Chicago 10 Animated Feature Film

Chicago 10 is a 2007 partly animated film written and directed by Brett Morgen and tells the story of the Chicago Seven. The film features the voices of Hank Azaria, Dylan Baker, Nick Nolte, Mark Ruffalo, Roy Scheider, Liev Schreiber, and Jeffrey Wright in an animated reenactment of the trial based on transcripts and rediscovered audio recordings. It also contains archive footage of David Dellinger, Abbie Hoffman, William Kunstler, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, and Leonard Weinglass, and of the protest and riot itself. The title is drawn from a quote by Rubin, who said, "Anyone who calls us the Chicago Seven is a racist. Because you're discrediting Bobby Seale. You can call us the Chicago Eight, but really we're the Chicago Ten, because our two lawyers went down with us." [1]

It premiered January 18, 2007 at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. It later premiered at Silverdocs, the AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival in Downtown Silver Spring. The film opened in limited release in the United States on February 29, 2008.

This film is a must see and i have been following it's development for a while now. You can find more clips on youtube by typing in Chicago 10. I encourage all to see this film and support this filmmaker!

Saying Goodbye to the Black Icons Who Passed in '07

Saying goodbye to black actors who died in 2007

By: Jackie Jones

They were civil rights pioneers, entertainers, writers, sports legends and journalists. Some broke new ground; others brought us art, beauty and comfort. Some provoked discussions in homes, bars and barbershops across the country and still others brought us the real story behind the inner workings of government and industry.

This is a look back at the lives and the accomplishments of some of those black Americans lost this year:


Darrent Williams of the Denver Broncos was killed in a drive-by shooting just hours into the New Year after leaving a nightclub in Denver. Williams, a second-round pick in the 2005 draft out of Oklahoma State, started nine games as a rookie due to injuries. This season, he took over as the starter for Lenny Walls alongside Champ Bailey and was second on the team with four interceptions and tied for third with 86 tackles.

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Gerald "Wash" Washington, 57, the first black mayor-elect of Westlake, a largely white Louisiana town was found dead in a parking lot on Jan. 2 just three days before he was to take office. Local authorities initially ruled the death a suicide, but state police opened an investigation following lingering questions about Washington’s mysterious death.

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Jane Bolin, whose appointment as a family court judge by New York City Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia in 1939 made her the first black woman in the United States to become a judge, died on Jan. 8 in Queens, N.Y. She was 98. The Poughkeepsie-born Bolin was also the first black woman to graduate from Yale University Law School, the first to join the New York City Bar Association and the first to work in the city's legal department. Bolin said her law career was inspired in part by images of lynching she had seen in the media. "It is easy to imagine how a young, protected child who sees portrayals of brutality is forever scarred and becomes determined to contribute in her own small way to social justice," she wrote in 1978.
Look into your financial future. Are you on track?

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Alice Coltrane, the jazz pianist and organist who was closely linked with the music of her late husband, legendary saxophonist John Coltrane, died Jan. 14. She was known for her contributions to jazz and early New Age music, including bringing the harp into jazz music and featuring astral compositions, as well as being the keeper of her husband’s archive and musical legacy. A convert to Hinduism, Coltrane was also a significant spiritual leader and founded the Vedantic Center, a spiritual commune in the Los Angeles area.

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Pookie Hudson, 72, lead singer and songwriter for the doo wop group The Spaniels, who lent his romantic tenor to hits like "Goodnight, Sweetheart, Goodnight" and influenced generations of later artists, died Jan. 16. Hudson wrote "Goodnight, Sweetheart, Goodnight" ("well, it's time to go") for a young woman he was dating at the time. "He was staying awful late at the young lady's house and her parents said ... he had to go. As he was walking home, that's what inspired him to write that song," said longtime manager Wellington "Bay" Robinson. The Spaniels' signature song was a Top 5 R&B hit in 1954. The McGuire Sisters rushed out a version of it that sold even more copies. At the time, only black radio stations played Hudson's version. The Spaniels' version was finally heard two decades later on the soundtrack of "American Graffiti." Among the Spaniels' other Top 20 R&B hits, were "Baby, It's You," "Peace of Mind" and "Let's Make Up."

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Billy Henderson, 67, a member of the band The Spinners, whose voice was heard most prominently on "I'll Be Around," died on Feb. 2.

Also on that date, Joe Hunter, Motown’s first bandleader and a three-time Grammy winner with the Funk Brothers, died. He was the first person hired in the late 1950s by Berry Gordy Jr. and he went on to hire many of the backup musicians who formulated the Motown sound and ultimately became known as the Funk Brothers. Hunter’s piano work was a major ingredient in the songs “Heat Wave” and “Pride and Joy.” After a 2002 documentary, “Standing in the Shadows of Motown,” was released, the soundtrack won two Grammys, and in 2004, the Funk Brothers were given a Lifetime Achievement Award.

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Singer-actress Barbara McNair, 72, who gained fame as a nightclub singer and Broadway star in the ‘60s, died on Feb. 4. After strong reviews in a musical called “The Body Beautiful” in 1958, McNair starred in the Broadway musical “No Strings” in 1963. She hosted her own TV variety show from 1969 to 1971 and starred with Sidney Poitier in the 1970 films “They Call Me Mister Tibbs” and “The Organization” in 1971.

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Olympic medalist Willye White, 67, a two-time Olympic medalist in track and field and the first woman to compete for the United States in five Olympics, died Feb. 6. White competed in five consecutive Olympic Games between 1956 and 1972. She won a silver medal in the long jump at the 1956 Games in Melbourne, Australia, at age 16 and won her second silver medal in 1964 as a member of the 4x100-meter relay team in Tokyo.

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Thomas Stockett, 82, a illustrator and political cartoonist for the Afro-American Newspaper, died Feb. 21. Stockett started drawing at the age of four and began painting as a teenager. He worked for a local sign shop where he designed movie billboards for various theaters in Baltimore before joining the Afro-American Newspapers in 1955 as the political cartoonist. "He was an institution that surpassed his position as just being an illustrator for the Afro-American Newspaper," said Afro Publisher Jake Oliver about Stockett. "His cartoons and illustrations had the power to make readers laugh, cry, be angry, but most of all, think."

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Dennis Johnson, 52, a five-time All-Star and star defensive guard who was part of three NBA championships, died Feb. 22. He played on title teams with the Boston Celtics in 1984 and 1986 and the Seattle SuperSonics in 1979, a series in which he won the finals MVP title. Johnson was coach of the Austin Toros of the NBA Development League.

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Lamar Lundy, 71, was a member of the famed Fearsome Foursome defensive line for the Los Angeles Rams in the 1960s. The 6-foot-7 Lundy, who died Feb. 24, was the first black player to receive a football scholarship at Purdue. With the Rams, he, along with Roosevelt Grier and Hall of Famers Deacon Jones and Merlin Olsen, formed the Fearsome Foursome, who were noted for stopping running backs and harassing quarterbacks, despite having only one winning season from 1963 to 1966, when the linemen played as a unit.

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Damien Nash, 24, was a running back for the Denver Broncos, died Feb 24. The fifth-round draft choice by Tennesee in 2005 played in just three games for the Titans. The Broncos signed him as a free agent last season. He played in three games, rushing for 66 yards on 18 carries. In his two-year career, he had 24 carries for 98 yards and seven receptions for 55 yards.

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Ronnie Wells, a popular jazz vocalist based in Washington, D.C. who came to prominence in the mid-1960s, making several television appearances and singing on stage with a number of luminaries, including Billy Eckstine, Lonnie Liston Smith and Oscar Brown, Jr., died March 7. She appeared semi-annually for five years, beginning in 1992, at Blackbeard’s Castle in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, and also performed on a number of occasions with the U.S. Airmen of Note, the U.S. Navy Commodores Orchestra and appeared at the Kennedy Center, Smithsonian Institution and other concert halls nightclubs and jazz festivals in the U.S. and abroad. She also had taught jazz vocal techniques in a program she created at the University of Maryland’s Department of Music.

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Luther Ingram, 69, the R&B singer and songwriter best known for the hit "If Loving You Is Wrong (I Don't Want to Be Right)," died on March 19. Ingram performed with Ike Turner at clubs in East St. Louis, roomed with Jimi Hendrix in New York and was the opening act for Isaac Hayes. He recorded through the 1980s and performed in concert until the mid-1990s, when his health began declining.

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G.E. Patterson, 87, the presiding bishop of the Church of God in Christ and a minister for almost 50 years, died March 30. In January, he won the traditional male vocalist of the year honor for his "Singing the Old-Time Way Volume 2" at the 22nd annual Stellar Gospel Music Awards.

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Born Bert Cooper in Nassau on Oct. 18, 1934, Calvin Lockhart moved to New York at age 18. After a year at the Cooper Union School of Engineering, he dropped out to pursue a career in acting. His on-screen heyday in the 1970s included prominent roles as the smooth-talking preacher/con artist in "Cotton Comes to Harlem" and an underworld character in "Uptown Saturday Night." Described by a New York Times writer in 1970 as having "matinee idol looks," with "chiseled-out-of-marble features" and "skin the color of brown velvet," Lockhart, who died March 29, had his first starring film role that year in "Halls of Anger," a racially explosive drama in which he played an ex-basketball star and English teacher who becomes vice principal of an inner-city high school where 60 white students are being bused in. About nine years ago, Lockhart moved back to the Bahamas, where he worked as a director on several productions of the Freeport Players Guild.

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The legendary former Grambling State University football coach Eddie Robinson, 88, sent more than 200 players to the NFL, including Hall of Famers Charlie Joiner, Buck Buchanan, Willie Davis and Willie Brown. Robinson, who died April 3, won 408 games in 45 winning seasons, nine National Black College championships and 17 Southwestern Athletic Conference titles during a 57-year career. Robinson’s tenure spanned 11 presidents, several wars and the civil rights movement.

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Darryl Stingley, 55, a quadriplegic who became a symbol of the violence of football, was playing for the New England Patriots as a wide receiver when he was hit and permanently injured by Oakland Raiders defensive back Jack Tatum during a preseason game on Aug. 12, 1978. He died April 5.

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Actor Roscoe Lee Browne, 81, was known for his rich voice and dignified bearing, which brought him an Emmy Award and a Tony nomination, died April 11. Browne's career included classic theater and TV cartoons. He also was a poet and a former world-class athlete. His deep, cultured voice was heard narrating the 1995 hit movie, "Babe."

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At age 15, June Johnson, a founding member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, was beaten and jailed in Mississippi during a voter registration training course. On the road on June 11, 1963, as part of the training course, the SNCC volunteers’ bus stopped at whites only lunch counter and one of their party tried to use the segregated restroom. Separated from the group at the local jail, Johnson was beaten and when she tried to take a shower to clean up, she was scalded. After her release, the FBI followed Johnson to a camp up north and tried to get her to sign a statement saying her injuries were a result of infighting among her fellow civil rights workers. She was a plaintiff and paralegal investigator in lawsuits to stop racist practices in government and schools in two Mississippi counties and worked with Robert Kenney and Marian Wright Edelman to draw attention to the failure of the state’s anti-poverty efforts. She died April 13.

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Jazzman Andrew Hill, 75, a groundbreaking pianist and composer known for his complex post-bop style, died April 20. According to Cem Kurosman of Blue Note Records, Hill released his final album, "Time Lines," in early 2006, a farewell that earned him album of the year honors from Down Beat magazine. He performed up until about three weeks before his death with his trio at a Manhattan church. Hill was widely lauded within the jazz community; Blue Note founder Alfred Lion once described him as "the next Thelonious Monk." But he was often overlooked by mainstream audiences, which focused on contemporaries like Miles Davis and Charlie Parker. Hill had performed with both while a young man.

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Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald, 68 (D-Calif.), was a seventh-term congresswoman from a heavily Democratic Southern California district that includes Compton, Long Beach and parts of Los Angeles. When the Democrats took over after the 2006 midterm elections, Millender-McDonald became chair of the Committee on House Administration, which oversees operations of the House and federal election procedures. She also worked on issues including election reform and opposing the genocide in Darfur. She died April 22.

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Clarinetist Alvin Batiste toured with Ray Charles and Cannonball Adderley, recorded with Branford Marsalis and taught pianist Henry Butler. Though his age was not precisely known, New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival officials said he was born in New Orleans in 1932. Batiste suffered a heart attack and died May 6, just hours before he was to perform at the festival with Marsalis and Harry Connick, Jr.

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Diego "Chico" Corrales, 29, won boxing titles in two weight classes and was involved in one of the most memorable fights in recent times. Corrales was a big puncher best known for getting up after two 10th-round knockdowns to stop Jose Luis Castillo on May 7, 2005. He died on that same date two years later.

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Yolanda Denise King, 51, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s eldest child, pursued her father's dream of racial harmony through drama and motivational speaking. King, who died May 15, appeared in a number of films, including a role as civil rights martyr Medgar Evers’ daughter in "Ghosts of Mississippi," and as Rosa Parks in the 1978 television miniseries "King." King also ran a film production company. King, who was 12 when her father was slain, learned of his death from a television news bulletin while washing dishes at her family’s home in Atlanta.

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Actor Carl Wright, 75, began his career as a tap dancer and comedian and later appeared in movies including "Barbershop" and "Big Momma's House." His film credits also included "Soul Food," "Barbershop 2: Back in Business" and "The Cookout." He died May 19.

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New England Patriots defensive end Marquise Hill, 24, spent much of his free time and his NFL paycheck helping loved ones in New Orleans rebuild in the hurricane-damaged city where he grew up.The former LSU star died in a jet ski accident on Lake Pontchartrain on May 27.

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Parren J. Mitchell, 85, a Baltimore civil rights activist who became Maryland's first black member of Congress in 1970, died on May 28. A former head of the Congressional Black Caucus and chairman of the House Small Business Committee, Mitchell worked for years to assure minority participation in contracts let under federal public works programs. After earning his undergraduate degree from Morgan State University in 1950, Mitchell was denied admission to graduate school at the University of Maryland in College Park. He sued and won, becoming the first black graduate student at College Park, receiving a master’s degree in sociology in 1952.

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Rhythm-and-blues singer Bill Pinkney, 81, the last survivor of the original members of the musical group The Drifters, died July 4. Pinkney was among the seven significant contributors to The Drifters inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, including original members Clyde McPhatter and Gerhardt Thrasher, and subsequent members Ben E. King. Charlie Thomas, Rudy Lewis and Johnny Moore.

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Robert "Buck" Brown, 71, one of the first "crossover" African-American cartoonists, whose work appeared in Playboy magazine over four decades, died July 7. Playboy printed more than 600 of Brown's cartoons, including one that appeared in the magazine's August issue. His daughter, Tracy Hill, told the Associated Press that Brown sold thousands more to other publications. Brown's work also appeared in Ebony, Jet, the New Yorker, Esquire and the Chicago Sun-Times.

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Charles Tisdale, 80, owner and publisher of the Jackson (Miss.) Advocate and a civil rights activist, was credited with giving voice to black Americans in Jackson and throughout the state of Mississippi. Tisdale, who died July 7, continued to publish even after 84 bullets were fired into his then-office on East Hamilton Street in Jackson. Two former Ku Klux Klansmen were convicted in 1982. The office was firebombed at least twice, including in 1998 when gasoline was poured over the furniture and Molotov cocktails thrown through the window, according to the Associated Press. A Jackson man later pleaded guilty to the crime.

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Harold “Mr. Butch” Madison Jr., a homeless man, was something of an icon in Boston’s Kenmore Square before moving to Harvard Avenue in nearby Allston a decade ago. Ranting in rhyme with a beer in hand, Madison was known to panhandle one minute and offer to share his take with a friend the next. After his death on July 11, friends organized a city parade in his honor.

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Eddie Pinder, 36, a producer at ABC News described as “a large man with a personality to match,” died July 12. He was noted for his a body of work that included a “Master Teacher” series for the network’s "Nightline," on the experiences of a first-year public school teacher dealing with at-risk fourth-graders in Brooklyn, N.Y.; a story on linguistic profiling for 20/20, and the “America in Black & White” series for Nightline, telling the story of a man who discovers for the first time that he is the son of an African-American."

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Chauncey Bailey, 57, reporter and editor for the Oakland Post, was noted for his stories chronicling the history and the challenges facing the black community. Police said Bailey was gunned down August 2 by a man who told them he was angry over stories the journalist had written as part of an investigation into the financial activities of the Your Black Muslim Bakery in Oakland, Calif. Dozens of reporters, photographers and editors formed The Bailey Project, a coalition to continue Bailey’s work. It is the largest group journalistic investigation in more than 30 years. It is patterned after The Arizona Project, which was formed in 1976 following the slaying of Arizona Republic investigative reporter Don Bolles, who was killed by a bomb placed under his car while he was investigating links between Phoenix businessmen and organized crime.

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Asa Hilliard, 73, scholar, professor at Georgia State University, was heralded as a pioneer who helped elevate the study of classical African culture and for working to eliminate racial bias in the American educational system. He died Aug. 12 while leading a tour of students in Egypt. Before joining Georgia State, Hilliard spent 18 years at San Francisco State University where he was a department chairman and, later, dean of education. He also a consultant to the Peace Corps and was a school psychologist and superintendent of schools in Monrovia, Liberia, for six years. He was also a member of the National Black Child Development Institute and the Association for Study of Classical African Civilization.

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Max Roach, 83, a master percussionist whose rhythmic innovations and improvisations defined bebop jazz during a wide-ranging career where he collaborated with artists from Duke Ellington to rapper Fab Five Freddy, died Aug. 15.

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Many a woman swooned listening to jazz balladeer Jon Lucien, who died Aug. 18. Known for his romantic baritone voice, Lucien also was considered a forerunner of fusion, influenced by calypso, jazz, bossa nova, soul and R&B.

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Eddie Griffin, former Seton Hall and Houston Rockets star, was killed Aug. 21 when his sport utility vehicle collided with a freight train in a fiery crash. Investigators used dental records to identify Griffin, 25, who began his tumultuous pro career with the Houston Rockets in 2001. He was waived by the Timberwolves in March.

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Basil O. Phillips, 77, a longtime photo editor at Ebony and Jet magazines, headed a staff that cataloged and managed more than 1 million photographs, drawings, and color transparencies in the world's largest collection on the black experience in America. He died Aug. 27.

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Percy Rodrigues’ role as a neurosurgeon in the 1960s television series "Peyton Place" broke ground because he was cast as an authority figure when relatively few black actors were given such parts. When Rodrigues was added to the "Peyton Place" cast in 1968 as Dr. Harry Miles, the headline in The New York Times read, "A Doctor's Role for Negro Actor." Rodrigues, 89, who died Sept. 6, also had a long career as a voice actor. About the same time as his breakthrough on "Peyton Place," Rodrigues, a Canadian of African and Portuguese descent, played a commodore in a Star Trek TV episode and an embittered doctor in the 1968 film, "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter." From the 1950s through the 1980s, he acted in more than 80 film and television productions, including the 1979 miniseries "Roots: The Next Generation."

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Hercules L. Joyner, 89, the father of "Tom Joyner Morning Show" host Tom Joyner and entrepreneur Albert Joyner, died Oct. 21 in his Dallas home. Known for his dry wit and gentle ways, "Pops," as he was affectionately called by family and friends, graduated from Florida A&M College with bachelor of science in chemistry. While at Florida A&M, Joyner pledged with the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity and became an avid golfer. In later years, "The Herc" Golf Tournament was named after him. To share his passion for black colleges, Joyner was an active member of the Tom Joyner Foundation, created by his son 10 years ago to help keep students enrolled in historically black colleges and universities.

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Donda West, 58, mother of rapper Kanye West, was the former chairwoman of Chicago State University's English department and was the inspiration for the song, "Hey Mama," on Kanye West's 2005 album, "Late Registration." In May, she published the book, "Raising Kanye: Life Lessons from the Mother of a Hip-Hop Star," in which she paid homage to her famous son. She died Nov. 10.

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Ian Smith, 88, was the steely prime minister of Rhodesia -- now Zimbabwe -- who unilaterally declared the former British colony's independence in 1965 and spent 14 years defying international sanctions and calls for black majority rule. He died Nov. 20.

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Washington Redskins safety Sean Taylor, 24, died on Nov. 27, a day after he was shot at home during a botched burglary at his Florida home. An All-American at the University of Miami, Taylor was drafted by the Redskins as the fifth overall selection in 2004.

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Rapper Pimp C, 33, who helped define Southern hip-hop with his group, UGK, died Dec. 4. Pimp C, whose real name was Chad Butler, formed UGK with his partner, Bun B, in the late 1980s in Port Arthur, Texas. The group's first nationally distributed album, "Too Hard to Swallow," was released in 1992. The next year, a song from the album was included on the soundtrack for the film, "Menace II Society."

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Ike Turner’s role as one of rock's critical architects was overshadowed by his ogrelike image as the man who abused former wife and icon Tina Turner. Turner, 76, managed to rehabilitate his image somewhat in his later years, touring with his band, the Kings of Rhythm, and drawing critical acclaim for his work. Turner died Dec. 12. He won a Grammy in 2007 in the traditional blues album category for "Risin' With the Blues."

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Often called the father of distance running and the “pioneer of ultramarathoning,” Ted Corbitt, 88, competed in the marathon in the 1952 Olympics, introduced ultramarathon races to the United States, organized a number of running groups, developed accurate methods of measuring long-distance races and helped design the course for the inaugural course for the New York City marathon in 1970. One of the few elite black athletes in distance running, Corbitt’s time of 2 hours, 44 minutes and 15 seconds at the age of 51 was seven minutes faster than his Olympic time. He died Dec. 12.

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St. Clair Bourne, 64, one of the country’s most prominent black documentary filmmakers, died Dec. 14. His works included films about Paul Robeson, Gordon Parks, Amiri Baraka and John Henrik Clarke, films for television, education, industrial and fictional films. Bourne operated his own production company, Chamba Mediaworks, Inc., and newsletter and Web site, Chambanotes.com, which served the black cinematography community.

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Frank Morgan, 73, a jazz saxophonist whom critics likened to Charlie Parker, but whose fame was diminished by a three-decade struggle with drug addiction, died Dec. 14. He debuted as a solo artist in 1955 with a hard bop collection before slipping into addiction. He played off and on, but after a prison conversion to Islam, Morgan produced his second album in 1985 and in 1986 played a series of acclaimed performances at the Village Vanguard in New York, maintaining a rigorous schedule of performances even after he suffered a stroke in 1998. He was the lead instrumentalist on more than a dozen albums, playing with noted musicians including Wynton Marsalis, McCoy Tyner, Kenny Burrell and singer Abbey Lincoln.

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Rep. Julia Carson, 69, the second African-American and first woman to represent Indiana in Congress, died Dec. 15. In 1997, the building that houses the government offices for Marion County’s Center Township was officially renamed the Julia M. Carson Government Center in her honor. Carson also led Congress to pass a measure awarding Rosa Parks the Congressional Gold Medal and co-sponsored a bill to remove bureaucratic bottlenecks on child health insurance. Carson worked closely with the NAACP to develop critical civil rights legislation and served as vanguard against the retrenchment of NAACP legislative priorities.

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Hilda H.M. Mason, 91, a veteran of the civil rights movement and a member of the D.C. Council in Washington from 1977 to 1998, who dubbed herself “grandmother of the world.” A nonstop campaigner, she was virtually unbeatable at the polls as a staunch member of the D.C. Statehood Party and enjoyed broad support because of her efforts to improve literacy, education, housing and the quality of life for seniors. Mason died Dec. 16.

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During a career that lasted six decades, Oscar Peterson, 82, became one of the most-recorded jazz pianists. Peterson, who won eight Grammy Awards, including one in 1997 for lifetime achievement, recorded more than 200 albums and was hailed as a jazz virtuoso. Even after a stroke in 1993 left him without the full use of his left hand, Peterson continued a schedule of international club and concert dates. He died Dec. 23.

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Tom Morgan, 56, former president for the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), served the organization for several terms as treasurer before becoming president. He expanded the organization’s mentorship and training programs and established relationships with outside organizations like the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank. His administration also created the Ethel Payne Fellowship for black journalists to travel to Africa for several weeks of research. He also served on the programming committee for the first Unity convention in 1994, an event that brought together the four racial minority journalists associations for a joint conference, which is now held every four years during national election years and attracts the major presidential candidates. Morgan died on Dec. 24.

Fallen Soldiers Friday: Picture Memorial

Every Friday I will post a biography of an honored hero in the revolutionary struggle. Some will be well-known freedom fighters like VI Lenin or Emma Goldstein, others, so not well known. Because not all believed in the same strategy to achieve liberation, we will see a conflict of ideas. Something that we can draw upon to construct our views today.

Today, I will be posting up pictures of comrades who gave their energy and devoted their life to the struggle for liberation.

To pay tribute, leave a comment in remembrance of a fallen soldier whom has influenced you in any way shape or form.

Jean Baptiste DuSable


Huey P. Newton


Osageyfo Kwame Nkrumah


Kwame Toure


"Chairman" Fred Hampton



MLK


Malcolm X

The Treatment of African Slaves

This paper hopes to illustrate the barbaric and inhumane treatment of Africans during slavery in contrast to the pro-slavery counter-claims of fair treatment towards slaves. There is a famous African proverb which states, “Until the lion writes its own history, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” Meaning until slaves themselves were able to document their treatment or until others on their behalf exposed the truth, the true nature of slavery would never be know, and the “happy slave” myth would continue to perpetuate. Mary Prince in her narrative declared, “All slaves want to be free” and states, “I can tell by myself what other slaves feel, and by what they have told me. The man that says slaves be quite happy in slavery – that they don’t want to be free – that man is either ignorant or a lying person. I never heard a slave say so.”

Mary Prince’s The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself is the earliest know slave narrative by a woman, which highlights the treatment of slaves. It was published in 1831, almost 300 years after the first African slave was transported from the African coast. It is a saga of overwork, abuse and sexual violence that well over 10 million unnamed slaved had experienced during Colonial Slavery. She details horrific scenes of physical abuse inflicted upon her by her mistress. She says, “To stripe me naked – to hang me up by the wrists and lay my flesh open with the cow skin, was an ordinary punishment for a slight offense. However, she soon details a far worse scene of brutal treatment towards the slaves by describing what happened to a fellow slave of hers named Hetty after a cow she had tied up had gotten loose. She says, her “master flew into a terrible passion, and ordered the poor creature(Hetty) to be stripped naked, notwithstanding her pregnancy, and to be tied up to a tree in the yard. He then flogged her as hard as he could lick, both whip and cow skin, till she was all streaming with blood. He retired, and the hit her again and again. Her shrieks were terrible.” After the brutal beating, she was brought to bed where she give birth to a still born child. After seemingly recovering, she was again repeatedly beaten by the mistress and master and later died due to her injuries. Mary goes on to say that that day filled her with horror and could not bear to think of it, but it was always present in her head for a long time. This small statement showcases not only the physical trauma that the slaves suffered but also the emotional and psychological trauma they experience and developed due to inhumane treatment of themselves and other fellow slaves on the plantation.

Olaudah Equinao was a former slave who authored a slave narrative when freed. In the narrative he witnessed a horrific scene also. He says he saw, “a negro man staked to the ground and cut most shockingly, and then his ears cut off, bit, bit by bit, because he had been connected to a white woman, who was a common prostitute!” As if it were no crime in the whites to rob an innocent African girl of her virtue; but most heinous of a black man only to gratify a passion of nature, where the temptation was offered by one of a different color, though the most abandoned woman of her species.”

The act of raping an African slave was legal and a normal occurrence during slavery. Due to the fact that Africans where not thought of as humans, but as property, they did not have rights which whites enjoyed. Rape by nature is a violent act, whether the victim puts up a struggle or not. This is because rape is when a victim is forced into a sexual act against his or her will. The fact that it was legal to rape an African, because she was a slave, shows the barbaric and inhumane nature of slavery.

Rape is just many of the gruesome and violent acts committed against Africans during slavery. As noted in the slave narratives, many of the slaves were beaten so severe that their injuries were life threatening. The psychological effect of being beaten brutally or seeing someone else beaten could cause post traumatic syndrome. Showing that not only was slavery physically abusive but also mentally. The slave narratives stand in sharp contrast to the pro-slavery stories of a happy and well treated slave and also shows how important it is for the lion to write it’s own story.

Putting Reparations on the Socialist Agenda

According to the International Monetary Fund(IMF), in 2006 the United States of America had a GDP of more than $13 trillion and thus ranking it as the largest national GDP in the world. GDP, or gross domestic product, is the value of all final goods and services from a nation in a given time period. Yet, this wealth is becoming gradually concentrated as yearly statistics show. According to State of Working America, in 2004, 12.7% of the population, 37 million persons, were considered poor. Not only is wealth in America unequally distributed, but poverty is as well also, with 30 percent of Blacks being poor, 20 percent of all Hispanics, but only 9 percent of Whites. How did America generate and continue to generate this vast amount of wealth and is there a connection between that process and it's disproportionate allocation?

Slavery and Primitive Accumulation of Capital

Primitive, or "original accumulation", refers to the initial process that led to a 'critical mass' of accumulation that enabled capital to be set in motion. It's a concept developed by Karl Marx to explain how the capitalist mode of production came into fruition. Marx says we must envision an accumulation of capital that was not a consequence of capitalist production but was the starting point of capitalist production. He called this "primitive accumulation of capital".

So what is this primitive or original/previous accumulation of capital? According to Marx it was the,

discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. [Marx 1977, p. 915]

Capitalist development was due to the brutal exploitation of Blacks and indigenous people as consumers and workers. African slaves were forced to perform free labor for almost 250 years. Karl Marx notes,

Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that has given the colonies their value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world trade that is the pre-condition of large-scale industry.
-The Poverty of Philosophy: A Reply to M. Proudhon’s Philosophy of Poverty, New York, International Publishers, n.d., pages 94-5.

This constant expropriation of surplus value, at a high rate of exploitation, was the driving force behind capitalist development, as well as the underdevelopment of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Where did the reproduction and growth needed for capital investment come from after the abolishment of slavery?

Abolition and Permanent Accumulation of Capital

After the abolishment of the slavery mode of production in the South, the United states still continued to generate wealth. Rosa Luxemburg proposes that the cause of this continual generation of wealth is due to what is called, permanent accumulation of capital. The difference between Marx and Luxemburg is that, for Marx, primitive accumulation is the starting point for capitalism proper, whereas for Luxemburg it is an ongoing process. Even after Black Americans were "freed", they still were subject to economic exploitation and political disenfranchisement. This was accomplished by the racist/capitalist state through, but not limited to, Black Codes, convict lease, peonage, Jim Crow laws as well as institutional racism. The rate of exploitation was higher for black workers than white workers, allowing capitalists to accrue higher profits from black workers than their white counter-parts. This discrepancy still occurs today, according to State of Workign America, "For every dollar of whites’ income, minorities receive only 56 cents. For every dollar of networth that whites control, minorities control only 27 cents."

A Call for Reparations

The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America(NCOBRA) views reparations as a "process of repairing, healing and restoring a people injured because of their group identity and in violation of their fundamental human rights by governments or corporations. Those groups that have been injured have the right to obtain from the government or corporation responsible for the injuries that which they need to repair and heal themselves. In addition to being a demand for justice, it is a principle of international human rights law. As a remedy, it is similar to the remedy for damages in domestic law that holds a person responsible for injuries suffered by another when the infliction of the injury violates domestic law". Economist Larry Neal, estimates that unpaid net wages to blacks before emancipation amount to $1.4 trillion today. While, University of California at Berkeley calculated the gains of whites from labor market discrimination from 1929 to 1969 to total $1.6 trillion. In total, there are estimates that blacks are owed up to 10 trillion by the US government. Yet, through all of NCOBRA's legal routes and tribunals , blacks have yet to receive any compensation. Nor, is it for certain that the government ever will.

Revolution is the Solution

There is a direct correlation between the development of capitalism and the underdevelopment of Black America. The exploitation of blacks if the motor for the United States rapid accumulation of capital. The high rate of exploitation, combined with the expropriation of surplus value from black labor is not only the cause of America's vast amount of wealth, but also the reason why that wealth is disproportionately allocated. Therefore, it is in the best interest of the capitalist class to continue to accumulate profit through division of labor according to race. The legal route for reparations and the development of Black America is a dead end. The only solution is a socialist revolution.

In that sense, reparations for Africans and indigenous people must be included on the socialist agenda. The only way compensation and development will be achieved is through the destruction of the vary economic system and state apparatus that is the cause of the underdevelopment of Black America. One of the first tasks of a socialist society would not only to meet the basic needs of the people, but to develop historically oppressed communities. The socialist society will give preference to developing these areas not to recreate inequality, but to raise the standards of life for everyone in society. This task cannot be completed in a capitalist society, but only a post-revolutionary socialist one.

Cheers.

"Four hundred years the white man has had his foot-long knife in the black man's back - and now the white man starts to wiggle the knife out, maybe six inches! The black man's supposed to be grateful? Why, if the white man jerked the knife out, it's still going to leave a scar!"
-Malcolm X

Fallen Soldiers Friday: Mao Tse Tung

Every Friday I will post a biography of an honored hero in the revolutionary struggle. Some will be well-known freedom fighters like Sojourner Truth or James Baldwin, others, so not well known. Because not all believed in the same strategy to achieve liberation, we will see a conflict of ideas. Something that we can draw upon to construct our views today.

Mao Tse Tung (1893 – 1976)

The son of a peasant farmer, Mao Tse-tung was born in the village of Shao Shan, Hunan province in China. At age 27, Mao attended the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai, in July 1921. Two years later he was elected to the Central Committee of the party at the Third Congress.

From 1931 to 1934, Mao helped established the Chinese Soviet Republic in SE China, and was elected as the chairman.

Starting in October 1934, "The Long March" began – a retreat from the SE to NW China. In 1937, Japan opened a full war of aggression against China, which gave the Chinese Communist Party cause to unite with the nationalist forces of the Kuomintang. After defeating the Japanese, in an ensuing civil war the Communists defeated the Kuomintang, and established the People’s Republic of China, in October 1949.

Mao served as Chairman of the Chinese People’s Republic until after the failure of the Great Leap Forward, in 1959. Still chariman of the Communist Party, in May 1966 Mao initiated the Cultural Revolution with a directive denouncing "people like Khrushchev nestling beside us." In August 1966, Mao wrote a big poster entitled "Bombard the Headquarters."

Served as Party chairman until his death in 1976.

Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung

We should be modest and prudent, guard against arrogance and rashness, and serve the Chinese people heart and soul....

"China's Two Possible Destinies" (April 23, 1945), Selected Works, Vol. III p. 253.

All our cadres, whatever their rank, are servants of the people, and whatever we do is to serve the people. How then can we be reluctant to discard any of our bad traits?

"The Tasks for 1945" (December 15, 1944).

Our duty is to hold ourselves responsible to the people. Every word, every act and every policy must conform to the people's interests, and if mistakes occur, they must be corrected - that is what being responsible to the people means.

"The Situation and Our Policy After the Victory in the War of Resistance Against Japan" (August 13, 1945), Selected Works, Vol. IV, p. 16.

In order to build a great socialist society it is of the utmost importance to arouse the broad masses of women to join in productive activity. Men and women must receive equal pay for equal work in production. Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole.

Introductory note to "Women Have Gone to the Labour Front" (1955), The Socialist Upsurge in China's Countryside, Chinese ed., Vol. I.

Fallen Soldiers Friday: Frantz Fanon

Every Friday I will post a biography of an honored hero in the revolutionary struggle. Some will be well-known freedom fighters like George Jackson or Kwame Ture, others, so not well known. Because not all believed in the same strategy to achieve liberation, we will see a conflict of ideas. Something that we can draw upon to construct our views today.

His revolutionary ambitions cut short by leukemia in 1961, psychoanalyst and philosopher Frantz Fanon had by the time of his death amassed a body of critical work that today establishes his position as a leading theoretician of (among other issues) black consciousness and identity, nationalism and its failings, colonial rule and the inherently "violent" task of decolonization, language as an index of power, miscegenation, and the objectification of the performative black body. Fanon's burgeoning popularity and influence on more recent post-colonial readings of black liberation and nationalism perhaps serve as an index of his centrality to the movement for Algierian self-determination in the 1950's that shaped (and, in turn, was shaped by) his diverse career as a political activist and critic. Born on the island of Martinique in 1925, Fanon fought with the allied forces against Nazi Germany in Europe during the second World War and afterwards studied psychiatry in France, where he published his first book, Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks). While practicing medicine in Antilles in northern Africa during the French-Algerian war, Fanon actively supported and organized a resistance to French colonialism by authoring two books outlining an insurgent Third World uprising: L'An V de la revolution algerienne (A Dying colonialism or Year Five of the Algerian Revolution), and Les Damnes de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth).



"They are hungry: and the police officers, though they are now Africans, do not serve to reassure them particularly. The masses begin to sulk; they turn away from this nation in which they have been given no place and begin to lose interest in it."

Frantz Fanon
The Wretched of the Earth
pg. 169

Fallen Soldiers Friday: Patrice Lumumba

Every Friday I will post a biography of an honored hero in the revolutionary struggle. Some will be well-known freedom fighters like VI Lenin or Emma Goldstein, others, so not well known. Because not all believed in the same strategy to achieve liberation, we will see a conflict of ideas. Something that we can draw upon to construct our views today.

Today, I will be posting link to the documentary,
To remember Cuba! Africa! Revolution!. It is mainly about Cuba's support for Africa's revolutions and pays close attention to such African Freedom Fighters as Patrice Lumumba.

Synopsis:

The previously untold story of Cuba's support for African revolutions. This documentary unravels the story of the so-called Cold War, ... all » through the prism of its least known arena: Africa. Against colonialism, capitalism, and communism, the newly independent nations attempted for the first time to gain real control of their own countries. From Che Guevara's military campaign to avenge Lumumba in the Congo, up to the fall of apartheid in South Africa, 300,000 Cubans fought alongside African revolutionaries.

Patrice Lumumba was an African anti-colonial leader, and the first legally elected Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, after he assisted it achieve independence from Belgium in June 1960. Only ten weeks later, Lumumba's government was deposed in a coup. He was subsequently imprisoned and assassinated. President Colonel Mobutu, the key figure in the coup, supported by the Congo's former colonial power, Belgium, and the CIA, became the Congo's ruler. Cuba shared Africa's revolutionary quest for independence.

Fidel Castro decided that Cuba could not stand idly by, so he sent Che Guevara to Africa to assess how they could aid local liberation movements. In 1965, Guevara went to the Congo in an attempt to spark a revolution against the pro-Western regime, which had emerged after the assassination of Lumumba. The problem was, Guevara was without formal military training, and was up against the Congolese, who were aided by US Army Special Forces. So he returned to Cuba and recruited 120 soldiers, taking them back to the Congo. Still, Guevara's army was no match, and they eventually withdrew in August, 1965.

From the tragicomic epic of Che Guevara in Congo, to the triumph at the battle of Cuito Carnavale in Angola, Cuba: An African Odyssey attempts to understand the world today through the saga of these internationalists who won every battle, but finally lost the war.

Part 1:
Click Here To View

Part 2:
Click Here to View

Workers Self-Management in Action!

I posted this old article as an example of worker's self-management in action. It is a case in which 300 odd workers of the largest ceramic floor-tile factory in Argentina had expropriated the means of production and created a democratic workplace.

"The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the workers themselves." Flora Tristan, 1843.

March 18, 2004

Zanon, Argentina

By Marie Trigona

At the break of dawn on a frigid winter day the workers of Zanon, a ceramics factory under worker control, file into the plant for the day's first shift (6am to 1pm). They greet the men in charge of security at the plant's entrance and punch in to the time clock.

Since March, 2002 the factory has been producing without an owner, bosses or foremen. The factory sits among the red earth and rolling hills of the Southern Neuquén province in Argentina and is the largest factory in the region. After a long-standing conflict with the owners for back pay, sudden closure of the factory and firings in the fall of 2001, Zanon's workers occupied the factory and set an example of resistance against capitalism for workers all over the world that workers can produce even better under self-organization/management.

"It was a decision to stay here and struggle or go home, I could have gone home but I decided to stay here in the factory and struggle. I learned to defend my 15 years of work here in the factory and fight," forcefully expressed Rosa Rivera, one of the 15 women among the 300 employed by the factory.

"The owners never paid taxes, during the epoch of former President Raul Menem they were given millions of dollars in subsidies, the exploitation of the workers was extremely high and the company were stealing Mapuche land for raw resources for the ceramics factory."

When corporate welfare ran dry due to the Argentina's economic collapse in 2001, Zanon's owners decided to close its doors and fire the workers without paying months of back pay or indemnity. October, 2001, of the 331 original workers, 266 decided to continue to come to the factory to work to continue in their job posts. For four months workers camped outside the factory, pamphleteering and partially blocking a highway leading to the capital city Neuquén.

During this time, the events Argentina's popular rebellion December 19 and 20, 2001 and the brief post-rebellion upsurge of other factory occupations and organizing among the popular assemblies and unemployed workers organizations also influenced the decision to begin working under worker control.

"When we re-entered the factory we began selling the materials produce on a small-scale level, when those ran out, we asked ourselves what do we do-fight for an unemployment subsidy of 150 pesos [about 50 US dollars] or put the factory to work?," explains Fransisco Mollinas.

In March, 2002 the workers of Zanon reentered the factory and began to produce. "This is a battle against individualism, against everything that those above impose upon us. Here inside the factory we are fighting for a new human being."

As soon as the workers began to produce without an owner or boss, relationships inside the factory were re-invented, breaking with hierarchical organization, isolation and exploitation. Workers describe the company's practices of controlling the workers-one example is that workers had to wear a uniform of a certain color, to identify which sector a worker belonged to and it was prohibited to speak with a worker from a different sector.

On the wall in the factory's offices hangs a ceramic tile with an image of a young man, Daniel, with an inscription remembering him as a fellow comrade who died in the factory. Production inside the factory was set to maximize the company's profits, reducing salaries to the minimum possible level, cutting corners on worker safety measures and pressuring workers to produce at higher levels making it possible to have less workers on the production line.

These conditions previous to the workers' occupation led to an average of 25-30 accidents per month and one fatality per year. In the years of Zanon's production, 14 workers died inside the factory. Since Zanon's occupation by its workers not one accident inside the factory has occurred. "With the owner, you worry and are pressured. Without him you work better, you take on more responsibility with consciousness," one worker comments.

The factory is now organized practicing the ideal of horizontalism, direct democracy and autonomy. Everything is decided in an assembly, there is no hierarchical personnel or administration. Each sector such as the production line, sales, production planning, press, etc, has a commission which votes in a coordinator. The coordinator of the sector informs on issues, news and conflicts within his or her sector to the delegate's table. The coordinator then reports back to his or her commission news from other sectors.

Today, Zanon employs over 300 workers and continues to plan to hire more workers. Since the factory's occupation over 70 workers have been hired. The workers' assembly decided that it is necessary to take on workers from the unemployed workers organizations. Most new workers participate in the MTD (Unemployed Workers Movement). Each worker receives 800-pesos a month salary, which was based on the cost of basic "canasta familiar" or family needs.

The factory that spans for blocks has 18 production lines, while only three are currently functioning. Meanwhile, the factory is only producing 12-15% of its capacity, with lowered levels of exploitation (workers working less hours, higher salaries) they have been able to hire new workers.

One of the keys to Zanon's success has been the insertion of the workers' struggle into the community. At the factory's entrance, workers have constructed a mural made of broken ceramics. The mural tells of the history of the struggle inside Zanon. It begins with men and women around a large pot cooking above a fire.

During the months outside the factory, neighbors, students and workers from piquetero movement demonstrated solidarity-giving funds and groceries for the workers campaign. The prisoners from the jail behind the factory donated their food rations to the workers. Social organizations such as Mothers of Plaza de Mayo have acted in solidarity, some of the women are 70-years old, have declared that they to will defend the factory with their lives.

Zanon's self-defense and security scheme is the back bone of the factory. The government's response to Zanon has been violent, using different tactics to evict the factory. The government has tried to evict the factory five times with police operatives.

Each time thousands of community members came to defend the factory. When there is the threat of eviction, everyone leaves their job posts and assumes the role of security-unemployed workers organizations with self-defense lines outside the factory, while the workers go to the roof-top to take on self-defense measures like using the sling-shot.

Prison number 11 sits right behind the factory. One night, we accompanied the workers in charge of night security on their nightly rounds around the factory we near the prison. About 20 meters away we hear "clack-clack", a prisoner guard loading his rifle while we pass by.

The factory has developed particular measures to ensure that infiltrators do not enter the factory. Each worker must punch into the time clock-not to punish him or her for arriving late but to keep track of who is inside the factory. Before the plant's security was used to guard against workers stealing equipment. Today, workers in security make sure each worker coming to work brought his or her sling-shot to work.

On November 25, 2003 workers from Zanon and unemployed workers organizations in Nuequén protested a debit card for the unemployed (rather than receiving the 150-unemployement welfare to work subsidy in cash the government now wants the jobless to use the bank card, forcing them to only be able to take out a minimum amount in cash from the banks and having to purchase defined goods in 'commercial networks' which are to be transnational supermarkets).

The protests ended with violent state repression. There were over 22 injured - 10 from lead bullet wounds. Andrés from MTD and worker of occupied ceramics factory Zanon was injured with over 64 impacts from rubber bullets. He was held for over 8 hours by police without medical attention while he was tortured. He lost his left eye.

On December 2, 2003 seven hooded men entered the factory armed and stole 32,000-pesos. This was also after organizations in Nuequén were brutally repressed in November and workers and activists with MTD were continuously threatened in their homes. "We see this as a way to pressure those of us who are struggling for a more just society," published the workers in a press release after the infiltrators made off with the money.

The government is also using cooperatives to co-opt the factories under worker control. Other than Zanon, there is only one business, Tigre supermarket in Rosario that has refused cooperatization. "The government is co-opting the movement through different methods. The state offers cooperatives but you have to stop struggling," explains Raul Godoy, worker at Zanon.

The workers of Brukman, suit factory in Buenos Aires that was evicted on April 18, 2003, have reentered the factory recently but under cooperatization. They now have only two years to buy the machinery and building under the agreement that the government offered. Since the Brukman eviction, the political Left has been criticized for its damaging intervention in the conflict (convincing the workers that self-defense tactics were not necessary during the workers 16-month occupation of the factory and during the attempt to re-enter the factory after the eviction). The factory ! now has private security company, a shameful reminder of what the factory once symbolized.

Rosa Rivera, worker at Zanon for 15 years explains that Zanon is not only a struggle for the 300 workers inside the factory but a struggle for the community and social revolution. "If factories are shut down and abandoned, workers have the right to occupy it, put it to work and defend it with their lives."

In the shambles of Argentina's highly divided movements, Zanon continues as one of the most dynamic expressions of resistance against capitalism. The social process inside the factory has brought inspiration to break with the patrón (boss) for other workers occupying factories and for the working-class all over the world.

Marie Trigona is an independent journalist and activist based in Argentina. She participates in Grupo Alavío, video and direct action collective. She can be reached at mtrigona@riseup.net

http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2004-03/18trigona.cfm

Fallen Soldiers Fridays: Che Guevara

Every Friday I will post a biography of an honored hero in the revolutionary struggle. Some will be well-known freedom fighters like Malcolm X or Mao Tse Tsung, others, so not well known. Because not all believed in the same strategy to achieve liberation, we will see a conflict of ideas. Something that we can draw upon to construct our views today.

Guevara, Che (1928-1967)

Argentinian doctor; joined Castro in Mexico in 1954; a leader of the 1956-59 Cuban Revolution. Che served as president of Cuba's national bank and as Cuba's minister of industry in the period immediately following the Cuban Revolution.

Towards the end of his formal affiliation with the Cuban government, Che came to implicitly criticize Soviet bureacracy. His positions put him at odds with the party line of the Cuban CP. In 1965, Che realized that the defence of the Cuban revolution and the creation of revolutions abroad were naturally not always in sync, and this ultimately led to his resignation and his return to revolutionary work abroad.

During Che's subsequent revolutionary campaigns, he wrote his Message to the Tricontinental (1967) in which he openly criticized the Soviet Union; claiming that the Northern hemisphere of the world, both the Soviet Union and the US, exploited the Southern hemisphere of the world. He strongly supported the Vietnamese Revolution, and urged his comrades in South America to create "many vietnams".

In 1965 Che left Cuba to set up guerrilla forces first in the Congo and then later in Bolivia, where he was ultimately captured and killed in October 1967. Accounts of his execution have varied over the years, but many contemprary accounts indicate some degree of collaboration between Bolivia's government troops and the United States CIA.

Guevara developed a theory of primacy of military struggle, in particular concept of guerilla foquismo. Many of Che's theories regarding guerilla tactics are articulated in his 1961 work "Guerilla Warfare."

Further Reading: Che Guevara Archive

Fred Hampton's Assassination

Here is a short program done on the life and assassination of Brother Fred Hampton. A more indepth look into the life and circumstances around his death can be found in the documentary The Murder of Fred Hampton.

Fred Hampton: Life and Death

Fred Hampton


Born August 30, 1948
Chicago, Illinois
Died December 4, 1969
Chicago, Illinois
Fred Hampton (August 30, 1948 – December 4, 1969) was a radical African American activist and deputy chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. He was killed in his apartment by tactical unit of the Cook County, Illinois State's Attorney's Office (SAO), in conjunction with the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Many activists consider his killing to have been extrajudicial punishment.


Youth

Hampton was born on August 30, 1948, in Chicago, Illinois and grew up in Maywood, a suburb to the west of the city. His parents had moved north from Louisiana, and both worked at the Argo Starch Company. As a youth, Hampton was gifted both in the classroom and on the athletic field, graduating from high school with honors in 1966.

Following his graduation, Hampton enrolled at Triton Junior College in nearby River Grove, Illinois, majoring in pre-law. He also became active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), assuming leadership of the Youth Council of the organization's West Suburban Branch. In his capacity as an NAACP youth organizer, Hampton began to show signs of his natural leadership abilities; from a community of 27,000, he was able to muster a youth group 500-members strong. He worked to get more and better recreational facilities established in the neighborhoods, and to improve educational resources for Maywood's impoverished black community. Through his involvement with the NAACP, Hampton hoped to achieve social change through nonviolent activism and community organizing

Chicago

At about the same time that Hampton was successfully organizing young African Americans for the NAACP, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense started rising to national prominence. Hampton was quickly attracted to the Black Panthers' approach, which was based on a ten-point program of a mix of black self-determination and certain elements of Maoism. Hampton joined the Party and relocated to downtown Chicago, and in November of 1968 he joined the Party's nascent Illinois chapter — founded by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organizer Bob Brown in late 1967.

Over the next year, Hampton and his associates made a number of significant achievements in Chicago. Perhaps his most important accomplishment was his brokering of a nonaggression pact between Chicago's most powerful street gangs. Emphasizing that racial and ethnic conflict between gangs would only keep its members entrenched in poverty, Hampton strove to forge a class-conscious, multi-racial (albeit tenuous) alliance between the BPP, Students for a Democratic Society, the Blackstone Rangers, the Young Lords, and the Young Patriots. In May of 1969, Hampton called a press conference to announce that a truce had been declared among this "rainbow coalition," a phrase coined by Hampton and made popular over the years by Rev. Jesse Jackson, who eventually appropriated the name in forming his own unrelated coalition, Rainbow PUSH.

Hampton's organizing skills, substantial oratorical gifts, and personal charisma allowed him to rise quickly in the Black Panthers. Once he became leader of the Chicago chapter, he organized weekly rallies, worked closely with the BPP's local People's Clinic, taught political education classes every morning at 6am, and launched a project for community supervision of the police. Hampton was also instrumental in the BPP's Free Breakfast Program. When Brown left the Party with Stokely Carmichael in the FBI-fomented SNCC/Panther split, Hampton assumed chairmanship of the Illinois state BPP, automatically making him a national BPP deputy chairman. As the Panther leadership across the country began to be decimated by the impact of the FBI's COINTELPRO, Hampton's prominence in the national hierarchy increased rapidly and dramatically. Eventually, Hampton was in line to be appointed to the Party's Central Committee's Chief of Staff. He would have achieved this position had it not been for his untimely death on the morning of December 4, 1969.


The FBI

While Hampton impressed many of the people with whom he came into contact as an effective leader and talented communicator, those very qualities marked him as a major threat in the eyes of the FBI. It began keeping close tabs on his activities. Subsequent investigations have shown that FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover was determined to prevent the formation of a cohesive Black radical movement in the United States. Hoover saw the Panthers, and radical ethnic nationalist coalitions like that forged by Hampton in Chicago, as a frightening stepping stone toward the creation of just such a revolutionary body that could, in its strength, potentially overthrow the government of the United States.

The FBI opened a file on Hampton in 1967 that over the next two years expanded to twelve volumes and over four thousand pages. A wire tap was placed on Hampton's mother's phone in February of 1968. By May of that year, Hampton's name was placed on the "Agitator Index" and he would be designated a "key militant leader for Bureau reporting purposes."

In late 1968, the Racial Matters squad of the FBI's Chicago field office brought in an individual named William O'Neal, who had recently been arrested twice, for interstate car theft and impersonating a federal officer. In exchange for dropping the felony charges and a monthly stipend, O'Neal apparently agreed to infiltrate the BPP as a counterintelligence operative. He joined the Party and quickly rose in the organization, becoming Director of Chapter security and Hampton's bodyguard.

By means of anonymous letters, the FBI sowed distrust and eventually instigated a split between the Panthers and the Rangers, with O'Neal himself instigating an armed clash between the two on April 2, 1969. The Panthers became effectively isolated from their powerbase in the ghetto, so the FBI went to work to undermine its ties with other radical organizations. O'Neal was instructed to "create a rift" between the Party and SDS, whose Chicago headquarters was only blocks from that of the Panthers. The Bureau released a batch of racist cartoons in the Panthers' name, aimed at alienating white activists, and launched a disinformation program to forestall the realization of the "Rainbow Coalition." In repeated directives, J. Edgar Hoover demanded that the COINTELPRO personnel "destroy what the [BPP] stands for" and "eradicate its 'serve the people' programs".

The local Chicago police did not stand idly by. It helped the FBI by launching an all-out assault on the Black Panthers and their allies, characterizing the group as just a criminal gang. The CPD instigated an unprovoked armed confrontation with party members on July 16, which left one member mortally wounded and six others arrested on serious charges. On July 31, the CPD raided and ransacked the Monroe Street office, smashing typewriters, destroying food and medical supplies for the Panther health clinic and breakfast program, setting several small fires, and beating and arresting a number of Panthers for obstruction. A similar raid took place on October 31.

On May 26, 1969, Hampton was successfully prosecuted in a dubious case related to a theft in 1967 of $72 worth of ice cream in Maywood. He was sentenced to two to five years, but he managed to obtain an appeal bond and was released in August.

In early October, Hampton and his girlfriend, Deborah Johnson, pregnant with their first child (Fred Hampton, Jr.), rented a four-and-a-half room apartment on 2337 West Monroe Street to be closer to BPP headquarters. O'Neal reported to his superiors that much of the Panthers' "provocative" stockpile of arms was being stored there. In early November, Hampton travelled to California on a speaking engagement to the UCLA Law Students Association. While there, he met with the remaining BPP national hierarchy, who appointed him to the Party's Central Committee. Shortly thereafter he was to assume the position of Chief of Staff and major spokesman. This, combined with the Chicago BPP chapter having become one of the strongest in the country, with one of the most successful Serve the People programs, motivated the FBI to look for a more permanent way of neutralizing Hampton.



The raid

In mid-November 1969, O'Neal provided the FBI with detailed information of Hampton's apartment, including the location of furniture and the bed in which Hampton and his girlfriend slept. An augmented, fourteen-man team of the SAO -- Special Prosecutions Unit -- was organized for a pre-dawn raid armed with an illegal weapons warrant. On the evening of December 3, Hampton taught a political education course at a local church, which was attended by most members. Afterwards, as was typical, several Panthers retired to the Monroe Street apartment to spend the night, including Hampton and Deborah Johnson, Blair Anderson, Doc Satchell, Harold Bell, Verlina Brewer, Louis Truelock, Brenda Harris, and Mark Clark. Upon arrival, they were met by O'Neal, who had prepared a late dinner which was consumed by the group around midnight. O'Neal left at this point, and, at about 1:30 a.m., Hampton fell asleep in mid-sentence talking to his mother on the telephone. (The Kool Aid was subsequently thought to have been laced with the powerful barbiturate, secobarbitol.)

At 4:00 a.m., the heavily armed police team arrived at the site, dividing into two teams, eight for the front of the building and six for the rear. At 4:45, they stormed in the apartment. Mark Clark, asleep in a front room with a shotgun in his lap, was killed instantly, despite firing off a single round — the only shot the Panthers fired. The automatic gunfire converged at the head of the bedroom where Hampton slept. Two officers found him wounded in the shoulder, and Harold Bell reported hearing the following exchange:

"That's Fred Hampton."
"Is he dead?... Bring him out."
"He's barely alive; he'll make it."
Two shots were heard, which it was later discovered were fired point blank in Hampton's head. According to Deborah Johnson, one officer then said:

"He's good and dead now."

Hampton's body was dragged into the doorway of the bedroom and left in a pool of blood. The raiders then directed their gunfire towards the remaining Panthers, who were hiding in another bedroom. They were wounded, then beaten and dragged into the street, where they were arrested on charges of aggravated assault and the attempted murder of their assailants. They were held on US$100,000 bail apiece.


Aftermath

At a press conference the next day, the police announced the arrest team had been attacked by the "violent" and "extremely vicious" Panthers and had defended themselves accordingly. In a second press conference on December 8, the assault team was praised for their "remarkable restraint," "bravery," and "professional discipline" in not killing all the Panthers present. Photographic evidence was presented of bullet holes made by shots fired by the Panthers, but this was soon challenged by reporters. An internal investigation was undertaken; the assault team was exonerated of any wrongdoing. But investigators themselves later admitted it was a "whitewash". A day or two after the raid, the Chicago Police returned to the scene, and in a widely televised event, tore down the inside walls of the Black Panther home. Some believe this was done to destroy the ballistic evidence that could have incriminated the police. It took years of incessant public pressure to expose the truth; eventually it was proven that all but one of the ninety-nine shots were fired by the police.

Hampton's funeral was attended by 5,000 people, and he was eulogized by such black leaders as Jesse Jackson and Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King's successor as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In his eulogy, Jackson noted that "when Fred was shot in Chicago, black people in particular, and decent people in general, bled everywhere."

Although the officers involved in the raid were cleared by a grand jury of any crimes, a subsequent investigation definitively declared the officers were guilty of murdering the Black Panthers without justification or provocation. The families of Hampton and Clark filed a $47.7 million civil suit against the city, state, and federal governments. More than a decade later, the suit was finally settled, and the two families each received an undisclosed sum. In 1990, the Chicago City Council passed a resolution declaring "Fred Hampton Day" in honor of the slain leader.

The Chicago City Council unanimously approved a resolution introduced by former Alderwoman Marlene C. Carter commemorating Dec. 4, 2004, as "Fred Hampton Day in Chicago." The resolution read in part: "Fred Hampton, who was only 21 years old, made his mark in Chicago history not so much by his death as by the heroic efforts of his life and by his goals of empowering the most oppressed sector of Chicago's Black community, bringing people into political life through participation in their own freedom fighting organization."

Fallen Soldiers Fridays: Marcus Garvey

Every Friday I will post a biography of an honored hero in the revolutionary struggle. Some will be well-known freedom fighters like Huey P Newton or Che Guevera, others, so not well known. Because not all believed in the same strategy to achieve liberation, we will see a conflict of ideas. Something that we can draw upon to construct our views today.

Marcus Mosiah Garvey

"Up! You mighty race, you can accomplish what you will."
--Marcus Mosiah Garvey

Marcus Mosiah Garvey, one of the greatest leaders African people have produced, was born August 17, 1887 in St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica, and spent his entire life in the service of his people--African people. He was bold; he was uncompromising and he was one of the most powerful orators on record. He could literally bring his audiences to a state of mass hysteria. Garvey emphasized racial pride. His goal was nothing less that the total and complete redemption and liberation of African people around the planet. His dream was the galvanization of Black people into an unrelenting steamroller that could never be defeated. I consider myself, along with many others, as one of Garvey's children.

As a young man of fourteen, Garvey left school and worked as a printer's apprentice. He participated in Jamaica's earliest nationalist organizations, traveled throughout Central America, and spent time in London, England, where he worked with the Sudanese-Egyptian nationalist Duse Mohamed Ali. In 1916 Garvey was invited by Booker T. Washington to come to the United States in the hopes of establishing an industrial training school, but arrived just after Washington died. In March 1916, shortly after landing in America, Garvey embarked upon an extended period of travel. When he finally settled down, he organized a chapter of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League. The UNIA & ACL had been formed in Jamaica in 1914. Its motto was "One God, One Aim, One Destiny," and pledged itself to the redemption of Africa and the uplift of Black people everywhere. It aimed at race pride, self-reliance and economic independence.

Within a few years Garvey had become the best-known and most dynamic African leader in the Western Hemisphere and perhaps the entire world. In 1919 Mr. Garvey created an international shipping company called the Black Star Line. By 1920 the UNIA had hundreds of divisions. It hosted elaborate international conventions and published a weekly newspaper entitled the Negro World.

No other organization in modern times has had the prestige and the impact as the UNIA & ACL. During the 1920s UNIA divisions existed throughout North, South and Central America, the Caribbean, Africa, Europe and Australia.