Tuesday, March 1, 2016

AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY IS ALL OUR HISTORY -- FRED HAMPTON

 


   The great Fred Hampton was assassinated in his bed by the FBI. This is not a secret.  Historically one of the most charismatic and brilliant leaders of what would have likely been a successful movement to begin to dismantle the capitalist system, Fred Hampton had to be killed.  He was a tremendous threat to the powers that be so they walked into his house in the middle of the night and shot him while he slept.  Fred Hampton was just 21 years old.  Black Panther leader Mark Clark was also killed.  Fred Hampton's wife survived the attack somehow.



   Here are excerpts of Fred Hampton's own words from the documentary made about him:

FRED HAMPTON
: "So we say—we always say in the Black Panther Party that they can do anything they want to to us. We might not be back. I might be in jail. I might be anywhere. But when I leave, you’ll remember I said, with the last words on my lips, that I am a revolutionary. And you’re going to have to keep on saying that. You’re going to have to say that I am a proletariat, I am the people."





   "A lot of people don’t understand the Black Panthers Party’s relationship with white mother country radicals. A lot of people don’t even understand the words that Eldridge uses a lot. But what we’re saying is that there are white people in the mother country that are for the same types of things that we are for stimulating revolution in the mother country. And we say that we will work with anybody and form a coalition with anybody that has revolution on their mind. We’re not a racist organization, because we understand that racism is an excuse used for capitalism, and we know that racism is just—it’s a byproduct of capitalism. Everything would be alright if everything was put back in the hands of the people, and we’re going to have to put it back in the hands of the people."    




   "With no education, the people will take the local foundation and start stealing money, because they won’t be really educated to why it’s the people’s thing anyway. You understand what I’m saying? With no education, you have neocolonialism instead of colonialism, like you’ve got in Africa now and like you’ve got in Haiti. So what we’re talking about is there has to be an educational program. That’s very important. As a matter of fact, reading is 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 down ideology for the party. Why? Because if they don’t have an education, then they’re nowhere. You dig what I’m saying? They’re nowhere, because they don’t even know why they’re doing what they’re doing. You might get caught up in the emotion of this movement. You understand me? You might be able to get them caught up because 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 capitalists, and before you know it, we’ll have Negro imperialists."



   "We don’t think you fight fire with fire; we think you fight fire with water. We’re going to fight racism not with racism, but we’re going to fight with solidarity. We say we’re not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism. We’re still here to say we’re not going to fight reactionary pigs and reactionary state’s attorneys like this and reactionary state’s attorneys like Hanrahan with any other reactions on our part. We’re going to fight their reactions with all of us people getting together and having an international proletarian revolution."



   "Black people need some peace. White people need some peace. And we are going to have to fight. We’re going to have to struggle. We’re going to have to struggle relentlessly to bring about some peace, because the people that we’re asking for peace, they are a bunch of megalomaniac warmongers, and they don’t even understand what peace means. And we’ve got to fight them. We’ve got to struggle with them to make them understand what peace means."




   "Bobby Seale is going through all types of physical and mental torture. But that’s alright, 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 revolutionaries, but you can’t jail the revolution. You might run a liberator like Eldridge Cleaver out of the country, but you can’t run liberation out of the country. You might murder a freedom fighter like Bobby Hutton, but you can’t murder freedom fighting, and if you do, you’ll come up with answers that don’t answer, explanations 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 that’s acting like people and moving on pigs. And that’s what we’ve got to do. So we’re going to see about Bobby regardless of what these people think we should do, because school is not important and work is not important. Nothing’s more important than stopping fascism, because fascism will stop us all."

  Fred Hampton's fiancee Deborah Johnson who was 9 months pregnant at the time

DEBORAH JOHNSON: "Someone came into the room, started shaking the chairman, said, "Chairman, Chairman, wake up. The pigs are vamping." Still half asleep, I looked up, and I saw bullets coming from, it looked like, the front of the apartment, from the kitchen area. They were—pigs were just shooting.
"And about this time, I jumped on top of the chairman. He looked up. Looked like all the pigs had converged at the entranceway to the bedroom area, back bedroom area. The mattress was just going—you could feel bullets going into it. I just knew we’d be dead, everybody in there. When he looked up, just looked up, he didn’t say a word. He didn’t move, except for moving his head up. He laid his head back down, to the side like that. He never said a word. He never got up off the bed.
"The person who was in the room, he kept hollering, "Stop shooting! Stop shooting! We have a pregnant woman, a pregnant sister in here!" At the time I was eight-and-a-half, nine months pregnant. My baby was to be delivered in two weeks. Pigs kept on shooting. So I kept on hollering out. Finally, they stopped.
"They pushed me and the other brother by the kitchen door and told us to face the wall. Heard a pig say, "He’s barely alive. He’ll barely make it." I assumed they were talking about Chairman Fred. Then they started shooting. The pigs, they started shooting again. I heard a sister scream. They stopped shooting. Pig said, "He’s good and dead now." The pigs were running around laughing. They was really happy, you know, talking about Chairman Fred is dead. I never saw Chairman Fred again."
Fred Hampton Jr. is active in prison rights struggle now.

   A quote from one of the lawyers of the Hampton Family:  "...it is important not to relegate the Hampton assassination and COINTELPRO to the annals of history. In light of the current revelations concerning the systemic illegal activities of the National Security Agency and the FBI in the name of fighting terrorism, it is well to remember a quote from a 1964 COINTELPRO memorandum sent to the New York, Chicago and Washington FBI Offices by Director Hoover in which he claimed credit for "disrupting" and "neutralizing" the Communist Party:

"Over the years, our approach to investigative problems in the intelligence field has given rise to a number of new programs, some of which have been most revolutionary, and it can be presumed that with a continued aggressive approach to these programs, new and productive ideas will be forthcoming. These ideas will not be increased in number or improved upon from the standpoint of accomplishments merely through the institution of a program such as COINTELPRO which is given another name and in fact, only encompasses everything that has been done in the past or will be done in the future."

   From Wikipedia - to show just a tiny bit of the effectiveness of Fred Hampton:  "Fred Hampton was quickly moving up the ranks in the Black Panther Party, and his talent as a political organizer was described as remarkable.[5][6] In 1968, he was on the verge of creating a merger between the BPP and a southside street gang with thousands of members, which would have doubled the size of the national BPP.[5][6] Moreover, it meant an alliance extending the Black Panther Party reach and influence united with white and Latino organizers, a step which Hoover viewed as an untenable ultimate threat and ordered an intensified FBI crackdown to the level of "any means necessary" to decimate the BPP.[8]"

   No other Black Panther Party leader was amalgamating the various sectors of our class society into a united power that would have been capable of at the very least challenging the now monster Billionaire Boys Club who have taken over our society.  WE NEED FRED HAMPTON AGAIN!!

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