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We don’t fight racism with racism
On Thursday, December 4, 1969, at 4:30 am, the Chicago police stormed the apartment of a brilliant and charismatic leader of the Black Panther Party named Fred Hampton, 21.
While he was asleep, a Chicago officer executed him at point-blank range with bullets through his brain.
Before the police conspired with the F.B.I. and the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office to murder Hampton, he previously said,
“I’m not afraid to say I’m at war with the pigs.”
The war against baleful pigs remains.
Today, the term “pigs,” among several uses, is a pejorative term for the police.
But for the Black Panthers, they didn’t narrowly define or confine their slogans and terms.
The phrase, “all power to all the people” meant more than Black people, and similarly, the term “pigs” meant more than the police.
Bobby Seale, a founder of the Black Panther Party, told the Guardian in 1970 that a pig is anyone who systematically violates the constitutional rights of the people — be them monopoly capitalists or the police.
