Power Anywhere Where There's People
Channel: The Other Dimensions
Date: 2020-06-09

This is an edited recording of Michael B Jordan's reading of a speech delivered by Fred Hampton, a black socialist who was murdered by the FBI. 

I'm including the transcript below for easy copying.



Power anywhere where there’s people
Power anywhere where there’s people
A lot of people get the word revolution mixed up and they think revolutions a bad word. Revolution is nothing but like having a sore on your body and then you put something on that sore to cure that infection. And I'm telling you that were living in an infectious society right now. I'm telling you that were living in a sick society. And anybody that endorses integrating into this sick society before its cleaned up is a man who's committing a crime against the people. 
And what were saying is simply that leaders have got to become, we've got to start making them accountable for what they do. 
I'm saying that any program that's brought into our community should be analyzed by the people of that community. It should be analyzed to see that it meets the relevant needs of that community. 

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. 

We ain't gonna fight no reactionary pigs who run up and down the street being reactionary; we're gonna organize and dedicate ourselves to revolutionary political power and teach ourselves the specific needs of resisting the power structure, arm ourselves, and we're gonna fight reactionary pigs with INTERNATIONAL PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION. That's what it has to be. The people have to have the power: it belongs to the people. 

Now, what do WE do? We say that the Breakfast For Children program is a socialistic program. It teaches the people basically that by practice, we thought up and let them practice that theory and inspect that theory. What's more important? You learn something just like everybody else.

Martin Luther King said that it might look dark sometime, and it might look dark over here on the North Side. But we’re not afraid of the dark. He said that the arm of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards heaven. 

We got Huey P. Newton in jail, and Eldridge Cleaver underground. And Alprentice Bunchy Carter has been murdered; Bobby Hutton and John Huggins been murdered. And a lot of people think that the Black Panther Party in a sense is giving up. But let us say this: That we've made the kind of commitment to the people that hardly no one else has ever made. 

We have decided that although some of us come from what some of you would call petty-bourgeois families, though some of us could be in a sense what you call from the mountaintop. We could be integrated into the society working with people that we may have never had a chance to work with. Maybe we could be on the mountaintop and maybe we wouldn't have to be hiding when we go to places like this when we speak. Maybe we wouldn't have to worry about court cases and going to jail and being sick. We say that even though all of those luxuries exist on the mountaintop, we understand that you people and your problems are right here in the valley.

We in the Black Panther Party, because of our dedication and understanding, went into the valley knowing that the people are here in the valley, knowing that our plight is the same plight as the people in the valley, knowing that our enemies are on the mountain, and our friends are in the valley, and even though its nice to be on the mountaintop, we're going to go back to the valley. Because we understand that there's work to be done in the valley, and when we get through with this work in the valley, we going to go to that mountaintop. We're going to the mountaintop because there's a motherfucker on the mountaintop that's playing King, and he's been bullshitting us. And we’ve got to go up on the mountain top not for the purpose of living like he lives, living his life style. That’s not it. We gotta go up on that mountain top to make this motherfucker understand, goddamnit, that we are coming from the valley!