Here’s the truth. To watch footage of Fred Hampton — the Illinois Black Panther Party chairman slain by the twin forces of the FBI and Chicago Police Department in the twilight of 1969, at a mere 21 years old — is to be pulled in by a magnetism as expansive as his radical politics. Whether making speeches or debating with other organizers, Hampton blended an earthen intimacy with the patter of a Baptist preacher. His approach to community organizing was bold, undergirded by a belief in the power and need of cross-racial, cross-cultural solidarity. He was intelligent, able to imagine a necessary socialist future. It’s for this reason that he was a threat to the white-dominated, racist, imperialist power structures that govern this country.
