PHOTO/STEVE DALBER
CHICAGO, IL — “I am a revolutionary!” the crowd declared in unison as a salute to Fred Hampton, to close the “We Want Freedom” event.
A packed house gathered at the Uri-Eichen gallery on September 9 with veterans of the 1960’s Rainbow Coalition (not associated with Rainbow Push) between the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords and the Young Patriots organization, and later, Rising Up Angry. Surrounding them on the walls of the gallery were the imagery and press clippings from that era.
Billy Che Brooks of the Black Panther Party described the intense atmosphere of Chicago in 1969. He and others who were participants outlined the concepts and practice of the original Rainbow Coalition, which united poor people of Chicago across race and nationality lines. Their unity was based on what people had in common: inadequate housing, food and clothing and poor health care.
In the 1960’s the Black Panthers under the leadership of Fred Hampton met with Puerto Rican youth and poor white youth from the Uptown “hillbilly ghetto.” All were experiencing constant police oppression in the midst of terrible poverty. Working from a simple 10-point program that specified exactly what people wanted and needed, these young warriors put themselves in direct opposition to the Richard J. Daley machine and to the federal government that was carrying out a war in Southeast Asia at the time. No branch of the government wanted poor people uniting to oppose them so they struck, assassinating Fred Hampton.
On the panel was Brian Boyer who was the first reporter in the apartment after the assassination. He saw what had happened there and wrote a truthful article, quitting his job at the Chicago Sun Times when they cut out the facts in his article and buried it on page 39.
Mareo Phillips who spoke on behalf of MASK (the Mothers Against Senseless Killing chapter in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago) reflected on the event: “Last night, I was a speaker at a panel . . . What caught me off guard was these groups were mixed. It wasn’t just all Black people but Latinos and whites too. They talked about how informants and Cointelpro* brought down the Panthers and why solidarity is needed to beat the system . . . It just let me know that to navigate through this life, at times, someone’s past can help your future.”
A war is constantly being waged against the organizations of the dispossessed and we must learn from our past. Some things are the same as the 1960’s, but we must reckon with what is new in our environment today. We live in a time now when the same technology that is eliminating jobs, will have to be controlled by the working class so we can guarantee that basic needs are met for everyone. The unity of the dispossessed is still the order of the day for revolutionaries. And it has never been more possible and necessary.
*COINTELPRO was the FBI’s counter-intelligence program of covert action against domestic groups.
