Fred Hampton Quotes
We got to face some facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I'm talking about the white masses, I'm talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too. We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don't fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism.
Hampton, Fred. "Power Anywhere Where There's People." The Black Panthers Speak, edited by Philip S. Foner, J. B. Lippincott, 1970, pp. 138-139.
The organization was one of the first organized to agitate against the slave trade. He had organized many of the intellectual leaders of France to join in this effort.
What the Supreme Leader did not understand was that the very books that he recommended to see the faults of America were the very instruments that influenced the American reformers to change and improve America. And the lesson he missed is that he would not allow authors to heavily criticize the current Iran and have a wide audience so that Iran could improve. His examples were very well chosen. The lesson is the wrong one however.
Over the years, despite many efforts to unify workers of the world, most were much more focused on their own country. In this sense, Mussolini who was so wrong about most political things, may have been right in this instance.
Fredrick Allen Hampton was an American activist, Marxist-Leninist and revolutionary socialist. He came to prominence in Chicago as chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP), and deputy chairman of the national BPP. In this capacity, he founded the Rainbow Coalition, a prominent multicultural political organization that initially included the Black Panthers, Young Patriots, and the Young Lords, and an alliance among major Chicago street gangs to help them end infighting and work for social change.
