WATCH: Black Panther Party Activist Fred Hampton's 1960s Speech On Race & Class

Speaker 1: talk about fred hampton he was assassinated in uh... nineteen sixty nine on this date december fifth in nineteen sixty nine he was only twenty one years old which is december fourth excuse me i was yesterday nineteen sixty nine uh... he was only twenty one years old and already an incredibly important leader of the black panthers and nationally he was a which is just sort of extraordinary in this clip And it's very interesting to kind of go back and look at people from, you know, some people in the 60s did a very sophisticated political analysis. And in this clip, which you're going to play and you'll hear Bashkar, he's talking about how class politics intersects with race to sort of divide the working class and gives this very smart fusion of racial analysis and class analysis. Let's take a listen.

Fred Hampton: What makes them mad about it? What makes them mad about it is that they have black people and white poor people and red poor people and Puerto Rican poor people and Latin American and Puerto Rican people, poor people of all descent. They have caught up in their movements based on racism when the Black Panther Party stood up and said that we don't care what anybody says. We don't think to fight fire with fire events. We think you fight fire with water events. We're going to fight racism not with racism, but we're going to fight with solidarity. We said we're not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we're going to fight it with socialism. We still haven't said we're not going to fight reactionary pigs and reactionary state attorneys like this and reactionary state attorneys like Hammerhand with any other reactions on our part. We're going to fight their reactions with all of us people to get together and have an international proletarian revolution. And that's saying all power to the people. That's saying that no matter what color you are, there's only two classes. And that's saying there's a class over here and there's a class over there. And the reason that this class over here has never did anything to get this class off its back, because this is lower, this is upper, this is the oppressed, this is the oppressor, this is the exploited, this is the explorer. And these people in this class have divided themselves. They say, I'm black, and I hate white people. I'm white, and I hate black people. I'm Latin American, and I hate hillbillies. I'm hillbilly, and I hate Indians. So we fight amongst each other. And you've heard the testimony of pigs here. You've got pigs of all colors. You know that. You've got people that are white, you've got people that are black, you've even got people that are black and white.

Speaker 1: Okay, Bhaskar, what are your thoughts?

Bhaskar: Yeah, you know, it's shocking his level of, and just in general, the level of political sophistication of that generation of radicals. I mean, you have someone like Fred Cafferty, who was so young, he was a burgeoning leader, 18, 19, 20, and he was murdered, like you said, when he was 21 years old. And he understood politics, and he understood how to win politics, without compromise. His politics were radical. He was a Maoist. He was a black nationalist. He didn't have compromised politics, but I think he represented really the best wing of the Black Panther Party, the real socialist wing, the wing that really threatened capital. And there's a reason why Cleaver ended his life as a Reaganite Republican. And, you know, Frank Hampton ended his life at 21, you know, dead in his apartment, murdered by the FBI. But, you know, there's that clip where he, you know, just, I think, says what's more or less common sense, right? There's some nuance and complications we can add to it, but, you know, fundamentally at its core, working people of all races would benefit from a broad multiracial kind of class movement and that's one of the best ways to address racism that's something fred hampton understood and that's just what he expressed beyond that if you listen to his clips when he's talking about um some of the precursors to the weather underground and their actions on the days of of rage and certain tactics of what he called ultra leftist petty bourgeois anarchistic kind of just uh style of street fighting and he told them to go organize in their in their communities instead i mean that kind of again you know yeah add some complications add some you know nuance you know a little bit more complicated than he let on but but still you know that's a level of sophistication you wouldn't get today i know and i think it tells you why it's important that we actually have political discussions and political education. We're reading, we're talking about theory, even if it seems disconnected from our day-to-day activism. Because we just, I mean, I think in general, the left is less grounded in history. And in general, we're dumber than we were in the past. You know, a lot of us are kind of stuck in kind of a very vague and amorphous progressivism, and we're drawn to politics for the right reason. But Hampton, I think, really shows you you know, what you could do with when you really think seriously about these issues and how it doesn't have to stop you from also being a credible organizer and activist. It's not an either or. You know, we need more intellectuals that actually do political work and we need more activists that, you know, do intellectual work.

Speaker 1: Yeah. No, it's really important. And I think what you're really basically saying there is Fred Hampton, great guy.

Sam Cedar: great guy great guy does a great i mean he did a great 21 great job it's true hey it's sam cedar why don't you uh subscribe to this channel you can do so right uh and over here over subscribe