Fred Hampton Quotes

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.

If you walk through life and don't help anybody, you haven't had much of a life

You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can't jail the Revolution.

If you dare to struggle, you dare to win. If you dare not struggle, then damn it, you don't deserve to win.

Nothing is more important than stopping fascism, because fascism is gonna stop us all.

We don’t think you fight fire with fire best ; we think you fight fire with water best. We’re going to fight racism not with racism, but we’re going to fight with solidarity. We say we’re not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism. We’re stood up and said we’re not going to fight reactionary pigs and reactionary state’s attorneys like this and reactionary state’s attorneys like Hanrahan with any other reactions on our part. We’re going to fight their reactions with all of us people getting together and having an international proletarian revolution.

I believe I’m going to die doing the things I was born to do. I believe I’m going to die high off the people. I believe I’m going to die a revolutionary in the international revolutionary proletarian struggle.

Black people need some peace, white people need some peace, and we're gonna have to fight, we're gonna have to struggle, we're gonna have to struggle relentlessly to bring about some peace, because the people that we're asking for peace, they're a bunch of megalomaniac warmongers and they don't even understand what peace means.

Racism is an excuse used for capitalism, and we know that racism is a byproduct of capitalism.

...you can jail revolutionaries, but you can’t jail the revolution. You might run a liberator like Eldridge Cleaver out of the country, but you can’t run liberation out of the country. You might murder a freedom fighter like Bobby Hutton, but you can’t murder freedom fighting. And if you do, you’ll come up with answers that don’t answer, explanations that don’t explain, you’ll come up with conclusions that don’t conclude And you’ll come up with people that you thought should be acting like pigs that’s acting like people and instead moving on pigs.

Why don't you live for the people. Why don't you struggle for the people. Why don't you die for the people.

Yeah, well, the ones who happily claim and embrace their own sense of themselves as privileged ain't my primary concern. I don't worry about them first. But, I would love it if they got to the point where they had the capacity to worry about themselves. Because then maybe we could talk. That's like that Fred Hampton shit: he'd be like, "white power to white people. Black power to black people." What I think he meant is, "look: the problematic of coalition is that coalition isn't something that emerges so that you can come help me, a maneuver that always gets traced back to your own interests. The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it's fucked up for you, in the same way that it's fucked up for us. I don't need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?

First you have free breakfasts, then you have free medical care, then you have free bus rides, and soon you have FREEDOM!

Racism is an excuse used for capitalism.

I  have declared war on the rich who prosper on our poverty, the politicians who lie to us with smiling faces, and all the mindless, heartless, robots who protect them and their property.” - Assata Shakur

A few months later, in December 1969, the Chicago police conducted a pre-dawn raid on a Panther apartment. Approximately one hundred shots were fired. At first the police claimed that they had responded to the fire of the Panthers, but it was quickly established by the local press that this was false. Fred Hampton, one of the most talented and promising leaders of the Panthers, was killed in his bed. There is evidence that he may have been drugged. Witnesses claim that he was murdered in cold blood. Mark Clark was also killed. This event can fairly be described as a Gestapo-style political assassination.

I finally saw that Fred Hampton was fearless. Literally, without fear. And as we listened to the speeches again and again, it became apparent he had accommodated death. He knew he was going to die. It was OK And so he had set aside the ultimate fear, the one that stopped all of us in our tracks, no matter how courageous, the net fear upon which we base all our other fears, the one that keeps us all in line. Hampton had simply set that fear to rest. He was free. Thus he was able to speak clean simple truths that hit you like a thunderbolt.

Fred Hampton was instrumental in setting the terms of the relationship. Guerra continues, “Hampton was a very humble person and didn’t walk around like he was God’s gift to the movement, although he was an eloquent public speaker; he was also a great organizer. He was a person who came in an old car, got out, shook people’s hands, wanted to really talk to people. I remember him saying, ‘I’m glad to have met you. I’m glad to have met you.’ ”146 Hampton’s talents as organizer and public speaker and his radical coalition politics made him one of the most effective members of the Black Panther Party.

A  revolutionary woman can't have no reactionary man.” - Assata Shakur

We’ll be spending the weekend in the Hamptons with Fred and Frankie. They’ll expect us to stay in the same room. The same bed. Fuck.

Revolution  is about change, and the first place the change begins is in yourself.” - Assata Shakur

Silence and inaction equals death.

If you are not ready to make a commitment at the age of twenty only because you are afraid to die then you are dead already.

Their means may be strategically effective as in the work of the Black Panthers in Chicago, with Fred Hampton’s efforts there before he was assassinated by police. Their means may be, in other contexts, less effective than were the Black Panthers and other groups. In either case, though, they are termed “social dynamite” because they are, or can be perceived as, a major threat to the functioning of the economic and political order.

Lockdown America, especially the mass incarceration and police violence that target poor communities of color, drive such leaders underground. Often, they have been murdered by the police. The Black Panther Party leaders, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, who were murdered by Chicago police, together offer perhaps the most memorable case in point. The Philadelphia police bombing and shooting of MOVE Organization members is another example, as discussed at the outset of Part One of this book.