Maybe it’s only natural that organizers, activists, and artists like the ones here in Madison would be turning to Hampton half a century after his murder: that the Movement for Black Lives would namecheck him on their website; that director Shaka King and producers Ryan Coogler and Charles D. King would make him a subject of the Oscar-nominated film Judas and the Black Messiah; that Etsy shopkeepers would find buyers for shirts declaring that the “FBI Killed Fred Hampton”; that the activist and artist Noname would put Hampton-family attorney Jeffrey Haas’s The Assassination of Fred Hampton on her book club list.
I mean, he never really left—at least not his spirit, which has stuck around since his murder, at least in certain circles, both politically and artistically. Dozens of community organizations in Chicago were organized or recalibrated to demand justice for him and Mark Clark in the wake of their murders, and to insist that seeking justice in their memory meant reining in the city’s out-of-control, racist, and violent police force. Revolutionary organizations like the Black Liberation Army, the May 19th Communist Organization, the Revolutionary Communist Party, and the New Afrikan Freedom Fighters all claimed him as a revolutionary model, and his assassination as evidence of the state’s crimes. He lived on in art pieces still housed or on tour through venerable institutions like the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery and the Brooklyn Museum, and in songs by a diverse range of musicians that included the soul poet Gil Scott-Heron, folk artist Bob Gibson, and country singer Ronee Blakley.
So maybe I should’ve expected last summer’s mural. Maybe it was just one more note in a half-century praise song to him. Maybe it isn’t that remarkable after all.
But I don’t think that’s right. Or, rather, what I mean to say is that if visions and celebrations of Hampton never truly faded, ours is an especially important moment to consider him anew—and by “our moment” I mean not just the months since May of last year, but rather the years since the first invocation of #BlackLivesMatter in July 2013 and the August 2014 Ferguson uprising after the murder of Michael Brown, Jr.
So many of the oppressive structures that govern modern American society are extensions or exacerbations of ones that Hampton and his comrades in the late-1960s liberation struggles were battling against. That alone makes his life worth considering now. A few weeks before his murder, Hampton succinctly identified what he considered the primary trio of oppressors in the United States: “The only thing that’s gonna change our set of arrangements is what’s gotten us into this set of arrangements. And that’s the oppressor. And it’s on three stages, we call it the three-in-one: avaricious, greedy businessmen; demagogic, lyin’ politicians; and racist, pig fascist, reactionary cops.” In this framing, shaped by a Marxist reading of the world and the revolutionary struggle to remake it, the most important oppressive forces at work were the drivers of the capitalist system, the political class that supported it at all costs, and the police who were its frontline enforcers.