By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit
Exile in Happy Valley
Fred Hampton had a dream. It was a little more militant than Doctor King’s, but no less ambitious. The young chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party dreamed of a grand coalition of revolutionaries spanning across racial and class boundaries, united to bring down the American Empire and the police state it fostered in the ghettos of Chicago that he called home. Fred began to build his dream locally, creating the original Rainbow Coalition with Jose Cha Cha Jimenez of the Puerto Rican Young Lords and William “Preacherman” Fesperman of the Hillbilly Nationalists in the Young Patriots Organization. He also brokered unprecedented city wide ceasefires between warring street gangs by convincing them that their true power lied in their ability to protect their turf from the real thugs in the Chicago PD.
Soon Hampton’s dream began to spread across the country, creating a paisley quilt of countercultural tribes devoted to uniting to take down the man by any means necessary, from the modern day Aztec warriors in the Chicano Brown Berets to the Rock n Roll dope jihadists in John Sinclair’s White Panther Party to the new Dog Soldiers of the American Indian Movement. Fred didn’t dream of an army, Fred dreamt of a thousand armies, with a thousand flags, fighting a thousand revolutions at once, overwhelming the most powerful empire in modern history with not one, but two, three, four Vietnams, all raging in solidarity with their brothers and sisters in the Third World from the belly of the beast. For this daring dream, Fred Hampton had to die.
So his enemies, both local and national, devised a plan. The FBI used an informant named William O’Neal to drug Hampton so their would be zero possibility of the courageous young warrior defending himself. Cook County States Attorney, Edward Hanrahan put together a police hit squad and on December 4, 1969, they performed a no knock raid, murdered Hampton’s bodyguard, Mark Clark, dragged Hampton’s pregnant girlfriend from their bed and put three bullets into the 21 year old revolutionary dreamer, including two in his head, execution style. Sadly, do to the top-down structure of Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition, it quickly collapsed without its iconic leader. But Fred Hampton’s dream of revolutionary bottom unity lives on in some very unexpected places.
On the surface, today’s Boogaloo Bois couldn’t be more different than the Black Panthers of yesteryear. They are a coalition of mostly white militiamen far more inspired by Murray Rothbard than Mao Zedong, but the two iconoclastic organizations actually have more than a few things in common. They are both heavily demonized groups of young revolutionaries who seek to take on the police-warfare state with the high powered tools of the Second Amendment, and they both share Fred Hampton’s dream of a diverse coalition of radicals devoted to bringing Babylon to its proper place on it’s knees.
