate the waters, but it should never be, and in fact, one of the tactics used by infiltrators of the state is to so hyper paranoia, right? So if you start letting this make you hyper paranoia, you're sort of playing right into their hands. Oh, I don't want to engage in one version is I don't want to engage at all because I'm scared. Well, okay.

The other version is I'm cop jacketing and snitchjacketing everybody around me and can I really trust this person and that person? And that is actually a strategy of the state. And if you see anybody online or in organizations who seem hell bent on sowing seeds of mistrust and division, often with flimsy evidence, at the very least, you could distance yourself from them as somebody who's overly paranoid, or, I mean, it could even spark suspicions that they themselves might be engaged. But this is the messy, intertangled web of what we're dealing with. One thing we can certainly do is just be very cautious about how you say. what you say and what you what you do i mean for most engagements in helping alleviate the material suffering of people and serving people and building up organizational power you're not necessarily illegal and you know being open and honest and being just careful with how you talk and say

things online and in person just you know just just rational measures you can take without being swept up by hyper paranoia i guess that's it and then to the critique of we didn't really learn anything new and then Adon's sort of pushing back a little bit and saying there are some things that are worth knowing you know we all agree I think we're just sort of emphasizing different aspects of it one benefit though I think is just this continually reintroducing the story to every subsequent generation particularly coming out of a radical summer of protest in which teenagers and young 20 somethings were the prominent force and then in the wake of that being able to here's another excuse to talk about this story.

Here's another reason why we can reframe this story for a whole new set of people, especially after the 80s and 90s coming out of that anti-communist left latency period where not a lot was happening. And a lot of these figures and stories and narratives and histories were all but eliminated from mainstream culture to be able to bring this stuff back up. Any excuse to do so, I think it's something we should and do take advantage of. Yeah, the one, I'm going to just mention one quick thing before. I pick up that last point.

So the one quick thing is that we failed to mention that there was a second assassination that day. This tends to happen a lot, but I do want to mention that Mark Clark was also assassinated in that raid. And we, for relatively justifiable reasons, tend to focus on Fred Hampton in this event. But it is always worth remembering that there was a second Black Panther Party member who was assassinated in the same event. So just keep that in mind that when we're talking about this event, Mark Clark was also a member that was assassinated by the state.

But, Brett, I want to pick up that last point that you said. And this will be the last thing that we talk about in this intelligence briefing is it's good to have reasons to bring this up at any time and for subsequent generations. And that, of course, you can probably tell where I'm leading to is Judas and the Black Messiah. And for those who are unaware, there's a new movie that's out on Fred Hampton. And I have not seen it yet for two reasons, first of which, because I don't have time to watch anything. I haven't watched a movie in years. But the second thing is that I'm taking a page from an Africana Studies scholar who I respect greatly. I've interviewed her before and she's going to be a future guest of guerrilla history when her,

her book, Black Scare, Red Scare comes out, talking about the confluence of black radicals and communists and anti-communist, anti-black radicalism in the United States, particularly, Dr. Sherees Burden Stelly, who's an Africana Studies professor at Carleton College. When I heard her speaking on her show, The Last Dope Intellectual, which, yeah, for anybody that's interested in contemporary black power, it's, it's required. watching by my book. It's on YouTube. The movie, Judas and the Black Messiah,

was brought up on the show and she said that she's not going to watch it because of the pivotal role and the perspective being in large part from the role of the informant in this movie. And I tend to agree with that

perspective. And it's enough reason for me to not, you know, in my limited time, not choose this film as something to see because it does in some ways, at least from what I've seen, center the informant. And when I interviewed her recently on the David Feldman show, I also brought up that that was recently announced that they're making a Marcus Garvey film now. And one of the main characters, if not the main character, it hasn't been made yet,

but one of the main characters is going to be an informant, an infiltrator into Marcus Garvey's association. And the question that I asked her is, why is it? that whenever we have depictions of black radicals, we can never get a straight depiction of the black radical, the reason for their thought, what they were doing to organize people, the benefits that they had in their community, et cetera.

We always have to include the infiltrator as a pivotal role. And I understand that, you know, the infiltrator was a pivotal role in the assassination. It was one of the reasons why that assassination took place. There was an infiltrator there that drugged him, that laid out the house plan for the compound that allowed for his assassination. But to center that perspective, yeah, it doesn't quite sit right with me. But at the same time, as you said, Brett, I'm always happy for there to be more discussion about Fred Hampton out there, especially one that, and this is what I got from listening to your episode, your last episode about Fred Hampton on Revolutionary Left Radio,

that doesn't diminish his socialist bona fides in any significant way. And to really highlight that in popular media is something that's very important. But at the same time, you have this pivotal role of the informant being highlighted. And yeah, I don't know. So I haven't seen it. And Brett, I know you have. So what do you think about that, that dichotomy? Yeah.

Is it okay if I go first? Yeah, go ahead. because yes, so this is very interesting and I didn't get really a chance to talk about my critiques of the film obviously on the first episode but on the recent one either and there is that that critique

is like it centers the informant, valid critique. I would say, I would still recommend people watch it. I think it deeply humanizes Fred Hampton. It brings a sort of visceral reality to his brilliance, his humaneness, his tenderness, The tragedy, I mean, it's clearly portrayed as a fucking tragedy what they did to Fred Hampton

and is clearly portrayed generally at least who was responsible. The state forces acting in the background using this informant as a puppet in some sense. Now, the informant certainly has moral responsibility here, but it's complicated because it's just how it's used, like you're going to jail for many years if you don't do this for us. It's a tough situation. Nobody wants to be in. doesn't excuse his actions and it shows the informants cowardice I think by coming close seeing the moral superiority of the movement and Fred Hampton and still choosing for his own

selfish getting out of prison for five years to to be the person that sort of helps deliver death to Fred Hampton at the very end of the film very fascinating shows a little chunk of the interview with the informant rationalizing his choices and what this is a real video footage of the informant after the at the end of the movie and the informant is saying uh you know all these people are armchair revolutionaries i was actually in the struggle you know uh you know everybody that wants to tell me your opinion basically fuck you i was actually there so very weird argument to make given your position in the movement um and that night he went home and killed himself so he didn't even believe his own bullshit right obviously still

haunted him he obviously was projecting and trying to portray a vision of himself but he He himself didn't believe it. But my two critiques of the film, given that interesting, I still recommend people watching. I still think it's ultimately beneficial to put out there into a wide audience of people.

Two critiques. One critique would be the way it portrays Fred Hampton. It's sort of like a great man of history portrayal in that the implicit idea of why Fred Hampton was so great is because he had sort of just inborn talent and genius right and even the phrase the black messiah gets at this idea of fred hampton as just constitutionally superior in some moral way and i think that obscures the fact that fred hampton was utterly dedicated to study discipline and organization he he wasn't born that way

he was created and forged into being the man that he was and like there's no real scenes for example of the deep study that had to go in to have such a huge understanding of global politics at such a young age. You don't do that through being born a genius. You do that through years and years of dedication to the struggle, your own experiences in deep study. So that's one critique.

And the second critique would be insofar as the film centers the informant, there is a tendency to almost want to knowing full well that there are state actors behind the scene, this tendency to want to blame a black man for the death of Fred Hampton. And you could walk away from that film knowing that there's like snakes in the government and they had a role to play, but putting a bulk of the culpability on another black man who himself,

a victim of, I believe, the drug war, right, a victim of being arrested for drugs, I believe. And then that used against him as leverage to do the state's bidding. so that could be also also a critique um but those would be two to my i'm still interested in engaging with critiques of this film though um because i think i think it's interesting and you know if you have time check out the film and engage with it critically i think everybody should engage with all forms of art and media critically but you know still engage i guess it would be my uh my recommendation yeah i well i definitely

think that it would be worth watching it. I haven't had a chance to view it, but I think the idea that just because it centers an informant isn't itself a reason not to view it and then do the critique of it. You know, like if there's a malign way in which centering the informant's perspective undermines an understanding and analysis of the genuine dynamics of Fred Hampton's politics, then I think it's worth making that critique. And I think your point that it kind of reduces responsibility for this to another black man who himself is a victim of, you know, the oppressive. carceral state i mean you know the point is is that it should enable so if it's done well it should enable us to see the more systemic responsibilities that make inevitable their exploitation of you know black people to pit them against one another in this way to undermine a movement that's i think i think that's the you know that would be a real problem of centering you know of centering if there was no way to gain access the way they'd framed it to really making those larger conclusions.

And so that's why I would watch it. But I think that's the perspective that we should have. And, you know, I think this other issue is about that question of leadership. And Brett, you had mentioned about that you wanted to talk a little bit more about the question of charismatic, leadership versus the social movement. And I'm wondering if in addition to the way in which this film builds a charismatic picture and calls him the Black Messiah, if you had some broader thoughts about that relationship between our political leaders and the movement and how to think about that relationship. Yes, but did we lose Henry? He's coming back. Okay, he's coming back. Okay. Sorry about that. Okay. To answer your question,

Yes, I'm going to get to your question really quick. But first I'll just mention one thing about the film. And I think that's where these critiques kind of come together is like by using the informant as the fulcrum of the film, a lot of these critiques can fall out of it. If that informant played a more marginal fringe role and there was sort of a proportionate focus on the state force, because it's not absent, right? It's very clear in the film that the FBI and the local police department are fucking scumbag pieces of shit. Like you can't walk away not thinking that. But if you could make that informant more marginal and in direct proportion blow up the FBI and police as the central focus, that could be helpful in undermining some of these critiques. So that said, going to your point about leaders and movements, there is always this interesting contradiction.

And in fact, I think there's a big tension between anarchists and Marxists over how to organize, specifically because of the role, I think, the relationship between movements and leaders with different fears and emphasis. on each side of that debate. The fact is, movements, horizontal, vertical, or whatever, organically generate leaders. So you don't have a movement without naturally generating leaders. At the same time, leaders can be targeted. So having a structure with discipline and focus and plans and, you know, people that earn their right to have more of a say,

yeah, I've been in this struggle for 40 years, you know, you're somebody new that's just fresh out of college, let me teach you. Like that all makes sense. And it makes for more efficacious organization locally, nationally and internationally. And I think that's why Marxist movements have been able to challenge capitalism and imperialism on a global scale in ways that other movements that eschew such leadership and organization haven't been able to. But certainly there's also the underbelly of that, which is leaders can be targeted.

So when you have a leader that's crucial to a movement, and arises out of that movement. By targeting them and taking that amount, you do empirically weaken that movement, MLK, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, and just in the U.S. context, we can go on forever naming people that this was done to all over the world. So that tension, I think, speaks to a bigger tension about how you should organize. And I come down on the sort of side of integrate both.

Like there should be elements of descent, like, you know, even in like the Antifa movement. Although the paranoid fever dreams of the right make it end to this militant organization with leaders and presidents and all this stuff, the fact is it's decentralized structure is great for what it aims to do, which is to fight against fascists in a sort of local community needs-based way. So in that context, it makes complete and total sense to have an utterly decentralized network, which is completely frustrating to the state and the right.

And so they almost have to create it into a structure for them to be able to comprehend what it is. They can't imagine like there's so many people in every single city in this country that are genuinely just regular working people motivated to hit the streets or do their part in fighting against fascism. It has to be a conspiracy. The right can't comprehend that sort of behavior. But on the other hand, of course, as I've said before, there are numerous benefits to having discipline, leadership, solid organization, et cetera. So the idea is can we build movements that have the best of both worlds that can compensate for the weakness. is in the other. That's the task.

Yes. Well, and in addition to that structure that you're talking about, about combining leadership and structure organization in the movement, I think it indicates the importance and significance of continuing revolutionary education and training, because that's how you expand the cadres of people, so that you're not vulnerable to just the loss of one particular leader, but that you train and develop a cadre of people who are invested with leadership abilities and capacities because they've been politically organized, trained, and educated. I think that's another way and perhaps, you know, the work that we're doing here.

Hopefully, you know, you put out this kind of content, we learn from history, and hopefully we have more and more people who are capable of drawing the lessons of how you, the tactics and strategies and the lessons from our historical experience. So that education has to happen alongside, I think. Excellent point. I just want to throw one thing out there and I apologize that I missed two minutes of the conversation

after my computer crashed, but hearing this conversation about political education. I was doing my best to sort of cover and filibuster around, you know, like, you know, don't let anybody know the fourth wall, you know, And then I've ruined that for Adnan. And then both of you guys are kind of being these honest, you know, figures. Oh, wait, where's Henry?

And Henry, oh, I miss time. Oh, well, what can I say, Adnan? I'm an honest interlocutor. But hearing this conversation about political education and building, you know, a deep bench, that is the key is that when you are a revolutionary leader, you know, whether it's a small revolutionary movement at the moment or it's a full-fledged revolution moment, the revolutionary leader is always going to have the target on their back. That's inevitable.

Whether you have a leaderless resistance, they're going to find people who nominatively are leaders nonetheless, or whether you have a figurehead. You know, this individual typifies our movement. Those individuals are always going to have targets on their back, and they're going to be targeted hard. That's how the counter-revolutionary movement. That's how the state is going to operate. That's how they prevent the revolutionary movement from succeeding. And so like you said, having political education and making sure that you have a deep bench of leaders, it's not just one person, you know, a cult of personality surrounding an individual, but you have a cadre of

individuals who all have these groundings in the political theory. They have groundings in the material conditions on the ground in the communities that they're trying to represent and serve. And that way, if that individual at the top has a target on their back, well, if they have the target, needless to say, acted upon, you don't have this power vacuum. You don't have this chicken with a head cutoff phenomena of a group that all of a sudden has no idea how to act without that one individual at the helm any large. longer. We have to, and as you said, we're trying to do our small part in us, to raise the political consciousness of the people in this revolutionary movement, broadly speaking,

so that when we do have targets on our back, not us particularly, we know we're not revolutionary leaders, at least not at the current time, when these revolutionary leaders do have the target put on their back, we have their back by building the political infrastructure and the political groundings behind it in the movement so that, one, it makes it that much harder for the target to be acted upon. And two, if, God forbid, the target is acted upon, we're able to fill that void with other individuals who have that same political grounding, that same historical grounding. And I think that that is a very, very important point. Any final words that either of you want to say before we wrap up?

But it's also a question here, also even before Fred Hampton was assassinated, there were clearly problems in the party because of the informant and because the FBI likes to try and pit people against one another and exploit these tensions. So the intelligence that they gain are about who doesn't like somebody else, who has an ideological disagreement, who's got a little bit of resentment. because they've been passed over for something and they try and seize upon those and exploit them to divide people to sow dissension to weaken the unity and solidarity of a movement and so that's also where this training and education is so important not just external to us about history and social forces but also internally about you know how you maintain some kind of sense of discipline, you maintain confidence in working together and on the ideals that you've committed yourself too. This is also personal development that people have to overcome some of

the egoistic temptations and desires for self-aggrandizement because ultimately we shouldn't be doing these things for the satisfaction of ourselves, but to create a better world. And that means that we have to have the right approach mentally, spiritually, emotionally, psychologically, and create the institutions in which that can be fostered. It's a very multi-layered process. And so that education and that training is both institutional but also personal, I think, so that they can't exploit simple fissures of, you know, we're all human beings, of course. So no one can achieve perfection, but we could make it a little bit more difficult to, you know, be divided and when pressure is put upon our movements to find ourselves, you know, fissuring and fragmenting,

but actually to remain solid and connected and dedicated to our common goals. Brett, any final words, or should we wrap this up? yeah my final words towards wrapping this up is just to bounce off that a little bit is like you know we talk about anti or you know personality cults and we talk about even the the problematic framing of fred hampton as a black messiah but what we can learn from fred hampton to odd non's point is precisely that fred hampton was able to be a leader with almost an anti personality cult element to him because of how he framed himself which is always a servant of and a manifestation of the people more broadly. And he knew the selflessness, this lack of an ego. It was never about Fred Hampton. It was never about how can I advance me, my career, my profile. It was always in service of others in service to the cause and in service to the community

at large. And he knew as Malcolm X did, and probably as MLK did, that this meant that there was only a matter of time before he was going to be killed. And he was still willing to do what he had to do. And he talked about, if I die, It's not going to be in a plane crash or because I slipped on ice. It's going to be because I died for the people. So his whole framing was this masterclass in genuine, authentic selflessness, lack of an ego,

anti-personality cultism, and always framing himself and everything he did in service of the other. Last two points with the Rainbow Coalition, don't forget the lump in elements. There was a concerted effort on the part of the BPP broadly, but on Fred Hampton specifically, to reach out to the lump in proletariat, the gangs and the communities, et cetera, as fraught as that sometimes was. There was that attempt. I think that's really important.

The second thing, a little fact I always like to throw up is Fred Hampton's mom is actually a babysitter for Emmett Till. So kind of an interesting, that's in the south all the way up to Chicago. Mom babysat Emmett Hill, that tragedy happened. You know, Fred Hampton,

also like just that woman, you know, the mother of Fred Hampton, and the things that she saw historically and we're related to, and I don't think we should lose sight of that tragedy and probably how devastating, right, that had to be for Fred's mom to live in that environment and the brutality that black women specifically have faced throughout American history. That's incredible.

I didn't know about that. Unity did I. Well, I think that that's a good note to end on something for the audience to chew on while they, you know, kick back. and digest this episode that we just put together. This is, again, a Patreon exclusive. So if you're listening to this, you're on our Patreon. We would really like to get more people onto our Patreon.

So if you know folks that like our podcast and haven't taken the plunge into our Patreon yet, let them know that we have episodes like this on there that they can listen to at their own leisure. And just generally speaking, let people know about our show, whether or not they join the Patreon. And like we said, this sort of political education that we're trying to do is very important for strengthening movements that we're trying to build. And so try to get the word out to people that this show exists. And hopefully they'll learn something from it. Hopefully we can continue to bring interesting historical narratives out for people so that they can take these lessons from the past and develop their history. historical consciousness, their political consciousness, and use that knowledge to advance the

struggle. So on that note, Adnan, how can our listeners find you on social media and your other podcast? Well, you can find me at Twitter at Adnan, a Hussein, H-U-S-A-I-N, and check out my other podcast, The M-A-J-L-I-S. It's on all the usual places. Brett, how can our listeners find you in your work? Everything I do can be found at Revolutionary Left Radio.com. And just bouncing off what Henry said. Another great way to help the show is to leave us a positive rating and review in iTunes. It helps the algorithm of the podcast apps pump our show up and recommended lists, etc. So if you could just do that or encourage somebody else, maybe you don't have enough money to be on the Patreon or your friend doesn't. Just encouraging people

to rate and review really does a lot to get the show expanded. Yeah, that's true. Before I pitch myself, I'm just also going to tell the listeners do go back and listen to those two episodes about Fred Hampton from Revolutionary Left Radio. In addition to finding those on the podcast feed, they're both also uploaded on the YouTube channel as well, which is something that I've, you know, not pushed quite as hard as I could, but all of the episodes of Revolutionary Left Radio, Red Menace, and now guerrilla history are going up on the Revolutionary Left Radio YouTube channel. So subscribe to that.

You can hit the bell. You'll get the notification anytime a new video goes on there. And I know there's a lot of people that watch YouTube video. And of course, it's just a stationary image. It's not video on the YouTube channel as of now. But I know a lot of people will use YouTube that don't use podcast players. So if you know somebody like that, that would be interested in the show, send them the links from YouTube.

That's another great way for people to be able to hear the show. And give us a thumbs up on those videos. That also helps with algorithms. But, yeah, both of those Fred Hampton videos are on the YouTube already. So you can find me on Twitter at Huck, 1995. You can find me on Patreon. I talk about science of public health at patreon.com forward slash huck 1995 and you can follow our show on Twitter at gorilla underscore pod G-E-R-R-R-I-L-L-A

underscore pod and you already know where to find us on Patreon because that's where you are. So listeners, thanks for joining us. Hope this was interesting for you. And until next time, solidarity. We're going to be able to be. We're going to be able to be. Thank you.