Live for the People

Deputy Chairman Fred Hampton of the Illinois Black Panther Party was only 20 years old when he helped the Party build its local chapter in 1968. Having led the Junior NAACP in his late teens, Hampton was no stranger to organizing other children to fight against injustice. When he was 12 years old, he organized against the lack of swimming pools for Black kids in Maywood, Illinois.

By 1969, the FBI had seen Chairman Fred Hampton as such a threat to the status quo that it appointed FBI informant William O’Neal to infiltrate the Black Panther Party and help destroy them. On the night of December 4, 1969, the Chicago police attacked Hampton’s apartment and assassinated him in his sleep. Over 90 rounds were fired in what was described at the time as an intense gun battle. Eventually the truth was exposed that a single shot was fired by the Black Panthers’ security guard, Mark Clark - most likely as an involuntary reaction as he was dying.

Though his life was cut short, Chairman Fred Hampton’s work lives on in today’s leaders and activists who are working to dismantle systemic oppression.

1 - THE FREE BREAKFAST PROGRAM

The Black Panthers were the originators of the free breakfast program that fed thousands of children across 19 different cities in 1969. The program was eventually shut down by the FBI through a series of pantry raids for no other reason than that it represented “the best and most influential activity going for the BPP” according to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and should therefore be “neutralized”. Six years later, the program was adopted by the U.S. educational system and implemented nationwide, making it one of the Panther’s longest lasting contributions.

2 - THE RAINBOW COALITION

Even though the Panthers are often painted as anti-white separatists, they actually did tons of important work building multiracial coalitions fighting for equality and political empowerment. Most famously, Chairman Fred Hampton led the Rainbow Coalition which was composed of the Puerto Rican Young Lords and the Young Patriots - an organization of poor, white Southern migrants.

3 - THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY FOR SELF DEFENSE

The initial name of the Black Panther Party was the Back Panther Party for Self Defense. The name refers to the belief that racist oppression, police brutality and the murder of Black people can and should be stood up against. The Panthers distinguished violence from self-defense and believed that resistance was necessary in order to preserve human life. In fact, the Panthers evolved out of other nonviolent civil rights organizations, like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) led by John Lewis.

4 - FOCUS ON EDUCATION

The Black Panther Party had a huge focus on education: in order to join the Party, one had to fulfill an education requirement that included 6 weeks of classes on political liberation and read a minimum of 10 books on the subject. Chairman Fred Hampton once said, “without education, people will accept anything.” In point number five of their Ten Point Program, the Panthers state: "We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society." The Panthers believed there was a need for education beyond what is taught in classrooms, which is why they developed a network of liberation schools. One of their many important contributions was their role in anti-racist education.

5 - SURVIVAL PROGRAMS

Along with the Free Breakfast program, some of the 60 other Survival Programs that the Black Panther Party developed to serve the needs of the Black community included free legal services, free medical clinics, free ambulances, free bus service to prisons, free housing cooperatives, free children’s development centers, and research into sickle cell anemia. Some of these programs still exist today.

As Huey Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party explained, “We realize that this country became very rich upon slavery and that slavery is capitalism in the extreme.” Racism in the U.S. has been legalized for centuries, and the effort to disrupt the movement for Black liberation is as American as apple pie.

According to exposed government documents, the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) was a covert operation designed to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of the Black nationalists”. Their tactics included spying and wiretapping Black leaders, incarcerating them on bogus charges, intimidating them, spreading rumors and misinformation (73% of articles written about the Black Panthers at the time were authored or commissioned by the FBI) and even assassinating them, as in the case of Chairman Fred Hampton.

The systemic oppression of people organizing for basic rights hasn’t gone away. From the Civil Rights movement to Black Lives Matter, the government continues to criminalize, exile, and murder those Black and Brown activists who dare to threaten the system.