Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] Fred Hampton: Honoring the Life and Legacy of The Chairman

Episode Date: April 28, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Feb 24, 2019 Chuka Ejeckam joins Breht to discuss and pay homage to the Black Panther Party leader and Marxist Revolutionary, Fred Hampton. Fred Hampton was more than a charismatic leader—he was a revolutionary force of nature. In this episode, we explore the life, work, and assassination of the legendary Black Panther Party leader who united poor and working-class people across racial lines, organized tirelessly for liberation, and paid the ultimate price for daring to challenge the power structure. From the Free Breakfast Program to the Rainbow Coalition, we reflect on the enduring relevance of Hampton’s organizing, his dialectical brilliance, and the fire he lit that continues to burn in struggles for liberation today. Find and support Chuka and his work here: http://www.chukaejeckam.com/ ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio HERE Outro Beat Prod. by flip da hood

Deborah Johnson, eight months pregnant, was asleep in the back bedroom next to Fred Hampton. The first thing I remember after Fred and I had went to sleep was being awakened by somebody shaking Fred while we were laying in bed, saying, chairman, chairman, wake up, the pigs are vamping, the pigs are vamping. This person that was in the room with me kept shouting out. We have a pregnant sister in here, stop shooting. Eventually the shooting stopped and they said we could come out. I remember crossing over Fred and telling myself over and over, be real careful. Don't stumble.

They'll try to shoot you. Just be real calm. Watch how you walk. Keep your hands up. Don't reach for anything. Don't even try to close your road. When I was in the kitchen, I heard a voice, an unfamiliar voice, say, he's barely alive or he'll barely make it. Then the shooting started back again.

Then I heard the same unfamiliar voice say, he's good and dead now. And I knew in my mind they were, I assume they were talking about Fred. And I knew when I left out of there, I couldn't look towards the room. Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host and Comrade Brett O'Shea.

On today's episode, we have Chuka Ijohn. document to talk about Fred Hampton, his life, and his legacy. If you like what you hear on the show, please feel free to support us at patreon.com forward slash rev left radio or give us a positive review on iTunes, which really helps increase our reach. Now, let's get to this episode on Fred Hampton. I'm a graduate student right now in political science. I was born in Winnipeg, in Canada.

My parents are from Nigeria. were of Ebo descent. And the first political things I learned of when I was a kid were the Black Panthers and the broader civil rights movement. I learned about those things and sort of connected to them. And from them, I learned about European colonization and the transatlantic slave trade and Jim Crow and so forth. And so that was sort of my initial, I guess you could say, introduction to the political world

or to the world as a political environment. And I think nebulously consider me a libertarian socialist with significant and, you know, in some sense, is increasing communist tendencies. I think actually, so an important note, though, in relation to the initial things that I learned of as like the very first political events or political, I guess, trends or currents in the world that I learned of that I just mentioned is I know that every so often on the show an intermittent. you bring up the Marxist concept of the base and the superstructure. And so in my perspective of the world, and I guess what informs much of my analysis is I consider that era of European colonization and the international slave trade as not the only base, not necessarily the most relevant base, but it's the one that I focus on. And I consider that to be sort of the primary material foundation of the world that we inhabit. And that foundation as being both

produced by and what produced for that primary superstructure, which were still entangled in in many ways to this day, I think of the significant social science research that reveals embedded implicit biases and, you know, people of all, of all sort of racial or ethnic heritages in many parts of the world that are, that I think that are directly linked to that, the superstructure that was produced by that era, that sort of scientific racism for and the intellectualization of white supremacy that happened then. Yeah, absolutely. That's an important point.

And just generally, I'm really happy to have you on. I know our friends and comrades over at Barb, who made our logo, introduced us and recommended you for this show, so I'm excited to talk about this. Fred Hampton is somebody that I've always been very inspired by, and I'm sure you have as well, as many people listening have as well. But before we get into the details of Fred Hampton's life, his death. and his legacy. Maybe we should start off by reflecting on why he was and why he remains such a powerful and charismatic figure for those of us invested in liberation movements, especially

for communist organizing today. So what about Fred as a human being and a revolutionary? Do you personally find the most inspiring and fascinating? So there's three things that I think are particularly compelling about Fred Hampton's story. The first, his story and, I mean, the person that he was. And the first, the first, is that he paired Marxist analysis and theory with material initiatives. So his revolution provided resources. You know, it wasn't enough to speak to people about, you know, building a better future or critiquing the state or, or castigating oppressors in all forms, which of course is absolutely necessary. But I think that there was a recognition of the fact that if you're going

to bring people into this movement that necessarily takes time, energy, and resources, then you have to provide people with resources and facilitate for them circumstances in which they can expend time and energy on this larger project of universal emancipation. I think that it's obviously incredibly difficult to do, but it's also absolutely necessary if you want to even allow people the freedom to consider what the overriding structures are that compel their actions and limit their choices and their freedom. I think that, yeah, that's just incredibly necessary and incredibly compelling. So the second point is that Hampton insisted on and prioritized both cross-gender and cross-racial solidarity. In the chapter of the Black Panther Party that he was the deputy leader of, women took on leadership positions from immediately upon the chapter's inception, whether it was their civil defense programs or their public education programs or even strategizing for, the future and operations of the organization itself. Women were active in every role.

And that was, there were other chapters around the country that had issues in that regard about, you know, sort of limitation of women's involvement or just, you know, in unequal treatment or sexism overall. And Fred Hampton wasn't, he didn't just sort of work to not have any of those issues in the chapter that he led, but he also actively worked against those issues in other chapters. And in the same way, he advocated, insistently advocated cross racial solidarity,

which is something that was particularly concerning to the law enforcement officials who, I mean, who sought to to quell his influence. And then the third point is that there was a moral clarity and a moral urgency, especially

to his vision, that is just incredibly energizing in a speech that he gave condemning the treatment of of Bobby Seal by the justice system, he has this one line that I've never forgotten. He said, work is not important and school is not important. Nothing is important but stopping fascism, because fascism will stop us all. Bobby Seal is going through all types of physical and mental torture. But that's all right, because we said even before this happened,

and we're going to say it after this, and after I'm locked up, and after everybody's locked up, that you can jail a revolutionary, but you can't jail a revolution. You might run a liberator like Eris Cleave out the country, but you can't run liberation out the country. You might murder a freedom fighter like Bobby Hutton, but you can murder freedom fighting. And if you do, you'll come up with answers that don't answer. It's the clinicians that don't explain.

You'll come up with conclusions that don't conclude. And you'll come up with people that you thought should be acting like pigs. It's acting like people and moving on pigs, and that's what we've got to do. We're going to see about Bobby, regardless of what these people think we should do. Because schools is not important and work is not important. Nothing more important than stopping fascism because fascism will stop us all. And the first part of that sentence, work is not important and school is not important. I mean, I keep that with me every day.

I think that just the notion that there's nothing that is, nothing that is of higher importance, right? Nothing that is a higher priority than this project to free, to emancipate. and empower everyone. I think that it's easy to get lost in the shuffle of our daily lives, but it's just such a powerful assertion. Yeah, I couldn't not agree more with all of those points, and I would only add that he was also, and this is kind of well known, and what made him such a relatable person and such a good organizer,

was that he took pretty complex Marxist ideas and was able to put them into plain everyday language that could be easily understood by the people in his community. He talked, he was one with the community and, and so, I mean, the Black Panther Party broadly was, but, you know, him, him especially. And I think that really, that really contributed to his effectiveness as not only like, you know, somebody that could, that could talk, you know, an orator, if you will, but as an organizer, as a leader, a leading figure in the Black Panther Party. And also, you know, throughout his, his short career as an organizer, because he died so damn young, he was, he was hounded by the police and they were desperate. to find something on Fred Hampton, you know, something that would destroy his reputation or something they could lock him up in jail for. And he just lived his life in a very clean, above-bored way.

He lived as if he was responsible every second of the day to his community and to the movement that he was building. And the way that he upheld himself in his personal life, as well as his public life, I think, is amazing. And that genuineness and that authenticity goes a long way and explaining, you know, why people still to this day have such a love for Fred Hampton. I think that that's correct. And it really is, I mean, you mentioned that he died so young, and it really is incredible how young he got into activism and activism that was, that always had a broad base, you know? It was always, like, speaking for a particular community that was being unfairly treated by structure that that community had to directly interact with on a daily basis,

whether it was discrimination in his school or discrimination in access to public resources in the community where he was growing up. I mean, it was, it's always this sort of the position that the people are, have demands that the structure of power, whatever it is, is failing to meet. And so that structure of power has to be acted upon by the people. I think, you know, the speed at which he came to that position and then held that as an animating, an animating assertion or an animating principle, I think he's really, really incredible. Yeah, absolutely. So let's go ahead and move on to the life of Fred Hampton, and the easiest way to start that is just to ask you,

what was Fred Hampton's childhood like, and how did he initially get into political organizing at such a young age? So he was born in August in 1948 in the suburbs of Chicago. He was the youngest of three children to Francis and Iberia. They'd left Louisiana in 1930 and gone north seeking better opportunity, In this period, obviously, there was a lot of movement north of African Americans who were living in the South due to, obviously, you know, oppression by the state and in many cases fleeing racial harassment or terroristic violence by the KKK. And I don't know that, I don't know which of these particular considerations weighed, waded more heavily on the decision. I wasn't able to determine that. But it does seem to be, you know, so again, part of this, this American story that is very familiar.

They moved to Blue Island in 1951 and to Maywood in 1958, both towns in Illinois. And Maywood is where Hampton particularly got into activism. He was an organizer pretty much immediately. In high school, he organized anti-racist campaigns against the conditions of the school, and as well as around disparity in treatment of black students and athletes. And even at this young age, the president of the West Suburban, Division of the NAACP contended that Fred's activism was instrumental in increasing the number of African-American teachers in the high school staff from just five to 16. So he graduated

high school in 1966 and from there he went on to Crane Junior College, which is now called Malcolm X College. He became the president of the NAACP's youth branch at the college in 1967, again, just a year after he graduated high school. He increased the groups organizing around civil rights and around spring investment in local recreational facilities. A significant amount of their activism was regarding equal access to education employment and housing accessibility. The group was able to get the board of his former high school to concede to a list of demands, which included a call for a public swimming pool and other recreational facilities in Maywood and an inclusion of African American history in the school's curricula.

And this was a period when, obviously, as Hampton was getting into activism, he sort of came onto the radar of other prominent civil rights leaders. He helped Jesse Jackson and the recently departed Dick Gregory in organizing campaigns and boycotts in the area. And he invited Stokely Carmichael at the time, then known as Stokely Carmichael, to Maywood to speak at the NWACP's youth branch. And I mean, he made such an impression that he was chosen in 1967 as one of the main speakers at a nationwide NAC function. So, I mean, more, you know, before 20 years old, he was becoming a national figure in civil rights and activism and already, again, sort of extracting concessions from the structures of

power that he was directly interacting with, which is, I mean, it's quite astounding. Yeah, I mean, to be that young and to be that active, it's just astounding and also makes me feel like shit because when I was a teenager, I was a shithead compared to Fred Hampton. I do want to say in the course of researching, I learned something interesting about his mother, Iberio, who you mentioned. She was actually a babysitter for Emmett Till when they lived in Mississippi. And Emmett Till is the 13-year-old boy that people know was killed for, quote, unquote, whistling at a white woman who later confessed, you know, decades later that she lied about the entire thing. And he was, you know, lynched in the South because of that. So the connection to, you know, Fred Hampton's mother actually babysitting Emmett Till and then growing up to to be the mother.

of Fred Hampton is amazing, but it's also tragic. I mean, imagine the the pain that Iberia went through throughout her entire life, you know, with losing Emmett Till, somebody she babysitted as a child and then losing her own son to the same sort of white supremacist system. It's fucking tragic. It absolutely is. And I think that it's your, you know, spot on in identifying them those murders as different branches of the same system, you know, whether it's structural violence committed by the state, structural violence, you know, enforced by the state, and then committed, you know, extra, extra police brutality committed on top of that structural violence or whether it's, it's private civilians violence that reinforces the structures of the state. I agree that it's the same thing. And it, I mean, I didn't know this, but I didn't know that that Hampton's mother babysat Emmett Till, but yet you're, I mean, that is incredibly tragic. And even the, the, the, the story of Emmettel, despite the fact that the woman came out years later and said that she had essentially fabricated the story and sentenced this child to death for no reason. His grave,

his headstone is regularly riddled with bullets and they frequently have to to repair it. So, I mean, that sort of, like, inscrutable, incomprehensible, you know, racial animus, it still exists, so. Oh, man, absolutely. Jesus. So moving on to talk more about Fred's ideology, right? So what was Fred's political ideology and how did it influence his organizing strategies and approaches? So this was a bit, I wasn't able to find an instance where he described himself with a specific and explicit political term. And that I think maybe speaks to what you mentioned before about how he brought down sometimes very lofty or overarching. political theories to a level that was directly accessible to people and meaningful to people that

weren't necessarily pursuing the trying to like pull apart the intricacies of different political theories as opposed to, you know, meeting the demands of their daily life. But from the speeches that he gives and from the positions that he took, you can tell that he was each a Marxist, a revolutionary, an anti-capitalist and an anti-imperialist. I think you could also call him a communist in that he cited Marx, Lenin, Che Guevera, and Mao. But in the speech that I'm referring to, wherein he cites those four figures, he wasn't co-signing necessarily every single one of their statements or actions, but he was identifying them as ideological forebears of class-based revolution. And so that, I think, is the fundamental organizing principle of his ideology was class-based revolution that was necessarily emancipatory. And he was certainly an internationalist as well. Well, actually a few weeks before his death, which is something, this is something that I learned when I was doing research for this episode, a few weeks before his murder, I should say, he visited the University of Saskatchewan in Regina in Canada, and he spoke of a worldwide struggle against imperialism and the importance of building international solidarity with oppressed peoples. In fact, upon arrival in Regina, as he got off the plane, he refused to comment to any of the established newspapers that had gathered, or the journalists representing established newspapers. He refused to give them comment because he objected to their coverage of indigenous people in Canada. So he would later give an interview to like a leftist, a sort of alternative leftist magazine.

But the established papers he refused to comment on, which again, I think embodying and acting out the politics that he espoused. And then finally, I think that you could call him militant to the extent that he believed strongly that armed organization was necessary to prevent police brutality. And he makes, you know, some pretty, pretty strong statements in this regard, statements that, that, you know, living in the apocalyptic panopticon in which we do, you imagine would statements that would immediately incur state surveillance. And, I mean, they did incur state surveillance when Hampton made them as well. But so I guess even at that time, it was even, you know, that many, that a few decades ago was the same. But these are statements that you imagine, like, if you may, if you were to, you know, them in a messenger or something like that, that message would be immediately flagged by some, by some algorithm and then document you and whatnot. Right. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, as for his ideology, I guess we've already done an episode on the Black Panthers Party broadly. People can go check that out. But I certainly would argue that he's definitely, he has like a Lenin, if you listen to his arguments, he has a Leninist conception of both the party and of Vanguardism. He's

definitely carrying out the mass line. I think it's not unfair to say that the Black Panthers broadly and Fred Hampton, although they weren't obsessed with tendency like leftists are today as much, I don't think. I do think it'd be fair to put them somewhere in the realm of like Marxist-Leninist Mao Zedong thought, because, you know, Maoism wasn't synthesized as an ideology at that point, but you're absolutely right that he was a proletarian internationalist, and that definitely undergirded his politics. And you could see the Black Panthers interacting and engaging with international socialist movements and those socialist movements turning around

and engaging with the Black Panther Party as well. So that international proletarianism is beautiful and definitely something that he carried forward. See, I got it. The thing is, with me, you dig, I need to know some more about it. I wish you asked some of the literature about the educational thing here. Because you did, as far as we concerned, you know, and the struggle. What we look at struggle is that this depends on the educational thing you did.

Because of this depends on the education. the whole thing. No, but in the end, this does. You can form this with no education. You can form this? No, not the way we're talking about forming it. You know, right. We're talking about forming it, right.

You know, it's not on the paper. We didn't write it on the paper. No. No. Let me give you an example. Yomo Kenyada formed the excellent revolution with no education. And on the day of the end thing, Yomo told him, motherfucker, I said, well, you know, you been educated to hate the enemy, but I'm your brother.

I'll help you lead the revolution. Now I'm more pressure. Another example, Papa Doc in Haiti. Papa Doc in Haiti hated everything white. Man, you couldn't put this white paper in front of Papa Dot's face. But he moved all the white people out and he took over it and be oppressive because no education. And the people had been educated, they said that we don't hate the motherfucker-fucking white, we hate the oppressor. Whether he'd be white, black, brown, or yellow.

So we got to know your educational program to find out what is going to be in the finale. A lot of people work. Yomo Kenyat is called not a never revolutionary, but an ex-revolutionary. So it's Papa Doc. They brought on a successful revolution. That thing in the Ma-Mas was a bitch. Baton to Freedom Fighters, all that kind of action. What we're saying is that it's the end.

That you don't judge Castro now. You can't do it. Nobody's room could judge whether Castro's going to be a revolutionary or not. You know what I mean? We're talking about things, you know what I mean? With China, the people with the republic, and even at the stage they're in now, talking about even going on further into a communistic state.

That's what we're talking about. That was a revolutionary. So we've got to understand here the educational program that you have to be able to figure out whether they will go on the right lines where the people will end up in a situation where they can be able to really control themselves, With no education, the people to take this local foundation and start stealing money because they won't be really educated to why it's the people's thing anyway. You know what I'm saying? With no education, you have neo-colonialism instead of colonialism like you got in Africa, 9, like you got in Haiti.

So what we're talking about is there has to be education in the program. That's very important. As a matter of fact, we're so important for us that a person has to go through six weeks of our political education before we can consider himself a member of the party, able to even run out ideology for the party. Why? Because if they don't have an education, then they know where. You dig what I'm saying? They're no way, because they don't even know why they're doing what they're doing. You might get people caught up in an emotionless movement. You understand me? You might get them caught up and cause they're poor, and they want something.

And then if they're not educated, they'll want more. And before you know it, they'll be Catholics, and before you know it, we'd have a Negro imperialist. Yeah, we see, brother, the reason we don't do a lot of talking because what you say is foregone conclusion with us. Yeah, well, see, brother, the reason I do do a lot of talking is because I don't, there's no foregone conclusions with me. Let's talk about Fred's involvement with the Black Panther Party specifically. I know we've touched on it a little bit, and a lot of people are familiar with it,

but how did Fred Hampton get involved with the Black Panther Party specifically? How did he rise within the movement? And what made him such an effective leader in that party? First documented contact that I found was in 1968, which, again, you know, it's worth mentioning is only two years after graduated high school. But he was contacted by Bobby Rush, who was an activist with the student's nonviolent coordinating committee and who would go on to be a congressman later on. But then he was a student, Bobby Rush was a student,

at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a member of the local SNCC chapter. And so Bobby Rush sought to found the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. He initially brought this opportunity to Fred Hampton, who agreed to participate, and then Hampton was appointed as the deputy chairman of the chapter. And by all accounts,

he was immediately recognized as a compelling speaker, an organizer and a leader. Actually, with Hampton and Rush at the head, the Chicago Panthers chapter took on new members so quickly that they were forced for a period to refuse new applicants so that they could better accommodate them, integrate them into their initiatives, and find roles for everyone,

as opposed to just taking on more and more people who they weren't able to specifically had positions or roles for. And I think, I mean, really it speaks to sort of everything about him, but that he was animated by all these, these assertions of egalitarianism, assertions of international solidarity, critiques of state, critiques of the state, critiques of illegitimate power, and that there really, it doesn't seem that there was a way for him to exist in the world other than being animated by those principles. In every institution that he operated, whether it was his high school or the college that he went to, or the city that he lived in, or ultimately the country that he lived in. And, you know, principally and most powerfully, the entire world, he necessarily would, you know, seek out and critique illegitimate power. He would work to establish emancipatory means of resource distribution and whatnot.

And I think that that is sort of what led him to take on a leadership role, not just that he had those capacities. And again, that insistence, that moral urgency, but also that it was incredibly evident and other people. identified him as a leader, we're quick to follow him, we're quick to, I don't want to say heed, but listen in a way, you know, like they valued his contributions. They valued his input in a way that I think naturally led him to a leadership position. Yeah, definitely. And it's worth noting that, you know, when Hampton was the leader of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, you know, based out of Chicago immediately, the FBI, you know, like Jay Edgar Hoover of the FBI called the Black Panther Party the number one threat to internal security in the United

States. And the Chicago Police Department were, you know, immediately hell-bent on trying to, you know, deconstruct attack, you know, sabotage the Illinois chapter in Chicago. And one of those attempts resulted in a police raid on the Black Panther Party office in Chicago. And the cops actually set fire specifically to the third floor of that office space in Chicago, where where they kept all their food for their breakfast program. And that was not done accidentally, right? The first and second floors were not set aflame by the cops. Only the third floor was.

And that was to sort of, you know, take a big shot at their breakfast program. The FBI talked about the breakfast program for children. They called it, quote, unquote, indoctrinating children. And they said that they needed to, quote, unquote, disrupt this nefarious program. So at that point, you know, the FBI started looking for black infiltrators and black informants who they could send in to the Black Panther Party, including the Chicago chapter. to do infiltration work, which we'll come back to in a little bit. So just know that immediately aggressive confrontations with the state,

aggressive attacks by the state, were underway right out of the box. Yeah, I have some notes on this that we'll get into in a little bit. But 1968, early months of 1968 are the first times that Hoover, that Jay Edgar Hoover, who was then the director of the FBI, was giving explicit mandates to the organization that mentioned the Black Panther Party, that mentioned Fred Hampton specifically, and were beginning or we're sanctioning this large-scale organization-wide effort against the Black Panther Party, which, as you mentioned, they considered to be the greatest threat to internal security.

Which is amazing and kind of inspirational that a movement could become that. It says a lot for that movement. And, of course, any successful socialist movement, the number one enemy, whether to demonstrate, domestically or internationally is the U.S. government, so it's not surprising. Not surprising at all, yeah. Let's get into the specific programs. Can you talk a little bit about the political programs that Fred Hampton led in Chicago, including and especially his organizing with street gangs and the formation of the Rainbow Coalition?

Yeah, so you mentioned the breakfast program earlier, and that was one of the, is one of the most prominent and most essential ones. That's what the best of the program is. A lot of big things of charity, but what they do. It takes the people on a stage to another stage. stage to another stage in any programs, the revolutionaries and advanced the program, revolution has changed, honey, and they just keep on changing. That's what we do. We take the people in there and take them through those changes and before you know it,

they are in fact not only knowing what socialism, they're not to know what it is. They're endorsing and they're participating and they're observing and they're supporting socialism. Oh, you're going to go to school now? All right. Right on. All power to the people. That's the people saying. Socialism is the people.

Socialism is the people. You're afraid of yourself. If you're afraid of socialism, you're afraid of yourself. But the Illinois chapter ran several of what they were, what they called survival programs. These included free breakfast for children, free medical research and health clinics, which served hundreds of people each day, free busing to prisons to visit family members or friends who had been incarcerated, free daycare centers for young parents or parents who had to work and needed help caring for their children, free clothing banks, free ambulance services, legal aid, and public education programs. You know, I mentioned earlier that the revolution provided resources, right? And this is indicative, I think, of the fact that it's not that you're in the same way that you're attempting to mobilize people

and without being patronizing, attempting to raise class consciousness and whatnot, you also have to meet people's material needs. By critiquing the same structure that robs us of freedom by reducing our access to resources, making us, you know, fight in these Byzantine markets for the basic health care or basic, like, food or services or whatnot. In doing that, they're both disempowering us, like, you know, conceptually or theoretically and materially. And so I think that there's, in the same way that you're sort of seeking to extend to people emancipatory thoughts, emancipatory, um, emancipatory narratives and dynamics and arguments, you have to extend to them emancipatory resources. I think that that's also, as you mentioned, part of why the organization was seen as such a threat because it had a theory that was supported by physical means, that it said that not just is the state a

legitimate, not just is it a force of power and oppression that we have to act against, but in acting against it, we have to replace it. And I think that they were actively, seeking to actively replace the state in these meaningful ways. Part of that organizing was, you know, seeking organization, working with organizations that one could argue in other, in sort of a different aspect of replaced the state. And so one thing that the Illinois chapter did was they would organize with street gangs and bring them into the delivery of their programs. So, you know, Hampton and the organization, they would initially approach the leader and then request one, if there was anyone in the, the organization, you know,

who wanted to participate in the panther chapter, who wanted to participate in the delivery of these survival programs, and then two, if the gang would permit them to distribute literature in their territory. And so I think it's especially important that neither of these things would go forward without the ascent of the leader, which shows a recognition of those organizations as social communities, right? that a recognition that, of course, the state would never offer, that law enforcement would never offer, and that much of, you know, well-meaning liberal society would reject as well. I think that that's, that again, it's sort of incredibly invigorating that you're, that there are these assertions that that animate all of their work and that they would never sort of flee from even if it was on the face of it and a bit counterintuitive or some people would certainly find that threatening, of course. And so these groups together were, and it's noteworthy that they formed what came to be called the Rainbow Coalition. And it was called so because it was a cross-racial coalition. So he organized with Appalachian and Southern white migrants who were in a group called The Young Patriots, organized with Puerto Ricans in a group called The Young Lords, and with middle-class whites, who had formed a movement called Rising Up Angry, which is, I mean, there's a sort of,

peculiar and somewhat unfortunate, parallel to the rise above movement that's active now, that is a white, white nationalist, white supremacist, violent movement, but that's obvious, not related to this one at all. Anyway, these groups together, they formed the original Rainbow Coalition in 1968, a term that would go on to later be part of Jesse Jackson's presidential run, and I think speaks to the import of these struggles. this activism in Chicago politics, which of course, you know, Chicago politics being that which birthed Barack Obama. And these groups which were active from, or this coalition, which

was delivering these community service programs between 1968 and 1974, so long after Hampton was murdered, the group, this coalition served more than 2,000 people a day across their different services. Yeah, that's wonderful. Talking about the Lumpin proletariat and Fred Hampton and And the Black Panther Party broadly, but definitely, you know, Fred Hampton reaching out to street gangs and trying to get them involved. It's interesting because in 1969, the Black Panthers were talking to a gang in Chicago, well-known gang called the Blackstone Rangers. And the FBI saw this. They saw this coming together of a leftist political organization with the street gangs, and they were obviously concerned and worried about that. So they immediately sought to disrupt this coalition.

And one of the things that the FBI did was they wrote to the leader of the Blackstone gangs. Rangers, and they told him that the Black Panther Party had a hit out on him. That turned out not to be taken very seriously necessarily and definitely not to be true, but it just goes to show that they immediately start to try to create cracks and breaks in these political coalitions wherever they can, and that's one of the areas they attacked. And just when we're talking about the revolutionary potential of the lump and proletariat and, you know, street gangs and marginalized and poor communities, the people that I think really carry this idea forward to today are actually in hip hop so like you know hip hop artists like bamboo or dead prez or killer

mike throughout all of their albums throughout all of their songs they constantly make references to to street gangs not only because they were involved in them and they were surrounded by them growing up but also because they understand that the lump and proletariat are still members of the proletariat and although it's difficult there is an opportunity there to reach out and use that energy that a lot of these young gangbangers or whatever have and guide that energy, direct that energy towards revolutionary politics. And so it's still, I think it's still a strategy that the left should pursue. We should pursue it responsibly. And obviously only people within those communities have the real right to reach out to the lump and proletariat in their areas, in my opinion.

But I do think that's the strategy that can very much still be woven into to left us organizing to this day. Yeah, I would agree. I think that if anything, you know, street violence or are communities that are in the long-term struggle with violent, like criminal activity that endangers people or, you know, the hyper-policing that's ostensibly a response, but in many cases, in many ways also a cause of levels of like civic instability or what have you. They are more than anything, a critique of the state, right? A recognition that the state has failed to meet these people's, meet this community's material needs, and in many cases intentionally seeks to deprive these communities of the material needs. And then those individuals responding in the way

any individual would when sort of facing generations and, if not centuries, of structural deprivation, right? You just seek to meet your material needs, however, appears to be available. And I think that, you know, given that it's a recognition of those failures, right, given that it's a, it's a recognition of the very issues that, that the people on the left critique and, and seek to, to rectify in the structure of the world that we inhabit, I think that that that kind of organizing is incredibly important. Also, it's just in the notion that, you know, you can't leave anyone behind, right? Like, it's all of us or none of us. And because an individual might have made a choice that you, and I'm not saying that this is the case in the circumstance

that we're discussing, but in the abstract, even though an individual might have made a decision that you disagree with, and that, of course, is never a reason to discard that individual or write them off in any way, right? Like, it's, it's, if we recognize that, that the economic circumstances that structure people's lives have also compelled their decisions, right? Like, if our emancipatory politics are based in a pursuit of freedom, then it's a recognition that constricting economic circumstances is a reduced level of freedom. And with that reduced level of freedom, the choices that you make are necessarily compelled or coerced in some fashion. And so it's, it's, you can't make. And again, I'm not asserting that anyone

has made a bad decision. I'm not asserting what bad decisions are. But even if a particular individual disagrees with the choice that another person is makes, and, and thinks that that choice is a bad one, then it's not reflective of that individual. It's more, in my opinion, reflective of the economic circumstances, which structure that person's choices overall. And just on the point about the Blackstone Rangers, the group that was later on, I think, called the Black Peace Stone Nation, you're correct that the FBI sent the leader a letter and saying that Hampton called out a hit on him.

And this was actually a year before Fred Hampton was assassinated. One thing that's, I think, incredibly important is that Hampton had attempted to organize with that group before, I believe, before the letter was received. And I think that, you know, it's fair to either argue or wonder if the fact that they had made contact with the group. And despite that the group didn't agree to participate in the programs and they didn't involve themselves in what the Panthers were doing, the fact that they had had that contact is, you know, it's a bridge, it's a social connection, whether it's not a particularly friendly one. it's a social connection that sort of either has some amount of respect or recognition or whatnot that I think makes that fake assassination attempt harder to believe or makes it a harder sell on the part of the FBI because you're not speaking to someone, you're not speaking about someone that the leader of the group hadn't ever met. You know, they're talking about someone that he has

met, that he has some sense of who that person is. Yeah, great point. And, you know, pointing to that point is like earlier I mentioned that the Chicago office of the Black Panther parties were attacked and raided and burned by the police and what happened in response to that. And this speaks to the fact that these bridges are being built is that the entire community came out. The entire neighborhood where the Black Panther's Chicago office was, they all came out and they rebuilt it in a matter of days. The people, the masses, the people who the Black Panther Party was serving and meeting their needs when the Black Panther Party was in need of some help, it was the community that came out and that act of community coming together to help the Black Panther parties is

really a testament to how well they organized and how close they were to their community and street gangs are in their community. So you're absolutely right. Those bridges are essential and you know there's lots of talk on the left these days about everybody being a cop, you know? And a lot of times on like Twitter and shit you'll see people calling other people cops simply because they have a different tendency or disagree about a certain fucking point. But I think when we look back at history, we actually see what cop shit is. Cop shit is not, oh, here's my position that's a little different than your tendency. Copshit is how can we use sectarianism?

How can we sow seeds of distrust? How can we create rifts in the movement between people and, you know, hypersectarianism and, you know, break down these bonds, burn these bridges, if you will. That's how cops operate. That's how they've always operate. And that's how I can only assume that they're still operating today. So I really think, especially when the stakes are so high and we look back and we see that Fred Hampton got his life taken away, by the police, by the state,

to throw the accusation of of cop around to people you disagree with is really irresponsible. And I hope people understand, and this leads well into the next question, understand how this shit actually works and what infiltration actually looks like. And also that the state doesn't give a fuck

if all you're doing is talking online, right? The state will get involved when they think that you're an actual material threat. The Black Panthers were an actual material threat precisely because they were meeting the material needs. of their community, showing their community that not only do they have these ideas about how the world could be, but actually putting those ideas into action and winning over the

hearts and minds of people in their community, which made them a threat and prompted the state to, you know, to clamp down on them as hard as they did. Yeah, I think that I'm not sure that that could be better stated. I think that, you know, we talk a lot, like as you mentioned, we talk a lot about cops and cops as opponents of leftist politics or opponents of emancipatory politics or the, you know, the movement nebulously. And I think that, I don't think that that's incorrect, but I think you're, you're, again, spot on in identifying that, like, this is the particular move, right? This is, like, dividing people and, and, uh, positioning them as, as against one another.

And again, that that, that, that harkens back to what I was talking about, uh, in regards to the primary base and the primary superstructure in that, that was like the fundamental movement of white supremacy, right? It was to divide up the groups, uh, divide up people and then use those divisions to cement itself as both politically and economically empowered. And I think that, you know, certain people who aren't who don't come from these traditions or don't have experiences in their childhood or through conversations with older family members that bring them to these positions, it's easy to think of police as in that like ideal serve and protect sense, right? And I mean, even if you aren't willing to jump on to the MDC or ACAB train or

whatnot, right? It's, uh, I think that there is the, there's still the reality that how cops exist in the world is as much or should be considered as much if, if not in my opinion, the overpowering consideration as opposed to just the ideal notion of what cops are meant to be, right? Because we don't in any other circumstance think that, well, you know, people want to be doctors only because of the ideal healer, right? We assume that some sort of the real world material compensation is a consideration. And I think in that same vein, we should assume that the real world material application of force, the real world supremacy of violence that police, that police have that defines their role in our societies is, I mean, I imagine that's what draws a lot of people to

the job. But again, I'm not one, I'm not a person who's particularly fond of that position or its historical precursors. So I think that that's pretty reasonable. When I'm talking to people who might have, you know, some indoctrinated or inculcated, you know, sympathy towards cops. One rhetorical strategy that I find particularly useful and brings people around, because a lot of people hate to let go of this idea, like, hey, somewhere in the world a good cop exists, right? The cop takes off his badge. He goes home. He takes care of his kids.

You know, they have a hard time letting that go. So one argument that I use that people might try is fine. I'll concede to you that in their personal life, perhaps there are some fraction of cops who are good dads and good neighbors, whatever. But the social role that they play is the nefarious one, right? The moment that that quote unquote good person puts on that badge and puts that gun on his hip and goes out, he is serving a social role. And that social role is the violent arm of the state, is the brutality that we see on TV, is the thing that we're against when we say, fuck the police. And at least when I use this rhetoric around people who are somewhat sympathetic to cops, I really see them shift their perspective.

and they say, okay, okay, I see what you're saying there. I see what you're saying. It gives them a little inkling of their initial argument to hold on to while really paradigm shifting the way they think about the social role that police play. And so I found it useful. Yeah. Yeah, I think that this is something that's particularly a struggle in, you know, the quote unquote West or in wealthy industrialized ostensibly liberal democracies.

And perhaps especially in Canada and the U.S., and I think that we just partly through media discourse, which does not do a good job, of and perhaps has no interest in teasing these apart, but I think we struggle with the distinction between sentiments and structures. I think we talk about racism, for example, as most often as sentiments, right? Like, this person has bad beliefs or this person treats people, treats these people badly or thinks lesser of these people, as opposed to this person through the use of their power and the application of their agency reinforces systems of structural deprivation, of structural exclusion, and of structural brutality.

really. And that happens regardless of what they believe, right? So in the same way that people are now critiquing Kamala Harris, that's a distinction between sentiments and structures, right? Because she could have all of the, she could have the most, the loftiest, most beneficent sentiments in the world. But as a prosecutor in California or in America, right, you're embodying these structures that have particular valences that have been used for particular means and that still serve those means. And so, regardless of how you feel, you're not only choosing, but you're acting out that

structure's direction and orientation. Exactly. Incredibly well said. 100% agree. Okay, well, look ahead. Look ahead. You sit over here and thought about all that jail chimed behind his motherfucking back and say, I got

the rap to. Our deputy minister, he got to say. This is my rush. The deputy minister fifth was State of Illinois, bad motherfuckers, you can tell the way to hear you that if I'm Kevin Bobbicill feels the way about he'd be new and I feel the same way about the Rush. We didn't start the Black Panther Party, but we do know this.

Do we are some bad motherfuckers? The black path of the parties don't remain in the state of Illinois. You know, sometimes we get to talking and I go to court and then so we're afraid, I come back and rush said, friend, we got to keep you on the streets. Then the rush to go to the court, do you come back and ask the rush, we got to keep you on the streets. And after we just went back and forth, we decided that we like each other so well, God damn, and we both going to stay on the motherfucking street. There ain't nobody going nowhere.

We ain't taking us nowhere. We're going to stay right here with the people. We're going to have to move, and we've got to move fast, we've got to move hard, and we're going to have to move organized to be able to keep Bobby Rush on the streets. We got our field secretary, Nathaniel Jr. up against the wall. They got our Minnesota of Information chalk up against the wall. Everybody, they even got your friend up against the wall. Everybody against the wall.

They even talking about giving folks 20 years. Talking about giving me 20 years. Dig it? For ice cream truck robbery. That's right. $71 worth of ice cream, 710 ice cream bars. I might be big, but I can't eat 710 ice cream bars. But even though they tried to give me all that bad publicity,

they still came out in the end showing the true nature of a capital because they said I went into the truck, feed up this pig that was in our community exploiting people, took the ice cream bars from him. brother, handed them out to the kids. Even though they made me a thief, they made me a robber who attacked people. Game to the people. Here's a man that represents the people.

Debbie the Minnesota fence for the state of it in the noise. Bad motherfucker. A brother of mine, a brother I've been working with a long time to go continue to work with. I'm going to eat with him. I'm going to sleep with him. I'm going to die with it. I'm going to live with it. I'm going to lead with it. By the Russ. So after talking about all this cop stuff, I think that the next logical question is to talk about Co-Intel Pro.

People may be familiar with it. I'm sure lots of people have some basic idea of it. So can you remind listeners what that program was and then talk about the ways in which it went after and attacked the Black Panther Party? Yeah. So Cointel Pro is an initialism or an acronym for the FBI's counterintelligence program. It operated from 1956 to 1971. It was ultimately wrapped up because there was a heist of FBI documents in the town of media in Pennsylvania. And these documents were made public, which were describing the program. But in the mid-50s, the program was initially founded to oppose the Communist Party. of America. And it eventually shifted to focus primarily on acting against the civil rights movement. And it spied on civil rights organizations. As you mentioned, it planted informants in meetings, which were going to be a significant part of its operations. And again, as you mentioned earlier, it considered the Black Panther Party to be the greatest threat to the internal security of the nation. And this is because of the group's survival programs, which the FBI

said was fostering cross-racial solidarity and anti-capitalist solidarity. And this, solidarity is especially why Hampton came onto the group's radar. In a biography of Fred Hampton that was published in 2014, written by a man named Jacoby Williams, he writes that the daily administration was threatened by the racial coalition led by Hampton as not even Reverend King could get Confederate flag wearing Southerners to fight and defend him as Hampton had done. And I mean, really, you know, it's quite florid to consider now, but the FBI taking up this project was, you know, it's almost explicitly identifying itself as an organization that is supporting capitalist imposition and sort of white domination of society, necessarily identifying those things as equal to or essential to American security or American national security or national prosperity. Of course, that is a particular vision of America that isn't necessarily inaccurate, but it's arguably not complete or not finish or has a long way to go to be what it considers itself.

be, whereas I'm sure Edgar Hoover at the time was quite happy with, with, you know, capitalist domination and Euro-colonial supremacist. Anyway, in March of 1968, Edgar Hoover gave Cointel Pro an explicit mandate to, quote, prevent the rise of a black Messiah that could collect and cohere black radical and activist groups across the country. It's notable that any group with primarily black membership was, in Hoover's mind, a black nationalist hate group. And I think that that term black nationalist hate group has some almost chilling, if not exhausting, parallels to that black identity extremist report that came out a couple of years ago from the FBI. And so Hoover instructed that every

co-intel pro office in a region with a Panther chapter was to open a program to explicitly disrupt, destroy and neutralize the operations and programs of the chapter. And they, in that memo, Hoover identified the Breakfast for Children program as a specific target. And so, again, I think that you're correct in noting that, you know, they identify this program where really it is, it really is just giving food to kids, right? And they say that that is a threat to America. I mean, how much more honest can you be, right? And so in April of 1968, Hoover wrote another memo that said, quote,

the Negro youth and moderates must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teachings, they will be dead revolutionaries. And so again, this is an explicit statement of the FBI's operation. These are people who are providing resources to communities that we don't want resources provided to, and in doing so are bringing a critique of the state and a critique of capitalism to these communities. And we need to convince them that if they follow these critiques and if they sort of intake them, then they will die. We will kill them. So the anti-Panther operation became the largest single operation in the FBI's campaign against black liberation movements. And Nome Chomsky would actually write in 1973 that internal FBI documents show

that the agency at the time was citing polling, which found that a quarter of the black population in the country felt great respect for the Panthers, including 43% of people 21 and under. I'm not certain the veracity of this polling, but it was fair to assume that it was believed by the FBI. Even before these memos, though, as early as 1967, Hoover had sent letters to the White House, the CIA, the State Department, and the Department of the Army, specifically mentioning Fred Hampton's name. So, I mean, a year out of high school, and the leader of the FBI has identified him as an existential threat to the country. And so, as I mentioned, the program came to an effective end in 1971 when a group of citizens called the Citizens Commission to investigate the FBI broke into an FBI office in Pennsylvania and stole confidential documents regarding the program. These documents were released to the press in March of 1971. They were published and this effectively brought an end to the program.

And I think that's important to sort of reiterate is that the way that the co-intel program was figured out, out was by an illegal direct action, you know, breaking into FBI headquarters and getting these documents. If these, you know, brave activists wouldn't have taken that huge risk and done that, you know, who knows if we would have ever known about this program. And we definitely probably wouldn't have known the extent of it and all the details we know today that we, you know, a lot of people on the left take for granted. But this whole uncovering of the Cointel program was an act of direct action, which I think is just an interesting thing to note. But this all led up to the tragic events on December 4th, 1969, Fred Hampton was sleeping in his bed next to his

fiance who was nine months pregnant with his son when Chicago police raided his home and murdered him in his sleep. Hampton had been drugged earlier in the night by an FBI infiltrator and was therefore unable to wake up during that raid, which was, and make no mistake about it, an orchestrated assassination by the Chicago PD and the FBI. On November 19th, FBI agent Roy Mitchell drew a floor plan of Hampton's apart based on information supplied by informant O'Neill. On December 4th, at 4.45 in the morning, 14 policemen, 9 white and 5 black,

raided the apartment. Deborah Johnson, 8 months pregnant, was asleep in the back bedroom next to Fred Hampton. The first thing I remember after Fred and I had went to sleep was being awakened by somebody shaking Fred while we were laying in bed saying, chairman, chairman, wake up. The pigs are vamping. The pigs are vamping. This person that was in the room with me kept shouting out. We have a pregnant sister in here. Stop shooting. Eventually the shooting stopped and they said we could come out.

I remember crossing over, Fred, and telling myself over and over, be real careful. Don't stumble. They'll try to shoot you. Just be real calm. Watch how you walk. Keep your hands. hands up, don't reach for anything, don't even try to close your road. When I was in the kitchen, I heard a voice, an unfamiliar voice, say, he's barely alive or he'll barely make it. Then the shooting started back again. Then I heard the same unfamiliar voice say, he's good and dead now. And I knew in my mind they were, I assume they were talking about Fred.

And I knew when I left out of there, I couldn't look towards the room. party leaders mark clark and fred hampton were killed in the raid four of the seven surviving occupants of the apartment were wounded all were charged with assault and attempted murder when they locked me up at the police station i kept begging him for a call to make one call i called i called i think the office the black panther office And I spoke to Bobby Rush, and he told me that Fred was dead. Fred had been killed. And I remember walking out of the office and looking through a little clearing over on the next block, which was right in front of the Monroe Street address and seeing a lot of police cars over there. And at that time, Barbara Rush came to the office.

He had just come from over there, or maybe. be the coroner's office. In any case, we walked back over there and we both were speechless. We just walked through the house and saw where what had taken place and where he died and it was shocking.

And then I was, you know, I just began to realize that the information that I supplied leading up to that moment had facilitated that raid. I knew that indirectly I had contributed and I felt it and I felt bad about it. And then I got mad, you know, I had, and then I had to conceal those feelings, which made it worse. I couldn't, I couldn't say anything.

I just had to continue to play the role. FBI headquarters authorized payment of a $300 bonus to informant William O'Neill for, quote, uniquely valuable services which he rendered over the past several months, unquote. Can you talk about the details of this assassination more in depth and explain how the FBI and local police work together to kill Fred? Yeah. So I think one aspect of context for this story is for this assassination, nation is the political environment in Chicago and the tenure of the mayor at the time, Richard J. Daley. So Chicago has of course been a democratic stronghold, but it is also has been the site of virulent racial inequality and police brutality. Chicago is one of the most prominent examples of redlining and it has and the impacts of decades long wealth

extraction. And the Chicago Police force is also famously corrupt. Recent examples are almost too numerous to name, but they include a drug and extortion ring operating within the Chicago Police Department. Homan Square reported a few years ago an offbook site where at least 7,000 people were quote-unquote disappeared. They were held and brutalized without record or access to counsel. And of course, the murder of LeClawn McDonald, for which the police officer who killed him is likely to serve less than or only up to four years. The other cops who filed false reports attempting to cover up this murder were acquitted of those charges. And then the incumbent mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, who hid the evidence of the murder over a year for over a year so that it wouldn't harm his reelection bid.

And it was also the former chief of staff to President Obama has, of course, suffered no consequences. And that brutality has a long history as well. example, I found reports that noted that between 1910 and 1920, black people made up 3% of Chicago's population, but 21% of people killed by police. So, I mean, this is, you know, a structure of exclusion and oppression and domination that has existed in the city for a long time, for more than a century now. A Chicago civil rights lawyer who was reflecting on the assassination of Fred Hampton said in a 2009 interview that he had never seen or heard of a Chicago police officer testifying to witnessing another officer committing police brutality.

And so to go back to 1968, in the clashes with police in 1968 that occurred in Chicago following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., during these clashes, Mayor Richard J. Daley, had instructed police to shoot to maim and shoot to kill. So he was already taking an increasingly aggressive stance against black political activism. And this is increasingly aggressive from what was. already an aggressive orientation. So in 1968, a guy named Ed Hanrahan was elected to be the Cook County state attorney, and Hanrahan was supported by Daly and adopted Daly's aggressive stance. He was known for especially targeting non-white youth, Black Panthers, and Black Panther supporters in the streets

for stops, arrests, and often they targeting them with police violence. And by this time, Fred Hampton had already been on the FBI's key agitator index since his activity. in high school in Maywood with the NWACP. So the FBI and through their co-intel program, the FBI had an informant in the Chicago Panther Party, one who was close enough to the leadership and close enough to Hampton specifically to draw a floor plan of his apartment

and identify where in the apartment he slept. And so this floor plan was supplied to the FBI by the informant who then passed it to the Cook County Sheriff's Office the day before Hampton was assassinated. the FBI on the Cook County Sheriff's Office to murder Fred Hampton and at the behest of Jay Edgar Hoover and his national anti-civil rights initiatives and they would later identify the raid as a success in internal documents and in fact they noted that the informant who passed the drawing and information to the FBI

that was then passed to the Cook County Sheriff's Office that informant was paid a bonus And so on the night in question on December 4th, officers later told reporters that they knocked on the apartment building, the door of the apartment building at 5 a.m. And they said that they were denied entry, but they opened the door to find a woman pointing a shotgun at them. And so they said at this point, they were forced to shoot back and that there was an ensuing gun battle. However, witnesses reported more than 10 minutes of continuous gunfire in which both 21-year-old Fred Hampton and 22-year-old Matt Clark were. killed. Matt Clark being another member of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. And there were 13 weapons and a few hundred rounds of ammunition found in the apartment. But ballistics evidence revealed that only a single bullet was fired by a member of the Black Panthers that night,

while the cops fired more than, or up to 100 bullets in the direction of the, of the Panthers in the apartment. This, of course, directly contradicts the statements of the officers who were present that night, who claimed that six or seven members of the Black Panthers were firing at them. Deborah Johnson, who was Hampton's fiancé and the mother of his child, stated that two officers, she would later tell that two officers entered their bedroom after the hail of bullets from the hall and into the apartment. And so the two officers entered the bedroom and she heard one ask, is he still alive? And then the other officer, she heard the other officer fire two bullets into Fred Hampton and then say, he's good and dead now. And an independent autopsy confirmed

that Fred Hampton was murdered in his sleep, as it found a high dosage of the barbiturate secondol in his system, a high enough dosage that it would have rendered him nearly, if not entirely unconscious. And there were seven panthers who were arrested that night and who were charged with armed violence, attempted murder, and weapons offenses, and all of these charges were eventually dropped. One more thing is that you can find pictures online of the four Cook County officers who are carrying Fred Hampton's body out of the apartment, and there are noticeable smiles on their faces. You can clearly see that they're pleased, you know, with a job well done. And I think that the internal FBI documents that note that the rate was a

success, you know, prove that this wasn't an attempt to arrest anyone. This wasn't an attempt to seek enforcement of some legitimate violation of law or whatnot. This was, it was explicitly in assassination. The FBI, the J. Edgar Hoover, the quote unquote, cop and the FBI, which is an organization tasked with in its own mind preserving the security and prosperity of the nation, identified this individual who spearheaded programs, again, to give food to children and support people in their communities, and they said he has to die. And then they called for that assassination. They enabled that assassination through obtaining the floor plan and then passing that to the Cook County officers. And then they

paid the informant for that successful assassination. Yeah. And so I, A couple things. One is that, you know, as a father, like it kills me to know that Fred never got a chance to meet his first and only child. She was nine months pregnant. The child was born a couple weeks after this assassination attempt. And moreover, the police knew that inside that home was a nine-month pregnant woman. And they still proceeded to shoot over a hundred bullets into that house, you know, just firing into whatever, the walls. It doesn't matter where the bullets go.

that is horrific. And then for the next couple of weeks, as you said, they lied about it. They said it was a gunfight that the Black Panther started, you know, shooting back and there was this big, you know, equal gunfight and half the bullets came from us and the other half came from them. And that story, as you said, was totally torn apart when actual ballistic experts went in and said only one out of a hundred bullets were fired from the Black Panther Party, all the rest from the police. So this was a cruel and brutal attempt at murder. they shot Hampton they didn't get him the first time so as you said they stood over his body fired two more bullets into him to make god damn sure he was dead what they did fuck up with though is that they left that house open for for two weeks the police did not shut it down as a crime

scene so what the black panthers immediately did was they would organize walkthroughs and they they took the community and showed them you know here's where fred hampton was look at all these bullets you know this is how this is which way they were coming in so you know god damn well that the FBI and the police are lying to you when they say it was a mutual battle. And one of the ladies, I remember, the people that were walking, the Black Panthers that were walking them through, one of the older black ladies from the neighborhood came out and she shook her head and she said, you know, this is a northern lynching. And that's exactly, exactly what that was. Yeah. And so I think that, you know, you made the comment before that, you know, certain people

they want to believe the notion that there's a good cop out there or whatnot. And that conflicts with the way that these systems operate. And I think that that description, that it's a northern lynching is absolutely dead on because, I mean, it is the case that cops started in America or in the United States as slave catching troops, right? So they were explicitly invested in preserving white supremacy. And though they've, you know, changed their uniforms, although not all that much over the years and gained power and legitimacy through the state, I primarily view them as fundamentally still existing in that same capacity and through, you know, protection of private property, which is obviously unequally distributed and attached to racial and

Euro-colonial extraction and exploitation, whatnot, they do the same job. And I think it's in the same way that people want to believe that good cops exist and whatnot. They're resistant to the notion that the police would assassinate someone, right? But I think once you accept that, once you sort of come to the realization that, you know, it's that their job isn't primarily to help. it's it's you know to help certain people and certain interests and and you know I imagine a lot of the other stuff is just like motions of legitimacy so that they're not viewed explicitly as like a private security force for capital then you are more willing to accept that they they would do this because it does fit into this this larger this broader project of working against egalitarian movements working against revolutionary movements that seek to to upset the distribution of power. and political power and capital and resources in the country and the world overall. Exactly. And then, you know, it's just worth stating the utter hypocrisy. So you look at somebody like Fred Hanton, never killed anybody, never advocated for the murder of innocent people. He

just fed children, took care of the elderly in his community, tried to organize people he was killed. But we look right now in our, you know, the United States today, the singular carrier out of extremist violence, mass shootings, you know, whenever, whenever you can tell you. high violent event in the United States to a political or religious group. Over the last year, 100% have been from the far right. But you do not see, you do not see the FBI cracking down on the right wing today, like you saw them cracking down on the Black Panther Party back then or even today. Like you mentioned earlier, the black identity extremists.

This is a black man who is an organizer who just would post, you know, anti-cop shit on his social media. page never hurt anybody he got locked up for how many months with with no ability to to get out or talk to his family you know and then the nazis can go around you know white supremacists the white nationalist white you know of all sorts can go out stage these terrorist attacks attempt to blow up trains murder people at rallies and yet you don't see any wide scale attack on their organizational ability whatsoever and i think that is fucking something that we should never forget absolutely i mean there's uh there was a recent um piece in the

New York Times about how, you know, the U.S. law enforcement failed to see the threat of white nationalism. And I mean, I don't think it's entirely that they failed to see it. I think that they just recognized either through sort of cynicism and callousness or their perception of like political feasibility that acting against the right wing was just very difficult to do in the U.S. There was a report released in the early months or years of the Obama administration that was explicitly, an FBI report explicitly about right-wing extremism, but the report was convened during the end of the Bush administration of George W. Bush. But because it came out during the Obama administration, obviously he got pegged as attacking the right wing and whatnot.

There were, as you mentioned, there were cop groups that were saying, oh, this is, this is the presidential administration saying that law-abiding citizens or criminals and whatnot. But all of that, you know, and so they backed off it, right, both the, both the, administration and law enforcement and, uh, like politicians who were, who were making statements about it. Uh, everyone backed off it and obviously Republican politicians were using it as a, as a cudgel to like beat back Democrats or beat back anybody who wanted to speak about right wing extremism. But all of it glosses over the fact that there is this, there's direct through line, right? There's a through line from Ruby Ridge and Waco and Timothy McVeigh to like the, uh, the, the,

Adam Woffin Division, right? Yeah, so the members of that there was a story reported recently where one member of Adam Woffin Division killed another member when he was who he was living with at the time. And they were, he was living with that other member and one of the founders of the movement, that founder of the movement was arrested. And despite having explosive and radioactive material in his garage was released by police and then armed himself and then started driving, started driving across states with the intent of committing mass shooting, I imagine, was eventually caught.

But again, like, inconceivable that you detained someone with radioactive and explosive material and release them. I can't imagine that, you know, had a Black Panther been detained with radioactive and explosive material, they would have been released so innocuously. But that member, when they were arrested and in that apartment where the other member of Adam Woffin Division was killed, they had a picture of Timothy McVeigh. And Timothy McVe, of course, showed up at Waco prior to doing the Oklahoma bombing and conducted the Oklahoma bombing on the anniversary of the Waco disaster. And so there's like all of these acts of violence that are in the same vein, right? They're white nationalists.

They're anti-state in the sense that they view the state as illegitimate, but not through what's illegitimate, not through what we might. argue are illegitimate uses of power or abuses of state power. They say they view it as illegitimate through some, you know, wide-eyed, Herner Diary, Zionist-occupied government, a phantasm that they've manufactured in their minds. But then take, have decided to coerce people and that state, the agents of the state are that are violent threats that must be met with violence and decided to take innocent lives. You're correct in saying that they aren't labeled as terrorists. I mean, And it's not even just in the U.S.

You know, yesterday there was a sentencing for a Canadian resident of Quebec who conducted a mass shooting at a mosque. The act was not labeled an act of terrorism, you know, despite that he was explicitly, explicitly invested in, I mean, carrying out racial war. I'm not sure, I'm not sure why that is. I haven't read the judge's statements on it at length, but I mean, I don't know that there will be a lot of new reasons. Yeah. No, exactly. We can't expect a white supremacist state apparatus, violent white supremacist state apparatus to really go after violent white supremacists. It's like that Spider-Man looking at himself meme. These people don't really care. And half the cops or half the people in power are sympathetic to the right wing, even if they're not full-on Nazis. And so they see themselves a lot more in the right than they ever could in the left. And so I think that contributes to some of this as well. Absolutely. But transitioning to the legacy of Fred Hampton as we sort of come towards the end of this thing. discussion. What was the reaction in the community and indeed the entire country after the assassination of Fred Hampton? So immediately following the assassination began 13 years of legal

proceedings, which ultimately would result in a civil case in front of the Supreme Court in 1983 in which each the FBI, Cook County, and the city of Chicago admitted guilt in orchestrating the assassination of Fred Hampton. Not any individuals, sadly, but unsurprisingly, were were convicted of direct culpability, but these institutions were deemed to be guilty. So they were forced to pay $1.85 million of settlement to the victim's families, or to Hampton's families. However, all of each the local state and federal officials involved were exonerated of all charged civil rights violations. In response to Hampton's assassination, the Rainbow Coalition responded by furthering their involvement in Chicago City politics. Chicago's first black mayor, Harold Washington, was elected in 1983 after running on a Rainbow Coalition platform.

As I mentioned earlier, Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Push Coalition, which was an aspect of his presidential campaign in the 80s, was a direct descendant of the Hampton-led organization. And again, as I mentioned earlier, Barack Obama's political careers arguably started as a product or outgrowth of the Rainbow Coalition's activism and of Harold Washington's victory, which, spawned consulting and community organizing throughout Chicago and Hampton's funeral to, I think, underscore the impact that he had both on the direct community and on the city as an individual and as leader of the, as deputy leader of the of the Illinois chapter. Fred Hampton's funeral was attended by more than 5,000 people. However, by some accounts, the Chicago Panthers lost membership and lost energy after he was murdered. And some of that, I think over time, their influence in Chicago City politics somewhat petered out. Of course, that's also in the context of a nationwide reduction in the prominence of the Black Panther Party that is in no small part due to a nationwide program of assassinations and incarceration and control and criminalization of black activists and Black Panthers specifically.

there were also those who saw this almost as like imperial overreach, you know, like the state being too consumed by its own power. And so, for example, the weather underground cited the assassination of Fred Hampton and other activists, but Fred Hampton especially in their 1970 declaration of war against the U.S. Yeah, that's fascinating. I didn't even know that last part. That's interesting. You know, this makes me think of, you know, people like Che, people like Rosa. Luxembourg, like Thomas Sancara, MLK, Malcolm X, all of which were prominent voices on the left and all of which refused to shut up in the face of violent threats and ultimately they were

all killed by the forces of reaction. And, you know, I think Fred Hampton can definitely be placed in this arena of leftist martyrs who gave their life, who risked it all and lost it all in the pursuit of liberation for other people. So with that in mind, what, in your opinion, is the legacy of Fred Hampton and what lessons can radicals today draw from him and his life? I sort of draw two lessons, and I sort of indicated these in the introduction when I was talking about some of the things that made him an especially compelling figure and particularly historically important. But the first is that it's all of us or none of us, and it's now or never. I think that the insistence upon cross-racial and cross-gender solidarity and the moral urgency of his movement and the insistence upon providing for people's immediate material needs, even as you're seeking to mobilize them politically, I think, is going to be especially important in any movement, especially in international movement, that seeks to confront the truly dizzying power of capitalism and its, it's, you know, militarization, increasing militarization, and then the threat of border. walls and exclusion and the notion that there is a rising movement on the right, which seeks

to allow or permit or help climate change do its dirty work, right? It wants climate change to cleanse the world so that it doesn't have to. So it doesn't have to argue for nukeing the parts of the world that are destroyed in the Turner Diaries or whatever. And so I think that the insistence on inclusion, the assistance that everyone must be provided for, everyone must be cared for, you know, save for those who willingly exclude themselves from this this universal egalitarian movement, that I think is especially powerful. And then that insistence that it's now, that it has to happen now, and that the things which we are made to occupy ourselves with, right, like our jobs and education and seeking to provide, seeking

to achieve some semblance of security or well-being in these horrific neoliberal circumstances or horrific capitalist arrangements. You know, horrific, relatively speaking, of course, there are obviously innumerable people in the world who's who struggles and day-to-day issues far outweigh any that I've ever encountered growing up, you know, relatively comfortable in Canada. I think that that the immediacy and that universality are especially important, especially animating. And I think that they're powerful as as fundamental assertions because those really are the fundamental assertions that I think are most opposed by the right, the notion that you're meant to care for everyone, and the notion that other people's, that suffering that exists

simultaneous with your well-being is inexcusable. Yeah. And then the second thing, in which some may call cynical, I don't, the senses I don't think that you'll view it that way. Second thing that I draw from him is that the politics that are required of us that are necessary for those who are earnestly interested in the freedom and well-being of all people, they will be opposed by every weapon that collected wealth and established power. have at their disposal, you know, it's whether it's assassination by way of criminalization and then false

police action, or it's the removal of one citizen status by identifying them as a foreign combatant or a domestic terrorist or an enemy of the state or what have you, one that seeks to upset the state's prosperity or stability through, you know, communist organizing or whatever it may be. But any, any movement, any political demand or, or activist, Anything that seeks to reduce the wealth and power that has been collected in certain quarters will be opposed by every means available, including and especially violence. And I think that it's, I mean, it's not, I don't think it's a, it's a necessary, a comfortable assertion, but I do think that, that if we are to engage in some, some broad-based and hopefully international move against capital, there will be, there will be blood, you know, there will be, uh, um, violence, there will be death. And it's not, I don't think that it's, it's not for me to, to say that any other individual should put themselves in the way of that violence. There, but there are, of course, already people who are through no choice of their own directly in the way of that violence, directly being acted upon by it. And, um, my concern, I guess, is that if we aren't prepared for that, then it will quell us. Um, again, you know, being someone who has not been forced to deal with or in, engage in very much violence at all in their life. And so, you know, I speak cautiously and with

caveats. Yeah, but I think that that's not cynical at all. And it's not even just speculation or your opinion. I think history has borne out the truth of that claim time and time and time again. The very same force that internationally crushes or attempts to crush every proletarian movement from Soviet Union to Venezuela to Cuba to everything is the same force that, that stomps on socialist movements like the Black Panther Party domestically. The same white supremacist, violent imperial capitalist machine that grinds people up and spits them out in the Iraq war, for example, is the same machine that kicked in Fred Hampton's door and put bullets in his body. And so, you know, connecting those things and seeing how the imperialism abroad to crush left-wing movements

and the violent white supremacist FBI and police apparatus here at home that does the exact same thing, those two things aren't exorably connected. And you can't fight one without fighting the other. Fred Hampton knew that. And I think we should know that. I completely agree. And honestly, I'm sort of hoping. I keep having my fingers crossed that we'll see the emergence in Canada and the U.S.

of a leftist political movement that is electorally minded, you know, conceding that obviously electoral politics will not be our savior. But just the introduction to the explicit political sphere of arguments for universal well-being, right, of arguments that there is no individual prosperity and that a country that seeks to build its prosperity on on subjugating, exploiting, and oppressing people in other parts of the world is a country that is indefensible and inexcusable. It is no prosperity at all. It is, I don't know, sociopathy. Yeah. It's sickening and it's, we can't, I mean, there's no, you know, I, I've come to this point where, you know, I keep asking, not myself,

but I sort of keep posing this question, you know, what is the value of a political or a moral theory that apologizes for or accepts suffering because it's merely because it's not within sight? And I imagine the only value is that it, you know, it makes one self feel better as opposed to actually seeks to create some amount of justice. I mean, you know, the people who are robbed by our world have been being robbed for centuries, right? These are centuries of colonial extraction and exploitation that sent money to particular places, and that money is being used to entrench the system as it has been. Our inability to mobilize around that in an electoral sphere, I think, is frustrating, but I think it's more indicative of the fact that we just still, and speaking broadly, our societies don't think that we have any responsibility to anyone else.

Right. You know, electoralism, as you said, definitely not, shouldn't be the primary focus. where we spend our time and energy, but there's a reason why, you know, Bobby Seal of the Black Panther Party's ran for, I think, governorship or some high office in California. And that was because, you know, we have to attack on all fronts and we have to get our word out, right? And a campaign is one way to get your word out. And I heard, I saw somebody on Twitter the other day say this and I really respect and I want to say this. And so far as we do, you know, support to any degree socialist candidates, radical candidates, going the electoral route to try to get

our message out or win office or whatever, we should hold them accountable to at least this standard, which the standard is that you have to be vocal and you cannot be mealy-mouthed when it comes to U.S. imperialism and just what this state is and what it does, because any attempt to try to stand back from that or obscure that or, you know, not want to get into it because it's too controversial, then you're just playing into the hands of the state and the dominant narrative that they constantly push, which is that, you know, America is the freest, greatest country on earth and all that bullshit and so you know there is there is a there is a role that electoralism can play in a much broader radical movement but that electoral role must be held to

principles and must be accountable to the people who it's ostensibly represents in the in the most rigid ways you know and I think that's a lot of times where the electoral path fails for radicals and why a lot of radicals just see that as something that can be utterly dismissed when you have you know people like you know Bernie Sanders who can't even really who has to add all these caveats before he can kindly kind of say, hey, maybe we shouldn't be in Venezuela. I mean, that's sort of cowardice is it can't be accepted on the left. Yeah. And I mean, Bernie Sanders, who, you know, for all the impact that he's had opening the Overton window in the U.S., he did co-sign Obama's use of drones. And I mean, I don't know how any person who

considers himself, you know, on the left can apologize for or accept a global unilateral assassination program. I mean, that's just, it's, it's on the face of it. It's horrific, right? Like, There's no, the notion that this one country is enough power to kill whoever it wants and no one can do anything about it. It can kill, it kills its own citizens and other parts of the world. It kills children. It doesn't matter, right? Like it's, it's, uh, the notion that you can't confront that. You can't say just openly and without fear that that is incorrect, that that is unacceptable. Um, is, it is quite, quite distressing. I do think that as you mentioned, there is some benefit in introducing arguments to people, helping people think about their life

in political terms, which many people don't do or and certainly don't do intuitively, or just, you know, making them believe that certain things are possible or making them believe, helping them believe that you can enter politics with these fundamental assertions. Everyone deserves, everyone must have housing, everyone must have food, health care, education, those things. And that that won't sort of keep you out. That doesn't have you written off. I think that there's some growth in that, especially among young people.

there's either a realization or demand that those kinds of politics must be not just present but must be legit must be viewed as legitimate but I think the other aspect to your point is that that the electoral sphere I do think it's sort of in in the way that it imagines itself to be very serious right that only serious policy proposals are considered that unless something is pragmatic and realistic then it's it's it's wild-eyed or it's a unicorn or whatever I think that the that it ends The electoral sphere ends up infantilizing politics in a way. I came across this Washington Post op-ed yesterday, I think, that said that Canada was now the moral leader of the free world because, yeah, because, I don't know, like, because Merkel was stepping down and obviously, you know, Mr. Trump is, he's a mean man. And it's like, like, what kind of child thinks that way, right? Like, one, what is the free world?

What are you talking about? this free world that necessary that it uh uh chose to built its prosperity on subjugating literally everyone else that's the free world right the free world and of course the moral leader can all the candidates are are predominantly white countries and historically sort of ethno european countries but i'm sure that there's no there's no valence to that right i'm sure it's just a coincidence right um but yeah but but even then the notion that countries can be like good and bad in that way. Like, countries are, it's primarily about like ideals and how the country thinks of itself and imagines itself. It's primarily about decorum and not the material relations

that that country has with other countries, that the people of that country have with the peoples of other countries that these settler colonial nations have with their indigenous populations. Like, it's just, it's just unbelievably childish. And it's, and it's horrific that these people are viewed as the serious-minded ones, you know, the ones that they're looking everywhere in world for a hero, but the hero has to be an elite. The people can't be their own hero. The people, the power of people, that mass movements aren't heroic. It's always a top-down savior. Absolutely. I could not agree more. I had a mass for Fred, and I was just shattered. I was devastated. And in the midst of this

mass, I was trying to explain to our children, as we had all the school children, they're all And I was trying to explain to them the importance of Fred. And I wasn't getting through, and at least I felt like I wasn't getting through. And in the midst of my explanation, I just burst in the tears. And the next thing I knew here was one of our eighth grade boys. He jumped up and he said, I am Fred Hampton. And then a girl in sixth grade, she jumps up, I am Fred Hampton, another kid in first grade. I'm Fred Hampton.

And before you knew it, the whole The whole church, kids were all shouting, I am Fred Hampton. And, wow, I just felt so wonderful. I felt like, gee, whiz, this death was not in vain at all. Because these kids are saying that they are willing to get up here and speak out for liberation, for first-class citizenship. Chuka, thank you so much for coming on this show, for having this discussion with me. I really appreciate it.

Before I let you go, are there any recommendations, that you could offer to anyone who wants to learn more about Fred Hampton and where listeners can find you and your work online? Absolutely. So there, though it is a sewage of reactionary nightmares, there is a documentary on YouTube called The Murder of Fred Hampton. You can watch the whole thing there. And it's particularly interesting because the documentary was started, was begun before he was killed. And so there's footage of him giving speeches and organizing with people. It's incredibly invigorating. It's of course, also incredibly heartbreaking. You see the footage of the scene of the assassination that night. You see, you know, the blood-soaked mattress and everything. And it's jarring in that regard. But it's, you know, also jarring in the amount of energy and invigoration that he had,

that Fred Hampton had when speaking, whether it was in a sort of, you know, one-to-one or one-to-a-few-people conversation or when he's standing at a lectern and orating to a crowd. It's, like, really, really, you know, It can't overstate how energizing a speaker he was and how it at the same time sort of gives you wings and clips them. You know, it shows you all this possible and then it reminds you what happens. And then there are a couple books that I drew from excerpts of for this discussion. The first being the assassination of Fred Hampton by Jeffrey Haas. He was a civil rights lawyer in Chicago and was president active in the scene when Hampton was assassinated. he'd also taken a lot of civil rights cases and represented black activists prior to the assassination.

So he had a lot of information that book is a lot of information on both the context and the actual assassination and then the trial afterwards. And then another book that I mentioned earlier by Jacobi Williams is called From the Bullet to the Ballot, the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party and racial coalition politics in Chicago. And this one is, you know, Hampton, of course, is a prominent figure in it, but it's, Also, about the chapter and how it operated in the city, including some of the stuff that you discussed earlier, like its survival programs and the gender inclusivity and whatnot and the cross-racial solidarity. As for my work, you can, I have a website www.chukajackam.com. My work focuses on drug policy and then economic and political inequality. and much of it centers around attempting to elucidate and address entrenched economic impairments and the legacies of slavery and colonialism and racial and sexual oppression and subjugation

and whatnot. Cool. Well, I really hope people, you know, go and check that out. Definitely support you and your work. Thank you again for coming on. And I hope one day we can talk more about other topics because I just enjoy having a conversation with you and, you know, prepping with you leading up to this conversation was also an honor. So, yeah, let's definitely collaborate in the future again.

That would be fantastic, man. I would love to speak to with you again. I, you know, I want to thank you sincerely, not just for having me on, but also the show overall. I mean, it's, I think you made a comment in a prior episode about how theoretical texts can sometimes be off-putting or alienating. But the, but, you know, I think that one, and you mentioned. you know, if you, you know, once you get into them, you find that you sort of can, you more intuitively understand the material than you might have guessed. But I think that on top of that, your show does great work in, in helping increase accessibility of some of these texts.

Thank you for listening. Rev. Left Radio is 100% listener funded. If you like what we do here, you can support us at patreon.com forward slash revleft radio or make a one-time donation at buy mea coffee.com forward slash rev left radio. Links will be in the show notes. You know,