From the article:
"The Chicago City Council may rename a one-block section of an inner city street for murdered Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton.
Remembering the Black Panthers, I understand why Palestinians voted for Hamas. Like Palestinians on the West Bank, we on the west side of Chicago in the 1960's understood how violent and well-armed are our opponents, in our case the Chicago Police Department."
3 comments:
I'm for naming the street after Freddie Hampton, but I reject the comparison to Hammas. At the time of Hampton's assassination, Chicago was harshly divided racially, with blacks formally and legally blocked from living outside of a defined zone. The police force was nearly all-white, and practiced terror on the citizen's of Chicago's "black belt." But in their response to this un-provoked repression, the Black Panthers expressed no intention of "driving white Chicago into Lake Michigan." Instead, they demanded and asserted the rights of black people to live in accordance with the principles of liberal republican democracy, as so perfectly defined in the US's founding documents.
I assess the Humas situation to be completely different. For one thing, Humas does not advocate people living under a government "of and for the people", with guaranteed equality of rights and personal liberties for all. Hummas advocates a religious tyranny. Sure, they have a hypothetical authentic historical grievance; all people do. But they have the means and opportunity to create an autonomous and prosperous nation where they are now, and muslims and arabs of any sort have more rights and prosperity within Isreal now than they do in the palistinian territories now, or would have if Hummas had its way.
The black panthers started as a reasonable and admirable group. When their aims became realized, they turned into a violent and despicable street gang. But that was after Freddie Hampton got executed by thugs in the Chicago Police Dept, acting then as more of a street gang than Panthers would ever become. Today's officers should recognize the despicable aspects of their legacy by respecting Freddie Hampton, and scorning their predecessors who killed him.
I very much support naming the street for Freddie Hampton. I just read another article on this topic in the NYT. Again I see that blacks in many city claim theirs is "the most segregated city in the US." They can't all be right! Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, New Orleans, black folks in all those cities claim to live in "the most segregated city in the country." And segretaion in 2006 is of course fundimentally different from that in 1966: Today it is 100% by choice.
But that's not the point. The point is that the Chicago police has a justifiably horrible historical reputation. In the 1960s they surely were a huge street gang, especially in matters of enforcing racial segregation. I have read extensively on the Black Panthers in general (including its foundation in Mississippi in 1964) and the Hampton killing in particular. I am convinced that Hampton was assassinated by the Chicago police, and that Hampton's view within its context was admirable then, and in retrospect I only object to its marxist aspects.
It galls me to no end that there are hordes of objectionable white folks with schools and streets and counties named for them, including most abhorently the confederates. Then any modern attempt to similar honor black people receives scrutiny that white monsters like Robert Lee never received. Let's rename the confederate schools for slave rebels, abolitionists, and the union officers who liberated the south. As for the Chicago police, you would think that its cheerleaders would want to keep their eyes on the present and the future, and not wish to draw attention to the past.
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