From the Bullet to the Ballot

The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago

Jakobi Williams

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781469622101, 9780807838167
• eBook ISBN: 9781469608167
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Political Advocacy
• Index: Social Sciences

In this comprehensive history of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party (ILBPP), Chicago native Jakobi Williams demonstrates that the city’s Black Power movement was both a response to and an extension of the city’s civil rights movement. Williams focuses on the life and violent death of Fred Hampton, a charismatic leader who served as president of the NAACP Youth Council and continued to pursue a civil rights agenda when he became chairman of the revolutionary Chicago-based Black Panther Party. Framing the story of Hampton and the ILBPP as a social and political history and using, for the first time, sealed secret police files in Chicago and interviews conducted with often reticent former members of the ILBPP, Williams explores how Hampton helped develop racial coalitions between the ILBPP and other local activists and organizations.
Williams also recounts the history of the original Rainbow Coalition, created in response to Richard J. Daley’s Democratic machine, to show how the Panthers worked to create an antiracist, anticlass coalition to fight urban renewal, political corruption, and police brutality.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Miriam Ma’at-Ka-Re Monges, “‘I Got a Right to the Tree of Life’: Afrocentric Reflections of a Former Community Worker,” in The Black Panther Party Reconsidered, ed. Charles E. Jones (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998), 137.

2. My use of “murder” and “assassination” in this book reflects the consensus and popular understanding of Fred Hampton’s death. See esp. Murder of Fred Hampton (The Film Group, 1971); Jeffrey Haas, The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2009); and Flint Taylor and Dennis Cunningham, “The Assassination of Fred Hampton: 40 Years Later,” Police Misconduct and Civil Rights Law Report 9, no. 12 (November/December 2009).

3. Peniel E. Joseph, “Black Liberation without Apology: Reconceptualizing the Black Power Movement,” Black Scholar 31, no. 3/4, “Black Power Studies: A New Scholarship” (Fall/Winter 2001): 2–19; Peniel E. Joseph, “Dashikis and Democracy: Black Studies, Student Activism, and the Black Power Movement,” Journal of African American History 88, no. 2, “The History of Black Student Activism” (Spring 2003): 182–203; Peniel E. Joseph, “The Black Power Movement, Democracy, and America in the King Years,” American Historical Review 114, no. 4 (October 2009): 1001–16.

4. Clayborne Carson, ed., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Warner Books, 1998); Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Viking, 2011); Komozi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

5. Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Peter B. Levy, “Gloria Richardson and the Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge, Maryland,” in Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America, ed. Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 97–115; Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

6. William Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

7. Theoharis and Woodard, Groundwork; Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, eds., Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles outside the South, 1940–1980 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Dayo Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard, eds., Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

8. Donna Jean Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Matthew Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Dittmer, Local People; Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights; Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom.

9. For a clear understanding of this debate, see Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” Journal of African American History 92, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 265–88. The article won the Organization of American Historians’ EBSCOhost America: History and Life Award for best scholarly article.

10. Gerald Horne, The Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995); Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).

11. Hasan Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York: New York University Press, 2009); Murch, Living for the City; Peniel E. Joseph, ed., Neighborhood Rebels: Black Power at the Local Level (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Judson L. Jeffries, ed., On the Ground: The Black Panther Party in Communities across America (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010); Yohuru Williams and Jama Lazerow, eds., Liberated Territory: Untold Local Perspectives on the Black Panther Party (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).

12. Bridgette Baldwin, “In the Shadow of the Gun: The Black Panther Party, the Ninth Amendment, and Discourses of Self-Defense,” in In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement, ed. Jama Lazerow and Yohuru Williams (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 83; Devin Fergus, “The Black Panther Party in the Disunited States of America: Constitutionalism, Watergate, and the Closing of the Americanists’ Mind,” in Williams and Lazerow, Liberated Territory, 268.

13. Cha-Jua and Lang, “‘Long Movement’ as Vampire,” 274, 278; Yohuru Williams, Black Politics/White Power: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Black Panthers in New Haven (St. James, N.Y.: Brandywine Press, 2000).

14. Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes, 2, 153.

15. Murch, Living for the City, 4–7.

16. Charles E. Jones and Judson L. Jeffries, “‘Don’t Believe the Hype’: Debunking the Panther Mythology,” in Jones, Black Panther Party Reconsidered, 28.

17. Martin R. Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the Unite States and Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party (1852; reprint, Humanity Books, 2004); Marilyn Richardson, ed., Maria W. Stewart: America’s First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); David Walker, Appeal (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1993).

18. Robert Hill, “Racial and Radical: Cyril V. Brig...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• FROM THE BULLET TO THE BALLOT
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• MAPS AND FIGURES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS
• INTRODUCTION
• ONE The Political and Social Climate of Black Chicago, 1900–1970
• TWO The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party
• THREE Chicago and Oakland
• FOUR The Original Rainbow Coalition
• FIVE Law Enforcement Repression and the Assassination of Chairman Fred Hampton
• SIX The Legacy of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX