Possible Futures Takes Pride In Fred Hampton

The thoughts and deeds of a young fallen revolutionary became fuel for poetic pursuits Monday evening at Possible Futures, the bookstore and meeting place on Edgewood Avenue, as Nyzae James and Nzima Hutchings led a dozen participants through ​“Fred Hampton 101,” a presentation that was part history, part poetry workshop, and all community building.

The workshop opened with Nyzae James, of Bamn Books, offering a brief biography of Fred Hampton. ​“How many people are acquainted with Chairman Fred?” she began. Half of the people in the audience raised their hands. ​“All right, well I’m just here to give you a little bit more information about the man that he was, and his legacy.” Defining him as a revolutionary, James began with his birth in 1948 in Chicago, the youngest of three. Iberia, Fred’s mother, James revealed, used to babysit Emmett Till. Hampton was a ​“promising student, excelling in academics and athletics,” James said. ​“He dreamed of playing center field for the New York Yankees. What a change in occupation,” she added, to laughter.

By the time Hampton was in high school, the ​“natural-born leader” was already an organizer, staging protests over student suspensions and calling for the school to hire more Black teachers and administrators. ​“Taking charge,” James said. He started working with the NAACP. He graduated high school in 1966 with high honors and ​“began vigorously studying socialist struggles,” from Cuba to China to Vietnam. 

He came into an era of turmoil, punctuated by the assassinations of Medgar Evers in 1963 and Malcolm X in 1965. ​“It was crazy times,” James said. ​“The struggle was struggling.” Hampton saw violence at protests he helped organize, and eventually turned to the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. By the time Hampton was involved, the Panthers were already providing their range of social service, education, and self-defense programs. ​“What attracted Fred to the party wasn’t just the cool leather jackets and the brothers and sisters with guns,” James said. ​“It was also their 10-point program,” which outlined an agenda of working toward social and economic empowerment and self-determination. He also met his soon-to-be fiancee. 

As Hampton rose through the ranks, the Panther headquarters in Chicago was vandalized and members harassed by police. Martin Luther King, Jr.‘s assassination in 1968 ​“set the country on fire.” In 1968 Hampton was arrested on suspicion of assaulting an ice-cream truck driver. By then Panther leader Huey P. Newton was in prison on charges of having killed a police officer (the conviction was reversed in 1970) and Bobby Seale was behind bars for comtempt of court (which was also reversed). In 1969 Hampton was back out of prison and founded the Rainbow Coalition, organizing Black, Latino, White, and other groups under the umbrella of class struggle. They were ​“focused on action against poverty, racism, police brutality, and substandard housing,” James. They were ​“shaking their boots.”

“That’s the work that Fred Hampton was doing. That’s what he lived for — until his life was cut short at the age of 21 on December 4 of 1969,” James said, when ​“police officers raided his apartment at the late hour of 4 a.m.” Hampton was killed while asleep, having been by drugged by an FBI informant earlier.

“You’re never a threat when you’re big, bad, and by yourself,” James said. ​“It’s collective thinking and action that shakes the boots of the racist, capitalist infrastructure. They didn’t kill Malcolm because he went to Africa to pray or get a tan, but because of the alliances he was forming abroad. And Dr. King wasn’t a threat because he wanted equal rights and desegregating public places, but for bringing working people together and questioning the environment they were forced to partake in. That’s why education is so important. Never stop reading. Never stop learning. As Frederick Douglass once said, ​‘knowledge makes any man unfit to be a slave.’ ”

James then turned the floor over to author and poet Nzima Hutchings, who picked up where James left off. ​“Yes, he was murdered young,” she said, ​“but his ideals, his perspectives, his beliefs, his movement, was revolutionary.” For her poetry workshop, she would use Hampton’s words and ideas as inspiration. In the next hour, she said, she would lead the group in doing found poetry and acrostic poetry, because ​“here it is, 2023, and we’re still talking about Fred Hampton.”

She then turned to explaining poetry and the many forms it can take, from sonnets to haiku to free verse and dozens of other possibilities. Whatever the form, ​“poetry is a springboard to deeper conversations,” she said. In its shorter forms, ​“it’s like the interlude in music. It’s a snapshot.” For this workshop, it was also a means to explore some of Hampton’s ideas. ​“The Black Panthers emphasized Black pride, community, unification, and civil rights,” she said.

She then read a piece of her own that had a call-and-response element to it. It was a way of modeling what she wanted the workshop participants to do. It was also a way of putting herself on the line, sharing of her own work to encourage others to do the same. And it was warming up everyone’s brains, filling their heads with phrases and getting them to speak.

From there, she moved to using two of Hampton’s quotes as a prompt for poetry. The first: ​“Yes, we do defend our office as we do defend our homes. This is a constitutional right everybody has, and nothing’s funny about that. The only reason they get mad at the Black Panther Party when you do it is for the simple reason that we’re political.” The second: ​“The pigs say, ​‘Well, the Breakfast For Children program is a socialistic program. It’s a communistic program.’”

Using those as prompts, the participants took a few minutes to write their own poems. Some were also to create entire spoken-word pieces. Others kept it short. The room ended up focusing on encouraging a younger student who hadn’t shared her poetry in public. ​“Why are you afraid of breakfast?” her poem began. ​“Why do you hurt us? Why do you pretend our voices don’t exist?” 

“You have something to say,” Hutchings said, focusing on the first line. ​“Your first opening line was a heart punch,” she said. ​“You can march, you can protest, you can say it loud, and that will stop people.… Keep writing.”

With that, others began sharing. Soon the room filled with laughter and applause.

She then proceeded to another poetry exercise, of creating a blackout poem — that is, taking a page from an old book and finding a poem in the text by crossing most of it out. ​“You’re going to black out words that you don’t need to make a poem. The poem is just going to jump out at you. Don’t overthink it. Lightly read it, and catch words, and then it will start to make sense to you. You start connecting words into a thread, into a narrative, from beginning to end.”

She gave everyone a few minutes to work their sheets, and then share the results with the group. Sure enough, the poems ranged wildly in mood and subject matter, filled with hope and despair, with triumphs and failures. It wasn’t explicitly about Fred Hampton’s political ideas anymore. But it was about finding your voice, about learning to speak, and by extension, to speak up.

Hutchings talked a bit more about the general power of words, first to evoke the senses. ​“Close your eyes right now. Can you smell microwaved, buttered popcorn? It’s in your memory. How about the chalkboard scratch? It’s in your mind’s ear. Think of something in your mind’s eye that you can see vividly … can you see Christmas lights, or a turkey? Can you see a little baby inside of a car seat?” But it was also to communicate ideas, which came out in the final poetic exercise of creating acrostics from Fred Hampton’s first name. The participants used words like ​“freedom,” ​“revolutionary,” and ​“dedicated.” Now the words in the room were flowing freely.

Hutchings nodded, satisfied. ​“Use his name,” she said. ​“Think about what he stood for. Keep his name alive.”

A series of events at Possible Futures focused on Fred Hampton continues for the rest of the year. For more events at the bookstore, visit its website.