As we face the challenges of life in a United States fraught with growing racism, xenophobia, and division, sown deeper each day from the highest office in the land and replicated across the states, towns, and urban and rural sectors of our society, we must tear down barriers and look to build stronger coalitions. We need to forge alliances that cut across racial and ethnic lines in order to move forward, together, and defeat that which will destroy us all if we fail to take action.
Coalition-building isn’t easy, even among those who have an oppressor in common—yet it can be done.The person who most embodied that ability, for me, is not well-known, even in progressive circles. His name was Fred Hampton.
A profile of Hampton on the website of the National Archives notes:
Fred Hampton was born on August 30, 1948 in suburban Illinois. He was noticeably gifted in academics and athletics. He wanted to play for the New York Yankees when he was done with school but ended up studying pre-law at Triton Junior College. Hampton was inspired to study law to use it as a defense against police and their brutality. Around this time, he became active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), leading their Youth Council of the organization’s West Suburban Branch. He increased the Council’s membership to over 500 members
While he was organizing youth on behalf of the NAACP, the Black Panther Party was gaining national popularity. The Party's Ten-Point Program that integrated black self-determination and elements of Maoism inspired Hampton to join and move to downtown Chicago. Hampton’s leadership abilities were apparent there. He brokered a nonaggression pact between Chicago’s most powerful and dangerous street gangs. Hampton’s personal charisma combined with his organizing skills and gift of speech allowed him to be noticed and rise quickly within the Black Panthers. He soon became the leader of the Chicago chapter -- organizing rallies, working with the People’s Clinic, and the Free Breakfast Program.
Most important, and notably absent in this brief biographical blurb is the crucial role Hampton played in bringing together groups of young people, poor people, blacks, Puerto Ricans and whites to form what would be called “The Rainbow Coalition.”
On Monday, Jan. 27, Independent Lens on PBS will premiere The First Rainbow Coalition, a documentary film produced and directed by Ray Santisteban.
There have been a number of films produced about the Black Panther Party, but this is the first to examine the strong alliances it built. PBS notes that the film picks up the story in the late 1960s:
In 1969, the Chicago Black Panther Party, notably led by the charismatic Fred Hampton, began to form alliances across lines of race and ethnicity with other community-based movements in the city, including the Latino group the Young Lords Organization and the working-class young southern whites of the Young Patriots. Finding common ground, these disparate groups banded together in one of the most segregated cities in postwar America to collectively confront issues such as police brutality and substandard housing, calling themselves the Rainbow Coalition. The First Rainbow Coalition tells the movement’s little-known story through rare archival footage and interviews with former coalition members in the present-day
Do not confuse this Rainbow Coalition with the one whose name was borrowed and used in 1984 by the Rev. Jesse Jackson. The film’s title includes “first” to make that distinction. I hope you will tune in, or attend one of the community screenings and discussion events being held across the nation.
I’m not writing about the man we called “Chairman Fred” and his Rainbow Coalition just because they are important pieces of history. He had a direct impact on my life, and helped shape my commitment to cross-cultural activism. Like Chairman Fred, I grew up a youthful member of the NAACP and CORE. My activist black and Puerto Rican classmates at the State University of New York College at Old Westbury read an article in the Black Panther Party newspaper about a group in Chicago called the Young Lords Organization and headed by José Cha Cha Jiménez; the brothers in our group drove to Chicago to meet him. They returned and immediately founded the New York chapter of the YLO, and we all became part of the Rainbow Coalition.
Because of what Chairman Fred birthed, we became more aware of groups outside the borders of black and Puerto Rican communities, and recognized the commonalities in our struggles. We developed ties to Asian American groups such as I Wor Kuen, while making sure we incorporated information from other rainbow groups, such as the Brown Berets. We used readings such as the Mohawk Nation’s Akwesasne Notes in our political and community education program. We also worked alongside groups of young radical whites, from Students for a Democratic Society to Youth Against War and Fascism.
We were truly part of building a rainbow.
Images from the time show how diverse the Rainbow Coalition truly was.
Of course, the PBS film isn’t the first to tackle Chairman Fred’s story. Far from it. Just last September, Jacqueline Serrato examined the Rainbow Coalition’s history—and its lasting impact—for Chicago’s South Side Weekly.
The Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers established themselves on the West Side of Chicago in 1968 and functioned under a ten-point program of self-empowerment and service. Their Oakland, CA founding members were already involved in multiracial movement building through the left-wing and anti-war Peace and Freedom Party.
The Young Lords formed on the streets of Chicago in 1960 as a gang, but in 1968 they declared themselves a civil rights organization. In trips to the West Coast, they were exposed to the Black Panthers, the Brown Berets, and the American Indian Movement, who were mobilizing together for racial justice there. Shortly after meeting, the two youths would found the original Rainbow Coalition: a “poor people’s army,” as José “Cha-Cha” Jimenez refers to it, that joined forces with working-class whites from the city’s North Side. As men were landing on the moon for the first time in a global display of American exceptionalism, the Rainbow Coalition was drawing citywide and nationwide attention to police brutality, premeditated gentrification, and institutional racism in Chicago.
“Fred took the Young Lords under his wing. He gave us the skills that we needed to come right out of the gang and start organizing the community,” said Cha-Cha, now seventy-one, leader of the gang-turned-political organization, in an interview. “We were already fighting for our rights in our neighborhoods, and we needed to form a united front. Our mission was self-determination for our barrios and all oppressed nations.”
In Chicago, the Black and Latinx activists became natural allies. Both communities had been battling Italian, German, Irish, and other white street gangs that were enforcing redlining at the street level. Black and Latinx Chicagoans lived together in the Cabrini-Green projects, attended overcrowded schools, and were denied entrance to certain beaches, restaurants, and public spaces; their parents had practically no access to city jobs or home ownership.
Here’s another great image from those days.
While collecting tweets for this story, I encountered a poignant post from a descendant of a Young Lord.
Here’s a bit more about Manuel Ramos, from an article published on the website Freedom Archives:
Manuel was a 20 year old member of the Young Lords Organization (YLO) in Chicago, IL. On May 4th, 1969 Manuel was shot and killed by a police officer outside of the apartment of another member of the Young Lords at 2am. Another member of the Young Lords was wounded and four others were arrested. Manuel was unarmed at the time of his murder.
As the details of the case surfaced, the Chicago police department did the best they could to cover up Manuel’s murder including trying to plant a weapon into evidence and claiming in the media that a police officer had been critically wounded in the incident. Both of these were exposed as lies soon after.
Over the next weeks, in response to the police violence, cover up and lack of judicial transparency, the Rainbow Coalition [Black Panther Party; Young Lords Organization and Young Patriots Organization] and community members organized numerous protests and a funeral attended by several hundred people. These protests culminated in the takeover of McCormick Seminary.
R.I.P., Manuel Ramos.
Our communities are no strangers to death by police, yet the planned assassination of U.S. citizens at their government’s hands is something that far too many people still reject out of hand as “impossible.” Yet that is exactly what happened to Chairman Fred Hampton and his brother Panther, Mark Clark.
Every citizen who believes in the right to be protected and not persecuted by our government should read The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther by Jeffrey Hass. The description of the book on Amazon.com notes,
On December 4, 1969, attorney Jeff Haas was in a police lockup in Chicago, interviewing Fred Hampton's fiancée. She described how the police pulled her from the room as Fred lay unconscious on their bed. She heard one officer say, "He's still alive." She then heard two shots. A second officer said, "He's good and dead now." She looked at Jeff and asked, "What can you do?"
Fifty years later, Haas finds that there is still an urgent need for the revolutionary systemic changes Hampton was organizing to accomplish. With a new prologue discussing what has changed—and what has not—The Assassination of Fred Hampton remains Haas's personal account of how he and People's Law Office partner Flint Taylor pursued Hampton's assassins, ultimately prevailing over unlimited government resources and FBI conspiracy. Not only a story of justice delivered, the book puts Hampton in the spotlight as a dynamic community leader and an inspiration for those in the ongoing fight against injustice and police brutality.
In 1971, filmmakers Mike Gray and Howard Alk were shooting a documentary about Hampton and the Illinois chapter of the BPP; sadly, the film became The Murder of Fred Hampton. A blog post at libcom.org describes the filming:
The Murder of Fred Hampton began as a film portrait of Hampton and the Illinois Black Panther Party, but half way through the shoot, Hampton was murdered by Chicago policeman. In an infamous moment in Chicago history and politics, over a dozen policeman burst into Hampton’s apartment while its occupants were sleeping, killing Hampton and fellow Panther Mark Clark and brutalizing the other occupants. Filmmakers Mike Gray and Howard Alk arrived a few hours later to shoot film footage of the crime scene that was later used to contradict news reports and police testimony.
That same year, I traveled with Black Panther Party communications secretary Kathleen Cleaver to the Cannes Film Festival in France, where the documentary premiered. The impact of the film on the European audience assembled in Cannes was profound: Shocked people asked us, “Why is there no justice for black people in the United States?” That was in 1971, and we still have no justice for those who were slain.
Last month, I was pleased to see The Root’s Michael Harriot tweeting about Hampton on the anniversary of his murder.
I realize that some readers here are not on Twitter. Thankfully, the Thread Reader app takes a long series of tweets that might be hard to follow and converts them into a more accessible document:
Harriot’s 25 tweets tell Hampton’s story in a conversational but complete way.
First of all, most people think they know about the Black Panthers, but they don't. For instance, everyone associates the Black Panther Party with Oakland. That's where it came from, right? And they were about retaliation and violence, right
See, bruh, you're already wrong.
In 1965 there was this young activist working down in Lowndes County, Ala. Lowndes County is BLACK AF. Seriously, even the dirt there is black. That's why they call it the Black Belt. Sometimes they call it Bloody Lowndes County because they lynched so many black people there.
Even though Lowndes County is 80 percent black, after the Voting Rights Act passed in '65 there were literally ZERO registered voters in Lowndes County. Now part of that was because, when black people in Lowndes County tried to register to vote, the mysteriously ended up dead.
Some would contract this weird magnetism to bullets and others would somehow end up with nooses around their necks. So this young activist with the Student Non-Violence Coordinating Committee went down to register people to vote.
But he wasn't gonna fuck around and end up dead.
So he carried a gun with him as he founded the Lowndes County Freedom Organization and registered hundreds of black people to vote.
During this time, the Alabama Democratic party mascot was white rooster, which might be the 3rd-most redneck mascot ever.
(UNC "Tarheel." is number 2. It feels like a racial slur.
Ohio State is #1. My aunt graduated from there and someone once called her a "buckeye," in front of me. I was gonna kicked their ass until she explained what they meant. It still sounds racist to me. )
The young LCFO prez HATED the white political parties. SO he created his own mascot and told the people that they had the right to defend themselves. And, for inspiration and self-affirmation, he got them to repeat a short chant/slogan of affirmation.
But he also told black people that they should arm themseves and register for guns.
It worked.
Thousands of black people in Lowndes County and all over AL registered. When the SNCC's president decided to run for Congress, the young organizer took over the SNCC.
And that's how Stokely Carmichael replaced Congressman John Lewis as the SNCC national president.
As SNCC president, Carmichael toured colleges telling people about the value of self-defense. He even named his conferences after his slogan of self affirmation.
In October 29, 1966, he visited Berkeley College and met with a group of students who held the same ideas.
Two of the students, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, asked Carmichael if they use the LCFO mascot. They had already adopted Carmichael's conference title and affirmation slogan into their ideology.
THAT'S when they became the Black Panthers.
THAT'S why they say "Black Power."
The Black Panthers were adamantly opposed to police violence and conducted armed patrol of the police. You know this outraged white folks and scared them. Especially when they showed up en masse at the State House with guns.
White people were like: "Nah, we can't have this."
In response, California passed the Mulford Act, one of the strictest gun laws in America. The Gov. who signed the bill was known as Ronnie, a pretty boy who did monkey movies. But his reaction would propel him into national prominence as Ronald Reagan: Protector of white people.
Now some of what I am about to say will sound like a vast conspiracy theory but every word of it is true. You don't have to take my word for it.
In the 50s Herbert Hoover started a Counterintelligence Program to "prevent the rise of a black messiah" and discredit militant blacks
In 69' Stokely Carmichael publicly denounced the Panthers, MLK was dead, Malcolm was dead. And in Chicago, there was this young kid rising named Fred Hampton.
When Hampton joined the Black Panthers, the feds were worried. It had nothing to do with violence. It didn't really have anything to do with the Civil Rights Movement.
They KNEW Fred Hampton was different.
Like the others, Hampton started out with mainstream black organizations. By the time he was a teenager, he was organizing his own youth chapter of the NAACP in his small Illinois suburb.
In a SINGLE YEAR, he had 500 members.
If this sounds like hype, consider this:
When Hampton attended his FIRST BPP meeting in Nov. '68:
-the FBI had already opened up a file on him A YEAR EARLIER. -His phone had been tapped for 9 months.
-he had been designated as a "key leader" on the FBI's "agitator index" for 5 months
Fred was different, yall.
In six months, he had brokered a nonaggression pact with every gang in Chicago. He was teaching gang members the law. He upset the city hospitals when convinced doctors to volunteer and give FREE medical care.
But this isn't why he was dangerous.
He also got the gangs to shut down construction sites and other white-owned businesses unless they hired black workers.
But this isn't why he was dangerous.
In 1968 Fred had an idea. He convinced the Chicago gangs to pool their money and start supporting black candidates.
But this isn't why he was dangerous.
6 months before his death, the charismatic Hampton organized the Conference for the United Front Against Fascism. Calling the conglomerate the “Rainbow Coalition,” the group included black gangs, Puerto Rican gangs and others.
From July 18-21, 1969 people from across the US attended the conference, including lawyers, politicians and civil rights activists from all walks of life. They would all agree that ALL the organizations would fight for black freedom
A few hundred people showed up.
Sike...
FIVE THOUSAND people attended the conference and they all reached the conclusion that black liberation could only be achieved through armed self-defense and community control of police.
But that wasn't why Hampton was dangerous.
(I know you're thinking: Just say it, nigga!")
There was a group at the conference called the Young Patriots who adopted the Panthers' 11-point plan. The Puerto Rican Young Lords promised solidarity, as did The Red Guard, a Chinese American group.
But here is why this was a problem:
Of the 5000 people who were in attendance, MOST were white.
Fred was creating a national coalition for armed resistance against racism. It would be the next phase in the Civil Rights Movement, so here's what happened:
Remember when I said Fred joined the Panthers in '68?
Well as soon as he joined, the FBI hired an informant named William O'Neal. Oneal agreed to infiltrate the BPP. He eventually became Hampton's bodyguard.
How did that happen?
Well, O'Neal fought valiantly in a gunfight against the Rangers. The Panthers would later discover that O'Neal had instigated the fight at the FBI's behest. Aside from trying to instigate rifts, O'Neal also rented an apartment for the Panthers.
One FBI agent wondered why Hoover was so adamant about this. He complained that the BPP was just feeding kids. In response, Hoover threatened every FBI officer's job if they didn't stop Hampton.
In Nov. Fred went to California. While he was there, the BPP leaders asked him to be the national spokesperson.
Meanwhile, back in Chicago, SOMEONE *cough* O'Neal instigated an attack on the police. Even though Fred was literally halfway across the country cops blamed him
On the night of Dec. 3, he had just finished teaching a class on politics and law at a local church. He went back to the headquarters and O'Neal fixed dinner. Fred laid down with his wife, who was 9 months pregnant, and went to sleep midsentence.
O'Neal lad left but Mark Clark was guarding the door. Around 4 am, police officers, burst in and opened fire on Fred and the Panthers. They said it was a "raid" but an investigation showed that the police fired between 90-99 bullets and the Panthers only fired 1.
Fred Hampton was dead at 21.
No one was ever charged with his death.
UNTIL...
Lemme tell you about this white dude named John & his ride-or-die wife.
They were like a not-racist Bonnie & Clyde*
One night they got an idea that only white people would get.
(I don't know if Bonnie and Clyde were bigots but I assume every white person in the 1930's was racist. Plus his name was "Clyde." it's a known fact that 72% of all Clydes are racist. Look it up.)
On the night of March 8, 1971, during the legendary Ali/Frazier fight, John, his wife and their friends did something only white people would ever do:
They broke INTO an FBI building
They stole 1000s of pages of FBI documents and forwarded to newspapers around the country. No one would publish them until the Washington Post did.
The papers revealed the existence of the FBI's counterintelligence program. THIS is how we know that COINTELPRO was a real thing.
THIS is how we know that the FBI tried to blackmail MLK into commit suicide.
This is also how we know about Mark O'Neal.
In those 1000s of pages, were revelations that Mark O'neal had slipped a powerful drug into Fred Hampton's food that night.
In those files was a map of the apartment where Fred Hampton was killed drawn by O'Neal
For years, everyone had blamed Fred Hampton's death on Cook County and the city of Chicago. When Hampton's family tried to say it was a conspiracy, a judge threw out the case. But after those files were released, the FBI essentially admitted that they coordinated Hampton's murder
The family won what was thought, at that time, to be the biggest Civil Rights judgment ever and the world now had proof that the federal government had instituted a secret program to stop every black movement for freedom and equality.
But here's the coolest fucking thing of all
The people who committed that burglary were never caught.
EVER.
They literally disappeared into the ether.
They called themselves the "Citizens Committee to Investigate the FBI" which is the 2nd whitest name for an organization ever (the first is "the Spice Girls)"
On the night of the burglary, they called and made this statement:
"These files will now be studied to determine:
1. the nature and extent of surveillance and intimidation carried on by this office of the FBI, particularly against groups and individuals working for a more just, humane and peaceful society.
2: to determine how much of the FBI's efforts are spent on relatively minor crimes by the poor and the powerless ...instead of investigating truly serious crimes... such as war profiteering, monopolistic practices, institutional racism, ...
Finally,
3. The extent of illegal practices by the FBI, such as eavesdropping, entrapment, and the use of provocateurs and informers."
If not for these files, it would be easy to counter white people's arguments about black movements. We KNOW they are despised. We see this exact same history repeated with Black Lives Matter and "Black Identity Extremism." But now it is history and not a conspiracy theory.
But how the fuck is Fred Hampton responsible for uncovering this history?
Hold on, goddammit! You know I'm long-winded.
The reason those 7 people got away with the break-in is because they were relatively unknown. We STILL don't know the identities of three of the people involved.
One was a physics professor. He was the mastermind.
Another was John's wife. Another disappeared for 43 years
If they had never come forward in 2017, after the statute of limitations had expired, you wouldn't know who they were.
But you would know John.
John was a pastor and a professor at Temple. John was the one who called the press and gave that statement. He has a Wikipedia page
That's because John spent his time fighting racism. John was actually a Freedom Rider and went to jail for trying to integrate a bus station in Little Rock. He was a member of CORE and SNCC
John was a motherfucking G.
But John met a girl and had to settle down. They never stopped believing they had to fight for equality.
John's wife was an activist too. They even took "protest trips" to the South to fight racism. But now he and his wife had kids, it was too dangerous and violent.
But sometimes, John would tell people about this nagging feeling he had. Since his days as a freedom rider, he always believed that the people instigating anti-black violence were part of the government. But people thought he was a crazy conspiracy theorist.
And when Fred Hampton died, John was devastated. He had met Martin Luther King. He knew Stokely Carmichael. He really felt like the government had killed "the one."
He knew it sounded crazy. There was no way for him to prove it.
There was only one other person who felt this way, another professor named William Davidon.
Davidon was a motherfucking genius who also believed the government was spying on activist. Davidon was from Chicago and he didn't work at Temple. So how did he know John?
Well, John and Bonnie vowed to "risk their freedom to oppose injustice." while Davidon was an anti-war protester but all the known conspirators had one thing in common.
They attended & pledged solidarity to the United Front Against Fascism
Davidon planned the burglary. John carried it out.
COINTELPRO killed Fred Hampton but Fred Hampton Killed COINTELPRO.
Bravo Michael!
This Twitter tour de force is important, and I include it here, because Harriot is bringing the story of Fred Hampton to a whole new audience, many of whom were not even born when he was murdered by his own government. I sure that his assassination—and why it happened—isn’t in young folks’ textbooks, or on their teacher-assigned Black History Month reading lists.
That “why” is key: Hampton was not building a “black thing,” or a “Latino thing,” or a “white thing.” He was building a coalition. The government recognized the revolutionary power of people coming together, and knew it had to be stopped.
Hampton’s story will be brought to even more audiences with the release of a feature film, currently expected to come out in August. The Root notes,
Directed by Shaka King and produced by Ryan Coogler, the film stars Daniel Kaluuya as the late Black Panther Party activist Fred Hampton and Lakeith Stanfield as FBI informant William O’Neal. Initially known as Jesus Was My Homeboy, the now-untitled film will follow O’Neal’s infiltration of the militant party and how his actions contributed to the assassination of 21-year-old Hampton in Chicago.
Will the still-untitled film capture the power of Chairman Fred’s Rainbow Coalition? Whether it does or not, either way, those of us who want to see real change take place in this nation must find ways to break down the barriers between us, and create a rainbow bridge to cross over into a just and equitable future.
We should heed these words from Chairman Fred: “We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity.”
The First Rainbow Coalition premieres on PBS stations and streaming services on Monday, Jan. 27.