Brian Slattery Photos
On one side of Hotchkiss Street at the intersection of Edgewood Avenue on Wednesday evening, along the side of the bookstore Possible Futures, a DJ on the corner pumped out irresistible grooves while friends greeted one another, browsed books, and snacked on empanadas and mimosas.
On the other side of the street was a cheerful sign that read “Happy 75th Birthday Fred!” with a timeline laid out beneath it. The Fred in question is none other than Fred Hampton, Black Panther Party leader and revolutionary.
Freedom Futures — billed as “free breakfast in the evening with a live DJ, free books and art supplies, exhibition pop-up, community mural, art activities, and roller skating” — was intended to take “a look at history and the work of Fred Hampton & Black Panther Party to imagine futures of freedom and liberation.” Sponsored by Possible Futures, The Black Infinity Collective, and Fair-Side, with community partners Kulturally LIT, Inner-City News, and Every Kinda Lady. The event was a panoply of words, music, food, and activites, none of which ever lost sight of the reason for the festivities, to celebrate a revolutionary from a generation ago whose social vision continues to resonate.
Friends gathering inside Possible Futures.
Lauren Anderson of Possible Futures called the event a “community joyfest” and also the culmination of a series of events and poetry workshops the bookstore has held throughout the year focusing on Hampton. “It came up in conversation just how little people know about Fred Hampton — they only know that he was assassinated, if they know that.” He was killed by police in 1969 when he was only 21, “but in those 21 years he accomplished an absolutely incredible amount. Things that most of us won’t accomplish by the end of our days.”
Possible Futures held a workshop every month leading up to Hampton’s 75th birthday on Wednesday, “which is also right around the one-year anniversary of this book space being open,” Anderson said. “This idea of having a place in the community where books are readily accessible is certainly the kind of thing that I think somebody like Fred would have appreciated and valued, as a person who read voraciously, and was about ideas — and making ideas accessible to people, and treating people’s ideas as importantly as things that are written down in books.”
To Anderson, broadening the event to collaborate with Juanita Sunday and 6th Dimension was easy. “We were already going to be collaborating,” she said, “and this one seemed like it totally fit with the idea of what Afrofuturism is about, which is imagining Black folks in the center of the future — in a way that builds on an understanding of ancestral knowledge and historical accomplishment and excellence.”
Regarding Hampton in particular, “it’s really wonderful to imagine his life and legacy in the here and now, and also in the future. What is the future that Fred Hampton would have wanted for all of us? What does the future look like if it’s informed by the spirit and activism of someone like Fred? What would Fred be saying if he was in conversation with people who are here today to talk about what the future could and should look like?”
This sign would later be surrounded by votive candles.
“We just wanted to celebrate Fred Hampton’s legacy in a way that would bring the community together,” said Nyzae James of Bamn Books, who has also been involved with the Fred Hampton workshops and projects with Juanita Sunday of 6th Dimension. Sunday said that Anderson had mentioned wanting to celebrate Hampton’s birthday, which coincided with the Afrofuturist festival she was planning. “It seemed like the perfect time to sync up,” she said. “I just loved the idea of honoring Fred Hampton and the work that he did — honoring liberation and freedom, and thinking about the future.”
That was where Sunday saw the clear connection to Afrofuturism. “A lot of the work he was doing was so ahead of his time,” she said. “How do we keep talking about that work and keep bringing it forward into the present and beyond?”
The work of the Black Panthers and Afrofuturists dovetailed even in the 1960s when the party was active. To Sunday, both had “these grounding principles of solidarity and liberation amongst Black people,” she said. “It’s really all about collective liberation for all of us. We’re not free unless all of us are free.”
In the 1960s, the emphasis on collectivism was linked to Communism — by both the Panthers, who saw parallels between their struggle and Marxist struggles elsewhere as they sought allies outside the United States, and by the FBI, who sought to destroy the party partially on those grounds. Even today, the idea of collectivism, of “sharing resources,” feels “scary” to some, said Sunday, even if it’s something as seemingly unassailable as Fred Hampton’s idea of free breakfast for kids.
James said she has been “heavy on learning and studying liberation movements, which Fred was heavy into. He studied rigorously Communism and all forms of liberation struggles.” With Bamn Books, she has tried to help people along the same path, finding “literature and the tools to study such liberation movements,” to “grasp and pick up what Fred was doing.… How can we keep that going?”
Sunday pointed out that Hampton’s story still isn’t taught in most schools. “That’s why it’s important for all of us to celebrate this day — particularly in New Haven, that has such a rich history with the Black Panther Party.” Even as that history continues to cast a long shadow over the city and is revisited now and again to reexamine its legacy, “it’s so much history that isn’t talked about,” James said.
As advertised, the seriousness of the history was balanced by the event often feeling like a block party, as people gathered in the street, sat with friends at benches and tables, or sometimes danced on the sidewalk.
Hutchings.
An open mic at the end of the evening anchored the event, allowing people to honor Hampton’s legacy by doing what he did so well: speak to an audience, communicate ideas, and be heard. Poet Nzima Hutchings, who had run the previous poetry workshops at Possible Futures, kicked things off by reading a few choice quotes from Hampton himself, as did a few who got up after her: “You have to understand that people have to pay a price for peace. If you dare to struggle, you dare to win”; “So we say — we always say in the Black Panther Party that they can do anything they want to to us. We might not be back. I might be in jail. I might be anywhere. But when I leave, you’ll remember I said, with the last words on my lips, that I am a revolutionary.”
Others got up, without introduction, to speak poetry of their own. They talked about their own struggles and the struggles they saw in others. They talked about the unfairness of capitalism and the need for education and revolution. They spoke of feeling tired and finding strength and resilience. And one after the other, they paid homage to Hampton, hoping he rested in power. By the time it was getting dark on the intersection of Edgewood and Hotchkiss, someone had lit candles underneath the portrait of Hampton on the other side of the street. In front of Possible Futures, the mic was still hot, and voices were still talking.
