Short Thread:

During the 1968 DNC, white activists descended upon Chicago for the “Days of Rage” and the Chicago Black Panthers told them not to bc Black Chicagoans were the ones who would suffer the consequences. The white activists didn’t listen.

Fred Hampton (Chairman of the Chicago Black Panthers) punched Mark Rudd (a member of the Weather Underground) in the face during a meeting and the white activists still wouldn’t listen.

Fred Hampton was brutally murdered in his sleep by the police the following year. Mark Rudd is still alive. In 2013 I asked Mark why Fred Hampton knocked his ass out. His answer was clear and concise: “we did not listen to the people on the ground because we were racist.”

When Black folks are repeatedly saying do not show the faces of protesters it’s because people’s lives are at stake it’s not an exaggeration. When we tell you that white people who are either agent provocateurs or cops or both are escalating shit it’s not a conspiracy theory.

This history is so long and dark, but if I have learned anything from my time in academia it is that the Mark Rudds of the world can be and often are just as dangerous and racist as the fascist pigs.

I don’t have anything else to say except that today’s freedom fighters must be protected at all costs. In the spirit of Fred Hampton. In the legacy of Assata Shakur.