You might run a liberator like Eldridge Cleaver out of the country, but you can’t run liberation out of the country. 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. We’ve got to struggle with them to make them understand what peace means.īobby Seale is going through all types of physical and mental torture. 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. We’re going to fight their reactions with all of us people getting together and having an international proletarian revolution.īlack people need some peace. 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 say we’re not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism. We’re going to fight racism not with racism, but we’re going to fight with solidarity. We don’t think you fight fire with fire we think you fight fire with water. 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. You understand me? You might be able to get them caught up because they’re poor and they want something. You might get caught up in the emotion of this movement. You dig what I’m saying? They’re nowhere, because they don’t even know why they’re doing what they’re doing. Why? Because if they don’t have an education, then they’re nowhere. 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. So what we’re talking about is there has to be an educational program. 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. 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. 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. 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. And we say that we will work with anybody and form a coalition with anybody that has revolution on their mind. 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. A lot of people don’t even understand the words that Eldridge uses a lot. You’re going to have to say that I am a proletariat, I am the people.Ī lot of people don’t understand the Black Panthers Party’s relationship with white mother country radicals. And you’re going to have to keep on saying that. But when I leave, you’ll remember I said, with the last words on my lips, that I am a revolutionary. This is some of Fred Hampton in his own words.įRED HAMPTON: So we say-we always say in the Black Panther Party that they can do anything they want to to us. In 1969, he had emerged as the charismatic young chairman of the Chicago Black Panther Party. Today, on this 40th anniversary of his death, we spend the rest of the hour on Fred Hampton. Noam Chomsky has called Hampton’s killing “the gravest domestic crime of the Nixon administration.” While authorities claimed the Panthers had opened fire on the police who were there to serve a search warrant for weapons, evidence later emerged that told a very different story: that the FBI, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office and the Chicago police conspired to assassinate Fred Hampton. Black Panther leader Mark Clark was also killed in the raid. On December 4th, 1969, Chicago police raided Fred Hampton’s apartment, shot and killed him in his bed. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Today marks the 40th anniversary of the death of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton.
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