Defining Moments in Black History by Dick Gregory

Author:Dick Gregory
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-09-19T04:00:00+00:00

The Killing of Black Leaders

I want you to think about something. Malcolm X was killed in 1965. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in 1968. And Fred Hampton, the leader of the Illinois Black Panthers, twenty-one years old, was shot to death in cold blood by the FBI in 1969. What did the three have in common, besides being black leaders? At the time they were killed, they were all reaching beyond the black American community to make ties with other people. That’s what the power structure is afraid of: people banding together. And when the power structure is afraid, people die.

Malcolm used to preach one thing: black people being separate from everybody else, on our own and self-sufficient. Then he went to Mecca, and the experience opened his eyes. He started to see the beauty of making common cause with other people. A man he met, Pio Gama Pinto, born in Kenya, led him to think about Pan-Africanism—black people all over the globe working together. Then the two of them were killed, four days apart.

Martin Luther King Jr. was organizing the Poor People’s Campaign. He said, “I think it is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights. . . . We have moved into an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society.” The whole society. Not just black folks. Next thing you know, he had been shot.

Then there was Fred Hampton of the Black Panthers. The Panthers was started in the 1960s by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale to protect black folks from racist police officers. They used to follow the police around, and when the police stopped some black dudes, the Panthers were there to make sure their rights were protected. The Panthers were some badass brothers, wearing their leather jackets and berets. They were all about protecting black folks. But Fred Hampton was starting to move beyond that. He saw that blacks needed to band together with others, and he was starting to make common cause with poor white folks. Go look it up. There’s video footage: white Okie-looking dudes you could picture in Klan hoods and robes, except they’re standing next to Fred Hampton, saying they stand with the Black Panthers. Next thing you know, Hampton is dead, too.

See a pattern?

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