What absolutely floors me is that Fred Hampton had organized all of this by the age of 21, when he was murdered. That kid . . . what he might have gone on to achieve boggles the mind.
I often think of how different we’d be as a nation today if certain folk had been allowed to live, like Fred Hampton, MLK, Bobby Kennedy, etc. and not murdered in their most productive years because of institutionalized societal hate and fear.
You know I kind of wonder if this is because those people died, or just because the social conditions that allowed those people to flourish, allowed those people to emerge, have changed in some fundamental way. The black panthers were a gang, still, make no mistake, they just weren’t as fucked up of a gang as many other drug gangs of the time and of today might be. The black panthers would still occasionally steal from richer white neighborhoods, or go on raids, I think they were called, to fund these free breakfasts. Which I think is cool, but is still something that you can quite easily frame as being a “gang activity”.
The social conditions have changed, though. Not in that the consequences have somehow become more severe, for breaking the law (though perhaps the surveillance state has increased, making it harder to get away with in the first place). Mostly, I think, the change emerges out of the crack and cocaine epidemic of the 80’s. Dealing is an easy way to make your way up, socioeconomically, it’s an easy way to pin people down with charges, it’s an easy way to get a bunch of people to fry their own brains, etc. And, we know who really propagated the crack epidemic, don’t we? Thank you, gary webb. Infrastructurally, the black community has been displaced from “the projects”, and other social works, which were designed to protect their communities, into suburban hellscapes where organization is much harder. You can even see this back all the way in like, the 50’s and shit, when everyone chopped up black neighborhoods with the highway act.
I’m sure there’s some other stuff I’m forgetting, but yeah, in any case, shit’s changed since the 70’s, organization has changed. I’m sure we’ll only be allowed to learn about the fred hamptons of our day 20 years from now, when they’ve all been neutralized by the CIA, and when their narratives and lives can be co-opted by the american state to push more garbage propaganda.
The black panthers were a gang, still, make no mistake, they just weren’t as fucked up of a gang as many other drug gangs of the time and of today might be. The black panthers would still occasionally steal from richer white neighborhoods, or go on raids, I think they were called, to fund these free breakfasts. Which I think is cool, but is still something that you can quite easily frame as being a “gang activity”.
I don’t disagree with anything you wrote. But it’s not the gang activity that made ol’ J. Edgar shit his kecks. It’s not the gang activity that set Fred Hampton up for federal execution.
It was the self-sufficiency of the group, Fred Hampton’s ability to unite them and talk them into doing for each other, by themselves, everything from feeding their community to policing and protecting it, essentially removing themselves from the societal dynamic of exploitation and all the wealth transfer systems that had been built up around it, that meant Fred Hampton had to die and the Black Panthers disband.
Fred Hampton was a one-man anti-modern-slavery giant who threatened the entire power structure of the time simply by removing himself and his local community from it – and thus proving to everyone that the Black community did not need to be a part of the system that uses and exploits but never serves them, always taking and never giving anything more than a subsistence living in return, and that at the point of a gun more often than not.
If Fred Hampton, a scrawny Black Chitown teenager could change that dynamic, it could happen elsewhere. Anywhere.
If Black communities started fending for themselves, feeding themselves, taking care of themselves, creating and owning their own value and then keeping that value to themselves, well, where then would all the tax dollars for the police and justice system go? Where would that steady supply of prison labor – 14th amendment slave labor – be gotten then? Or even all the non-prison cheap laborers? Where’s the convenient enemy then, like Reagan’s famous “Welfare Queen”? Whom do we then set apart as the enemy of society when we need for society to be divided for better control and distraction? Who do we set our police upon when they need a blood feed? If the powerless among us begin to own their power, well then . . . anyone could!
That’s why Fred Hampton had to die, IMO. Nothing to do with gang activity at all.
And the proof for that lies in all the gangs that operate freely without federal infiltration and extrajudicial death sentences, both then and now, that never got so much as a fraction of the attention that the Chicago Black Panthers got, much less the retributive violence.
The “gang activity” wasn’t my main point, my main point is just that I think fred hampton arose as a result of the circumstances around him, more than anything else. He was unique, yes, but I don’t think he was a messiah, or a “great man” of history, or what have you, I think he was just the right person in the right place at the right time. Or maybe in the wrong place, since he got killed, I suppose.
In any case, my point was just not to discredit the surrounding material circumstances which led to the group, the context, and that, context providing, modern gangs could move in a similar direction. They have that same latent potential, it’s just being co-opted by a bunch of different interests, currently. Maybe less so right now, actually, than in the kind of post-black panther period.
I’m also not sure that a black separatist state or movement would really threaten the feds all that much, or that black self-sufficiency would, but I’m more willing to be contested on that point. I would think, more, that the precursors to black separatist states and movements, would be the thing that threatens the government, and maybe the actions leading up to a black separatist state, rather than the existence of the state itself. The conditions that lead to such a movement would be the main threat to the feds, I would think, because the same precursors are what could easily lead to a direct moral conflict with the feds and an attempt at abolishing their power more broadly. “State” here being kind of a dumb word for it, but you get what I mean anyways, probably. But then, everyone just kind of decided to tear apart tulsa oklahoma, so maybe my cynicism level just isn’t high enough.
I dunno, we’re mostly saying the same thing here, I guess.
It’s all good, lol. I was a kid at the time and all I heard was Walter Cronkite-style tut-tutting about the threatening Black Panthers; it wasn’t until decades later that I started understanding nothing was as it had been told at the time. And the Panthers did not remain the same organization after Fred Hampton’s death, at all, which is why I tend to not equate the group with the man. He had that ability to unite and create a powerful force out of disparate people and interests that aimed toward a common good, which is one of the things that died with him.
But agree or disagree, we should all be thinking about the power structures that dictate the circumstances of our lives, and you’ve certainly given me some things to think about. I very much enjoyed reading your thoughts on the matter. Thank you for taking the time to write them.
What absolutely floors me is that Fred Hampton had organized all of this by the age of 21, when he was murdered. That kid . . . what he might have gone on to achieve boggles the mind.
I often think of how different we’d be as a nation today if certain folk had been allowed to live, like Fred Hampton, MLK, Bobby Kennedy, etc. and not murdered in their most productive years because of institutionalized societal hate and fear.
You know I kind of wonder if this is because those people died, or just because the social conditions that allowed those people to flourish, allowed those people to emerge, have changed in some fundamental way. The black panthers were a gang, still, make no mistake, they just weren’t as fucked up of a gang as many other drug gangs of the time and of today might be. The black panthers would still occasionally steal from richer white neighborhoods, or go on raids, I think they were called, to fund these free breakfasts. Which I think is cool, but is still something that you can quite easily frame as being a “gang activity”.
The social conditions have changed, though. Not in that the consequences have somehow become more severe, for breaking the law (though perhaps the surveillance state has increased, making it harder to get away with in the first place). Mostly, I think, the change emerges out of the crack and cocaine epidemic of the 80’s. Dealing is an easy way to make your way up, socioeconomically, it’s an easy way to pin people down with charges, it’s an easy way to get a bunch of people to fry their own brains, etc. And, we know who really propagated the crack epidemic, don’t we? Thank you, gary webb. Infrastructurally, the black community has been displaced from “the projects”, and other social works, which were designed to protect their communities, into suburban hellscapes where organization is much harder. You can even see this back all the way in like, the 50’s and shit, when everyone chopped up black neighborhoods with the highway act.
I’m sure there’s some other stuff I’m forgetting, but yeah, in any case, shit’s changed since the 70’s, organization has changed. I’m sure we’ll only be allowed to learn about the fred hamptons of our day 20 years from now, when they’ve all been neutralized by the CIA, and when their narratives and lives can be co-opted by the american state to push more garbage propaganda.
I don’t disagree with anything you wrote. But it’s not the gang activity that made ol’ J. Edgar shit his kecks. It’s not the gang activity that set Fred Hampton up for federal execution.
It was the self-sufficiency of the group, Fred Hampton’s ability to unite them and talk them into doing for each other, by themselves, everything from feeding their community to policing and protecting it, essentially removing themselves from the societal dynamic of exploitation and all the wealth transfer systems that had been built up around it, that meant Fred Hampton had to die and the Black Panthers disband.
Fred Hampton was a one-man anti-modern-slavery giant who threatened the entire power structure of the time simply by removing himself and his local community from it – and thus proving to everyone that the Black community did not need to be a part of the system that uses and exploits but never serves them, always taking and never giving anything more than a subsistence living in return, and that at the point of a gun more often than not.
If Fred Hampton, a scrawny Black Chitown teenager could change that dynamic, it could happen elsewhere. Anywhere.
If Black communities started fending for themselves, feeding themselves, taking care of themselves, creating and owning their own value and then keeping that value to themselves, well, where then would all the tax dollars for the police and justice system go? Where would that steady supply of prison labor – 14th amendment slave labor – be gotten then? Or even all the non-prison cheap laborers? Where’s the convenient enemy then, like Reagan’s famous “Welfare Queen”? Whom do we then set apart as the enemy of society when we need for society to be divided for better control and distraction? Who do we set our police upon when they need a blood feed? If the powerless among us begin to own their power, well then . . . anyone could!
That’s why Fred Hampton had to die, IMO. Nothing to do with gang activity at all.
And the proof for that lies in all the gangs that operate freely without federal infiltration and extrajudicial death sentences, both then and now, that never got so much as a fraction of the attention that the Chicago Black Panthers got, much less the retributive violence.
The “gang activity” wasn’t my main point, my main point is just that I think fred hampton arose as a result of the circumstances around him, more than anything else. He was unique, yes, but I don’t think he was a messiah, or a “great man” of history, or what have you, I think he was just the right person in the right place at the right time. Or maybe in the wrong place, since he got killed, I suppose.
In any case, my point was just not to discredit the surrounding material circumstances which led to the group, the context, and that, context providing, modern gangs could move in a similar direction. They have that same latent potential, it’s just being co-opted by a bunch of different interests, currently. Maybe less so right now, actually, than in the kind of post-black panther period.
I’m also not sure that a black separatist state or movement would really threaten the feds all that much, or that black self-sufficiency would, but I’m more willing to be contested on that point. I would think, more, that the precursors to black separatist states and movements, would be the thing that threatens the government, and maybe the actions leading up to a black separatist state, rather than the existence of the state itself. The conditions that lead to such a movement would be the main threat to the feds, I would think, because the same precursors are what could easily lead to a direct moral conflict with the feds and an attempt at abolishing their power more broadly. “State” here being kind of a dumb word for it, but you get what I mean anyways, probably. But then, everyone just kind of decided to tear apart tulsa oklahoma, so maybe my cynicism level just isn’t high enough.
I dunno, we’re mostly saying the same thing here, I guess.
It’s all good, lol. I was a kid at the time and all I heard was Walter Cronkite-style tut-tutting about the threatening Black Panthers; it wasn’t until decades later that I started understanding nothing was as it had been told at the time. And the Panthers did not remain the same organization after Fred Hampton’s death, at all, which is why I tend to not equate the group with the man. He had that ability to unite and create a powerful force out of disparate people and interests that aimed toward a common good, which is one of the things that died with him.
But agree or disagree, we should all be thinking about the power structures that dictate the circumstances of our lives, and you’ve certainly given me some things to think about. I very much enjoyed reading your thoughts on the matter. Thank you for taking the time to write them.