[News] Fred Hampton 35 years later

[News at freedomarchives.org]

Fred Hampton was the Deputy Chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black 
Panther Party. He and Mark Clark, defense Captain of the Peoria Chapter of 
the BPP, were assassinated by Chicago police, in cooperation with the U.S. 
Federal Bureau of Investigation, on December 4, 1969.

(SPEECH DELIVERED BY FRED HAMPTON AT OLIVET CHURCH, 1969)

POWER ANYWHERE WHERE THERE’S PEOPLE!

Power anywhere where there’s people. Power anywhere where there’s people. 
Let me give you an example of teaching people. Basically, the way they 
learn is observation and participation. You know a lot of us go around and 
joke ourselves and believe that the masses have PhD’s, but that’s not true. 
And even if they did, it wouldn’t make any difference. Because with some 
things you have to learn by seeing it or either participating in it. And 
you know yourselves that there are people walking around your community 
today that have all types of degrees that should be at this meeting but are 
not here. Right? Because you can have as many degrees as a thermometer. If 
you don’t have any practice, they you can’t walk across the street and chew 
gum at the same time.

Let me tell you how Huey P. Newton, the leader, the organizer, the founder, 
the main man of the Black Panther Party, went about it.

The community had a problem out there in California. There was an 
intersection, a four-way intersection; a lot of people were getting 
killed—cars running over them, and so the people went down and redressed 
their grievances to the government. You’ve done it before. I know you 
people in the community have. And they came back and the pigs said “No! You 
can’t have any
” Oh, they don’t usually say you can’t have it’ they’ve 
gotten a little hipper than that now. That’s what those degrees on the 
thermometer will get you. They tell you “Okay, we’ll deal with it; why 
don’t you come back next meeting and waste some time.”

And they get you wound up in an excursion of futility, and you be in a 
cycle of insaneness, and you be goin’ back and goin’ back, and goin’ back, 
and goin’ back so many times that you’re already crazy.

So they tell you, they say, “Okay niggers, what you want?” And they you 
jump up and you say, “Well, it’s been so long, we don’t know what we want,” 
and then you walk out of the meeting and you’re gone and they say,
“Well, you niggers had your chance, didn’t you?”

Let me tell you what Huey P. Newton did.

Huey Newton went and got Bobby Seale, the chairman of the Black Panther 
Party on a national level. Bobby Seale got his 9mm—that’s a pistol. Huey P. 
Newton got his shotgun and got some stop signs and got a hammer. Went down 
to the intersection, gave his shotgun to Bobby, and Bobby had his 9mm. He 
said, “You hold this shotgun; anybody mess with us, blow their brains out.” 
He put those stop signs up.

There were no more accidents, no more problem.

Now they had another situation. That’s not that gogd you see, because it’s 
two people dealing with a problem. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, no matter 
how bad they may be, cannot deal with the problem. But let me explain to 
you who the real heroes are.

Next time, there was a similar situation, another four-way corner. Huey 
went and got Bobby, went and got his 9mm, got his shotgun, got his hammer 
and got more stop signs. Placed those stop signs up, gave the shotgun to 
Bobby, told Bobby “If anybody mess with us while we’re putting these stop 
signs up, protect the people and blow their brains out.” What did the 
people do? They observed it again. They participated in it. Next time they 
had another four-way intersection. Problems there; they had accidents and 
death. This time, the people in the community went and got their shotguns, 
got their hammers, got their stop signs


Now, let me show you how we’re gonna try to do it in the Black Panther 
Party here. We just got back from the south side. We went out there—we went 
out there and we got to arguing with the pigs or the pigs got to 
arguing---he said, “Well, Chairman Fred, you supposed to be so bad, why 
don’t you go and shoot some of those policemen? You always talking about 
you got your guns and got this, why don’t you go shoot some of them?”

And I’ve said, “You’ve just broken a rule. As a matter of fact, even though 
you have on a uniform it doesn’t make me any difference. Because I don’t 
care if you got on nine uniforms, and 100 badges. When you step outside the 
realm of legality and into the realm of illegality, then I feel that you 
should be arrested.” And I told him, “You being what they call the law of 
entrapment, you tried to make me do something that was wrong, you 
encouraged me, you tried to incite me to shoot a pig. And that ain’t coo, 
Brother, you know the law, don’t you?”

I told that pig that, I told him “You got a gun, pig?” I told him, “You 
gotta get your hands up against the wall. We’re gonna do what they call a 
citizens’ arrest.” This fool don’t know what this is. I said, “Now you be 
just as calm as you can and don’t make too many quick moves, ‘cause we 
don’t wanna have to hit you.”

And I told him like he always told us, I told him, “Well, I’m here to 
protect you. Don’t worry about a thing, I’m here for your benefit.” So I 
sent another Brother to call the pigs—you gotta do that in a citizens’ 
arrest. He called the pigs. Here come the pigs with carbines and shotguns, 
walkin’ out there. They came out there talking about how they’re gonna 
arrest Chairman Fred. And I said, “No fool. This is the man you got to 
arrest. He’s the one that broke the law.” And what did they do? They bugged 
their eyes, and they couldn’t stand it. You know what they did? They were 
so mad, they were so angry that they told me to leave.

And what happened? All those people were out there on 63rd Street. What did 
they do? They were around there laughing and talking with me while I was 
making the arrest. They looked at me while I was rapping and heard me while 
I was rapping. So the next time that the pig comes on 63rd Street, because 
of the thing that our Minister of Defense calls observation and 
participation, that pig might be arrested by anybody!

Wo what did we do? We were out there educating the people. How did we 
educate them? Basically, the way people learn, by observation and 
participation. And that’s what we’re trying to do. That’s what we got to do 
here in this community. And a lot of people don’t understand, but there’s 
three basic things that you got to do anytime you intend to have yourself a 
successful revolution.

A lot of people get the word “revolution” mixed up and they think 
revolution’s a bad word. Revolution is nothing but like having a sore on 
your body and then you put something on that sore to cure that infection. 
And I’m telling you that we’re living in an infectious society right now. 
I’m telling you that we’re living in a sick society. And anybody that 
endorses integrating into this sick society before it’s cleaned up is a man 
who’s committing a crime against the people.

If you walk past a hospital room and see a sign that says “Contaminated” 
and then you try to lead people into that room, either those people are 
mighty dumb—you understand me, cause if they weren’t, they’d tell you that 
you are an unfair, unjust leader that does not have your followers’ 
interests in mind. And what we’re saying is simply that leaders have got to 
become—we’ve got to start making them accountable for what they do. They’re 
goin’ around talking’ about so-and-so’s an Uncle Tom so we’re gonna open up 
a cultural center and teach him what blackness is. And this n****r is more 
aware than you and me and Malcolm and Martin Luther King and everybody else 
put together. That’s right. They’re the ones that are most aware. They’re 
most aware, cause they’re the ones that are gonna open up the center. 
They’re gonna tell you where bones come from in Africa that you can’t even 
pronounce the names. That’s right. They’ll be telling you about Chaka, the 
leader of the Bantu freedom
fighters, and Jomo Kenyatta, those dingo-dingas. They’ll be running all of 
that down to you. They know about it all. But the point is they do what 
they’re doing because it is beneficial and it is profitable for them.

You see, people get involved in a lot of things that’s profitable to them, 
and we’ve got to make it less profitable. We’ve got to make it less 
beneficial. I’m saying that any program that’s brought into our community 
should be analyzed by the people of that community. It should be analyzed 
to see that it meets the relevant needs of that community. We don’t need no 
n*****s coming into our community to be having no company to open business 
for the n*****s. There’s too many n*****s in our community that can’t get 
crackers out of the business that they’re gonna open.

We got to face some facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong 
to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I’m 
talking about the white masses, I’m talking about the black masses, and the 
brown masses, and the yellow masses, too. We’ve got to face the fact that 
some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out 
best with water. We say you don’t fight racism with racism—we’re gonna 
fight racism with solidarity. We say you don’t fight capitalism with no 
black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism.

We ain’t gonna fight no reactionary pigs who run uip and down the street 
being reactionary; we’re gonna organize and dedicate ourselves to 
revolutionary political power and teach ourselves the specific needs of 
resisting the power structure, arm ourselves, and we’re gonna fight 
reactionary pigs with INTERNATIONAL PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION. That’s what it 
has to be. The people have to have the power—it belongs to the people.

We have to understand very clearly that ther’es a man in our community 
called a capitalist. Sometimes he’s black and sometimes he’s white. But 
that man has to be driven out of our community, because anybody who comes 
into the community to make profit off the people by exploiting them can be 
defined as a capitalist. And we don’t care how many programs they have, how 
long a dashiki they have. Because political power does not flow from the 
sleeve of a dashiki; political power flows from the barrel of a gun—it 
flows from the barrel of a gun!

A lot of us running around talking about politics don’t even know what 
politics is. Did you ever see something and pull it and you take it as far 
as you can and it almost outstretches itself and it goes into something 
else? If you take it so far that it’s two things? As a matter of fact, some 
things if you stretch it so far, it’ll be another thing. Did you ever cook 
something so long that it turns into something else? Ain’t that right?

That’s what we’re talking about with politics.

That politics ain’t nothing, but if you stretch it so long that it can’t go 
no further, then you know what you got on your hands? You got an 
antagonistic contradiction. And when you take that contradiction to the 
highest level and stretch it as far as you can stretch it, you got what you 
call war. Politics is war without bloodshed, and war is politics with 
bloodshed. If you don’t understand that, you can be a Democrat, Republican, 
you can be Independent, you can be anything you want to, you ain’t nothing.

We don’t want any of those n*****s and any of these hunkies and nobody 
else, radicals or nobody talking about, “I’m on the Independence ticket.” 
That means you sell out the republicans; Independent means you’re out for 
graft and you’ll sell out to the highest bidder. You understand?

We want people who want to run on the People’s Party, because the people 
are gonna run it whether they like it or not. The people have proved that 
they can run it. They run it in China, they’re gonna run it right here. 
They can clal it what they want to, they can talk about it. They can call 
it communism, and think that that’s gonna scare somebody, but it ain’t 
gonna scare nobody.

We had the same thing happen out on 37th Road. They came out to 37th road 
where our Breakfast for children program is, and started getting’ those 
women who were kind of older, around 58---that’s, you know, I call that 
older cause I’m young. I ain’t 20—right, right! But you see, they’re gonna 
get them and brainwash them. And you ain’t seen nothin’ t9ill you see one 
of them beautiful Sisters with their hair kinda startin’ getting’ grey, and 
they ain’t got many teeth, and they were tearin’ them policemen up! They 
were tearing’ em up! The pigs would come up to them and say “ You like 
communism?”

The pigs would come up to them and say, “You scared of communism?” And the 
Sisters would say, “No—scared of it, I ain’t never heard of it.”

“You like socialism?”

“No—scared of it I ain’t never heard of it.”

The pigs, they be crackin’ up, because they enjoyed seeing these people 
frightened of these words.

“You like capitalism?”

“Yeah, well, that’s what I live with—I lie it.”

“You like the Breakfast For Children program, n****r?”

“Yeah, I like it.”

And the pigs say, “Oh-oh.” The pigs say, “well, the Breakfast For Children 
program is a socialistic program. It’s a communistic program.”

And the women said, “Well, I tell you what, boy. I’ve been knowing you 
since you were knee-high to a grasshopper, n****r. and I don’t know if I 
like communism and I don’t know if I like socialism. But I know that that 
Breakfast For Children program fees my kids, n****r. And if you put your 
hands on that Breakfast For Children program, I’m gonna come off this can 
and I’m gonna beat your ass like a 
.”

That’s what they be saying. That’s what they be saying, and it’s a 
beautiful thing. And that’s what the Breakfast For Children program is. A 
lot of people think it’s charity, but what does it do? It takes the people 
from a stage to another stage. Any program that’s revolutionary is an 
advancing program. Revolution is change. Honey, if you just keep on 
changing, before you know it—in fact not even knowing what socialism is—you 
don’t have to know what it is—they’re endorsing it, they’re participating 
in it, and they’re supporting socialism.

And a lot of people will tell you, way, “Well, the people don’t have any 
theory, they need some theory. They need some theory even if they don’t 
have any practice. And the Black Panther Party tells you that if a man 
tells you that he’s the type of man who has you buying candy bars and 
eating the wrapping and throwing the candy away, he’d have you waling East 
when you’re supposed to be walking West. It’s true. If you listen to what 
the pig says, you be walkin’ outside when the sun is shining with your 
umbrella over your head. And when it’s raining you’ll be goin’ outside 
leaving your umbrella inside. That’s right. You gotta get it together. I’m 
saying that’s what they have you doing.

Now, what do WE do? We say that the Breakfast For Children program is a 
socialistic program. It teaches the people basically that –by practice, we 
thought up and let them practice that theory and inspect that theory. 
What’s more important? You learn something just like everybody else.

Let me try to break it down to you.

You say this Brother here goes to school 8 years to be an auto mechanic. 
And that teacher who used to be an auto mechanic, he tells him, “Well, 
n****r, you gotta go on what we call on-the-job-training.” And he says, 
“Damn, with all this theory I got, I gotta go to on-the-job-training? What 
for?”

He said, “On on-the-job-training he works with me. I’ve been here for 20 
years’ when I started work they didn’t even have auto mechanics. I ain’t 
got no theory, I just got a whole bunch of practice.”

What happened? A car came in making a whole lot of funny noise. This 
Brother here go get his book. He on page one, he ain’t got to page 200. I’m 
sitting here listening to the car. He says, “What do you think it is?”

I say, “I think it’s the carburetor.”

He says, “No I don’t see anywhere in here where it says a carburetor make 
no noise like that.” And he says, “How do you know it’s the carburetor?”

I said, “Well, n****r, with all them degrees—as many as a thermometer 
around 20 years ago, 19 to be exact, I was listening to the same kind of 
noise. And what I did was I took apart the voltage regulator and it wasn’t 
that. Then I took apart the alternator and it wasn’t that. I took apart the 
generator brushes and it wasn’t that. I took apart the generator and it 
wasn’t that. I took apart the generator and it wasn’t even that. After I 
took apart all that I finally got to the carburetor and when I tot to the 
carburetor I found that that’s what it was.
And I told myself that—fool, next time you hear this sound you better take 
apart the carburetor first.”

How did he learn? He learned through practice.

I don’t care how much theory you got, if it don’t have any practice applied 
to it then that theory happens to be irrelevant. Right? Any theory you get, 
practice it. And when you practice it you make some mistakes. When you make 
a mistake, you correct that theory, and then it will be corrected theory 
that will be able to be applied and used in any situation. That’s what 
we’ve got to be able to do.

Every time I speak in a church I always try to say something, you know, 
about Martin Luther King. I have a lot of respect for Martin Luther King. I 
think he was one of the greatest orators that the country ever produced. 
And I listened to anyone who speaks well, because I like to listen to that. 
Martin Luther King said that it might look dark sometime, and it might look 
dark over here on the North Side. Maybe you thought the room was going to 
be packed with people and maybe you thought you might have to turn some 
people away and you might not have enough people here. Maybe some of the 
people you think should be here are not here and you think that, well if 
they’re not here then it won’t be as good as we thought it could have been. 
And maybe you thought that you need more people here than you have here. 
Maybe you think that the pigs are going to be able to pressure you and put 
enough pressure to squash your movement even before it starts. But Martin 
Luther King said that he heard somewhere that only when it’s dark enough 
can you see the stars. And we’re not worried about it being dark. He said 
that the arm of the moral universe is long, but it bens toward heaven.

We got Huey P. Newton in jail, and Eldridge Cleaver underground. And 
Alprentice Bunchy Carter has been murdered; Bobby Hutton and John Huggins 
been murdered. And a lot of people think that the Black Panther Party in a 
sense is giving up. But let us say this: That we’ve made the kind of 
commitment to the people that hardly anyone else has ever made.

We have decided that although some of us come from what some of you would 
call petty-bourgeois families, though some of us could be in a sense on 
what you call the mountaintop. We could be integrated into the society 
working with people that we may never have a chance to work with. Maybe we 
could be on the mountaintop and maybe we wouldn’t have to be hidiin’ when 
we go to speak places like this. Maybe we wouldn’t have to worry about 
court cases and going to jail and being sick. We say that even though all 
of those luxuries exist on the mountaintop, we understand that you people 
and your problems are right here in the valley.

We in the Black Panther Party, because of our dedication and understanding 
went into the valley knowing that the people are in the valley, knowing 
that our plight is the same plight as the people in the valley, knowing 
that our enemies are on the mountaintop—our friends are in the valley, and 
even though it’s nice to be on the mountaintop, we’re going back to the 
valley. Because we understand that there’s work to be done in the valley, 
and when we get through with this work in the valley, then we got to go to 
the mountaintop. We’re going to the mountaintop because there’s a 
motherfucker on the mountaintop that’s playing King, and he’s been 
bullshitting us. And we’ve got to go up on the mountain top not for the 
purpose of living his life style and living like he lives. We’ve got to go 
up on the mountain top to make this motherfucker understand, goddamnit, 
that we are coming from the valley!


(SPEECH DELIVERED AT OLIVET CHURCH, 1969)


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