The Rainbow Coalition

The Rainbow Coalition

The Assassination of Fred Hampton by the U.S. Government

If you really want to know what scares the American empire, it’s not tanks, nukes, or foreign terrorists.

The most terrifying idea to empire is that the poor working-class folks might stop infighting, identify their true enemy, and start fighting the system together.

Back in 1969 in Chicago Fred Hampton built a cross-racial, anti-capitalist, working-class alliance that came to be known as the Rainbow Coalition. This wasn’t the later watered-down version associated with electoral politics, but one born out of the streets, radical and dangerous to the established system.

Fred Hampton, at just 21 years old, was already the chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. He used his position as well as his exceptional charisma, intellect, and organizing abilities not to win votes like some career politician, but to make wins for the actual material conditions of the people.

This coalition was primarily comprised of the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican nationalist group, and the Young Patriots, a group of white Appalachian migrants in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood.

Hampton and the Panthers also reached out to the Red Guard Party, a revolutionary Chinese-American group organizing in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The American Indian Movement (AIM) who were battling land theft and systemic racism against Native communities, and even anti-imperialist Jewish groups, radical Catholic workers, and Chicano activists who were fighting for farm labor rights.

He put together a grassroots alliance of the oppressed across every identity line. He managed to unite them not by a singular ideology, but by helping them identify the shared boot on their necks.

It was class consciousness in motion, and it terrified the state.

Once people realize that their enemy isn’t each other, but the banks, the landlords, the politicians, and the police who protect them, then the whole house of cards collapses. The entire American system relies on keeping the poor at each other’s throats. Black vs. white, Native vs. immigrant, straight vs. queer. If they ever actually started listening to one another, the elites know it would be game over.

That’s why Fred Hampton had to go.