The Murder of Fred Hampton

Fantastic documentary- both a great piece of journalism and a beautiful example of verite-filmmaking. It shows the truly socialist character of the Black Panthers as they feed and educate oppressed people of many backgrounds.

The radical journalists who made this film make clear that the Chicago police felt the need to execute Hampton, an important Black Nationalist, potentially an important Marxist revolutionary leader, before he developed any more of a mass, multi-national following. The fact that Hampton was convicted of clearly trumped-up charges of robbery by an all-white jury shows that the general white populace feared Black people, yet the many white progressives and radicals in Hampton's circle shows that the racial divide was gradually declining in the near- revolutionary climate of the late-'60s, at least among young people. The film thus makes terrifyingly comprehensible the capitalist state's desire to quash Black Power before it could be equated with, in Hampton's words, "Brown Power for Brown people, Yellow Power for Yellow People..." and even "White power for White people."