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• 1 2019-12-08T20:42:24-05:00 Fred Hampton Contingent of the Boston March for Freedom 8 plain 2020-03-17T19:14:02-04:00

  December 1984 - Unnamed student activists use this poster to spread awareness about and encourage participation in, what they call, the Boston March for Freedom. This Boston-area march was actually just a small part of the December 14th National March Against Racism. As the name suggests, this demonstration denounced racism on a broad scale, but the students responsible for disseminating this poster seemed to be more radical than the mainstream movement; hence the name Fred Hampton Contingent. The Fred Hampton Contingent moved beyond a simple denunciation of racism and advertised the end of state violence, specifically using the case of Fred Hampton and the Black Panther Party as an example. They even considered things outside of the U.S. context with their condemnation of Western imperialist involvement in the Third World. 

  One of the subheadings at the top reads: “Defend the Democratic Rights of the Oppressed Nationalities”. The phrase “oppressed nationalities” could seem rather vague, but it is defined below as Black, Latino, Asian, and other people of the Third World that the United States had historically “prevented from exercising their right to arrange their lives as they see fit.” This definition of “oppressed nationalities” is interesting on two fronts. First, it removes the American aspect of identity from people of color in the United States. It seems that the authors of this notice very purposefully didn’t include ‘American’ when naming races (i.e. Black instead of African American), but, more importantly, they grouped everyone equally with the “Third World peoples”. This goes on to speak to the second point: that said definition fosters a cross-national solidarity between all people that have been marginalized and exploited by the West. 

  It is very clear that the Fred Hampton Contingent is very clearly concerned about confronting American racism and, as one would assume, borrows heavily from the Black Panther Party’s approach. One of their small subsections at the bottom is dedicated to a call to “End the Racist Police Terror - Support the Right of the Oppressed Nationalities to Armed Self-Defense.” At the same time, it is also clear that they are thinking critically about systems that uphold white supremacy on an international scale, with one of the subsections being titled “End the Imperialist Oppression of Third World and Working Class people.” The goal of the Contingent is to combat both racism and imperialism. Further, it is interesting to point out that it is quite possible that the Contingent named itself after Fred Hampton because he was a very prominent and activism inspiring figure among Black people at the time. Therefore, the Contingent could attract attention with his name and, of course, support his cause, but also use the opportunity to educate people about larger questions on the oppression of poor Black and brown people everywhere.