When the filmmakers of this documentary started it, the subject was Fred Hampton, but it was about his work with the Black Panther movement, the Illinois chapter of which he founded, and how it had been misrepresented in the press. However, as they were drawing close the end of filming, their central figure was shot dead in a hail of bullets by the police, who claimed to be acting in self defence. Therefore the first half of this film details the speeches and community work of Hampton, while the second half illustrates the highly political killing, which to many eyes looked to be murder, of one of the most charismatic young leaders of his era.
It's easy to forget when you're watching Hampton in this that he was what? Twenty, twenty-one years old? He comes across as righteously angry, but articulate, perceptive and knowledgeable beyond his years, although hearing him proclaim a call to arms is the best way forward you can see why he made a lot of people nervous, not only the white, male establishment. You could say he was asking for trouble, except that no one deserved the treatment Hampton received simply for the crime of wanting to make a better world.
This is an obviously low budget documentary, and there's a lack of coherence at times that can be offputting, rendering the work too close to a selection of hectoring with the context tending to fall by the wayside too often. But pay attention and you do reach a sense of what Hampton and his colleagues were trying to achieve: stamp out poverty among their fellows, stop the violence and injustice meted out to them by the law (Hampton suffered a trumped up charge of robbing an ice cream van to get him off the streets for a while), and implement an American socialism.
With that last goal, it's clear that all the Panther's rivals in positions of power saw was encroaching Communism as practiced by the Soviet Union, but Hampton and his comrades were careful to make the distinction: this was power for the people, not the Iron Curtain falling in their neighbourhood. We see the medical programmes and the drive to give free breakfasts to Chicago's poorest black children, both extremely laudable and nothing like the image of dangerous radicals the Panthers had to endure in the media of the day. But it was the politics that were to lead to the clashes with the establishment, in particular the F.B.I.
