“Fight Racism with Solidarity”: The Radical Solidarity of Fred Hampton

In popular culture, the American imagination, and no small number of history textbooks, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) remains largely mystified. Or, perhaps it would be better to say, mischaracterized. Cast along with the larger Black Power era in which they were operative and with which are wrongly synonymized as the violent and destructive counterweight to the Civil Rights Movement, the Panthers have been routinely flagged as extremists, provincials, and, in the falsest constructions, “reverse-racists.”

This paper uses the politics of Illinois Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton to suggest a richer angle on the BPP’s vision and impact. Specifically, it explores Hampton’s political ethos through a lens of radical solidarity, and thinks through how radical solidarity as a political framework can help us better understand the history of the Panthers within the revolutionary convulsions of the late 1960s and 1970s.

Shifting focus away from the equally important work that Hampton and his comrades in Chicago did to establish survival programs for the city’s Black residents, I instead explore the solidarities he explored and fostered during his brief time leading the chapter. These include the more well-known alliances that the Panthers had Puerto Rican and white radical organizations in Chicago, but I here move outward to other arenas, as well: to Hampton’s travels to Canada and expressions of solidarity with that nation’s oppressed First Nations people; to his insistences on anti-sexism within his own party; to the ways that solidarity with others across the globe shaped his visions of anti-imperialism; to both the meaning and content of his assertion that “you don’t fight racism with racism. We’re gonna fight racism with solidarity.”