Cornel West, Jimmy Dore, and the Inevitability of Fred Hampton Leftism
Cultural nationalism still casts a shadow over revolutionary rainbows
Above: William “Preacherman” Fesperman of the Patriot Party (left) with Chairman Fred Hampton of the Black Panther Party (center)
The recent dust-up between presidential candidate Dr. Cornel West and leading left-wing podcaster Jimmy Dore provides a teachable moment on some major contradictions in revolutionary politics in the United States right now. The argument sheds substantial light on what the model of a “rainbow coalition” vying for national political power is actually based on.
The Rainbow Coalition concept that both West and Dore claim to be upholding comes from Fred Hampton and Bob Lee of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. Hampton was recently celebrated in a hit Hollywood film, so you might think that people now have a good idea of what he was about. But of course, that’s not what elite corporate cultural products are for. They are about distorting—and as many have said, co-opting and recuperating—radical ideas to serve establishment purposes.
Cornel West sees the Rainbow Coalition model as one that brings black organizations together with LGBT+ groups, feminist NGOs, and well-established socialist and environmental organizations. Jimmy Dore sees a successful Rainbow Coalition as based on explicitly working-class groups of various races, with economic and constitutional rights as the central issues. Only one of these visions matches that of Fred Hampton, and it isn’t the one you might expect.
In his recent rhetoric, Dr. West has focused on “white supremacy,” stating that this threat—embodied in Donald Trump—is the primary form of oppression in the country today. Jimmy Dore, however, criticizes that rhetoric as a hollow cliche of “Woke” ideology. There is much controversy about the exact definition of Wokeness, but the best description may be “cultural nationalism in the service of liberalism”—a phrase used by some American Marxists in the 1970s to describe the mainstreaming of black nationalist ideology through television shows such as Roots.
It was the Black Panther Party itself that first attacked cultural nationalism as counter-revolutionary. Modern Woke writers have tried to cast the Panthers’ differences with cultural nationalists as primarily concerning sexism (embodied in the sorts of attitudes associated with modern “HoTeps”) but just as important was their dispute about white supremacy as the central injustice of American society.
When the Black Panther Party (BPP) was first formed in 1966, it was heavily inspired by black power leader Stokely Carmichael (the fiery chairman of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) as well as by the late Malcolm X. In the course of its development, the BPP quickly grew away from black nationalism and towards Marxism in emulation of Malcolm X. In an interview he’d given to members of the Socialist Worker’s Party a month before his death, Malcolm said:
I used to define Black nationalism as the idea that the Black man should control the economy of his community, the politics of his community, and so forth. But when I was in Africa in May, in Ghana, I was speaking with the Algerian ambassador who is extremely militant and is a revolutionary in the true sense of the word (and has his credentials as such for having carried on a successful revolution against oppression in his country). When I told him that my political, social, and economic philosophy was Black nationalism, he asked me very frankly: Well, where did that leave him? Because he was white…he showed me where I was alienating people who were true revolutionaries dedicated to overturning the system of exploitation that exists on this earth by any means necessary.
So I had to do a lot of thinking and reappraising of my definition of Black nationalism. Can we sum up the solution to the problems confronting our people as Black nationalism? And if you notice, I haven’t been using the expression for several months.
As black scholars Floyd W. Hayes and Francis Kiene have noted, “cultural nationalists view White people and racist oppression as the main enemies while socialists see the capitalist class and economic exploitation as the primary antagonists…” In the words of founding Panther Huey P. Newton, “The cultural nationalists…feel that the African culture will automatically bring political freedom. Many times cultural nationalists fall into line as reactionary nationalists.” Newton was converted to Marxism after reading Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, a book that very explicitly rejects idealism—and by extension culture—as a foundation for political action.
Huey P. Newton’s Namesake, and Why It Matters
Newton inherited his focus on economics over culture from his family. The Minister of Defense for the Black Panther Party was named after Huey P. Long, the white populist governor of Louisiana, where Newton was born. Newton’s father admired Long’s re-distributionist policies which saw African-Americans prosper under his administration. With his “good old boy” persona, the governor was no stranger to racist tropes, but this was irrelevant when he also launched “beneficial programs to Blacks: free books in the schools, free commodities for the poor, public road and bridge construction projects that gave Blacks employment.”
The Black Panther Party co-founder had no regrets about his namesake, and understood him the same way his parents did. “While most whites were blinded by Long’s outwardly racist philosophy,” wrote Newton, “many Blacks found their lives significantly improved.” The fact that Long didn’t denounce white supremacy, and was culturally absorbed in it, did not disqualify him as a friend to the black proletariat—a reality that seems shocking in our age of performative anti-racism. What mattered is that the governor consistently backed economic policies that helped working people, which included the majority of African-Americans. Huey P. Newton’s family weren’t moralists, as liberals tend to be. They were materialists, like Karl Marx was.
“Kill-em-All Carmichael”
The BPP were so committed to a class-first position that they were willing to burn bridges with their black power mentors, most notably Stokely Carmichael. This was necessary, as Carmichael became notorious for “oscillations” in his politics. The Panthers had been inspired by the SNCC leader’s associations with socialist governments in the mid-1960s, shattering Red Scare taboos. Carmichael seemed to be focused on capitalism more than white supremacy, telling a Cuban journalist that “We want to economically destroy capitalism because capitalism goes hand in hand with racism and exploitation. Wherever capitalism has gone, those two characteristics are sure to follow.” He added:
We would like white working-class people to struggle with us. Whether they do or do not, it doesn't make any difference; we will struggle. When they finally join the fight, we will welcome them…
But at a BPP rally in 1968, “Stokely spoke and completely contradicted everything he had said during his recent trip to Havana, Hanoi and Europe,” recalled Panther Field Marshal Donald Cox. “He more or less condemned all whites and any working coalitions with them,” He also refused to center economics, and said the problem was “racism first” :
Why is it that black people are rebelling? Do you think it’s because it’s just poor jobs? Don’t believe the junk that honky’s running down. It’s not poor jobs; it’s a question of a people finding their culture…
Communism is not an ideology suited for Black people. Period. Period.
Socialism is not an ideology suited for Black people. Period. Period.
I will tell you why…The ideologies of communism and socialism speaks of class structure…We are not just facing exploitation, we are facing something much more important. We are facing being the victims of racism.
Communism, nor socialism, does not speak to the problem of racism. And racism for Black people in this country is much more important than exploitation…If we were exploited by other Black people, it would be question of how we divide the profits. That is not the question. It is a question of how we regain our humanity and begin to live as a people…We must consciously strive for ideology which deals with racism first.
Donald Cox was Carmichael’s full-time bodyguard through the winter and spring of 1968. He reports that Carmichael privately not only discouraged cooperation with white people, he now saw every single one as his born enemy:
Stokely and I went everywhere: Detroit, St. Louis, Boston, Chicago and many places in between…in the end we had to agree to disagree. I was convinced that any meaningful change in the situation of black people in the US was intertwined with meaningful change for everybody. The present form of racism keeps people with common economic interests at each other’s throats, and I knew one thing for sure: If the American people could be made to realize that everyone is a victim of the present social and economic order, instead of the finger pointing at blacks…there could be effective mobilization and change inside the US. Stokely on the other hand, believed that the only solution was to ‘kill them all.’ The whites had to die. Between us, his nickname became Kill-em-all Carmichael.
Shortly after this, the alliance between SNCC and BPP came to a vituperative end. FBI sabotage and disinformation through the COINTELPRO program played a role in the split, but so did Carmichael’s obsessive identity politics. It is unthinkable that the SNCC leader’s separatism could accommodate what the Illinois chapter of the BPP was incubating in 1968—the original Rainbow Coalition.
Why Was Fred Hampton Murdered?
The man who holds the most credit for establishing the Rainbow Coalition is Fred Hampton. Unlike other leaders associated with black power, Hampton was never a university student or a career criminal lumpenproletariat. He called himself simply “proletariat”, because that was the class of his factory worker parents. His academic career was derailed by the call to become a revolutionary, which he fulfilled first as the chairman of the Chicago Black Panther Party chapter, and then the Illinois chapter.
There is popular fascination with Hampton as a martyr, but little study of him as a thinker. This is bizarre since the two aspects are directly connected. Many revolutionaries were murdered indirectly or spontaneously by the state in the 1960s. Dr. King was killed through shadowy federal proxies; George Jackson died in a desperate prison escape; numerous other Panthers were pushed into mortal feuds by COINTELPRO psychological operations. But Chairman Fred Hampton was the only radical executed by police in his sleep after months of planning by the FBI. The corporate state moved with a uniquely naked aggression towards Hampton because he presented a threat like no other. The threat of creating a multi-racial, militant, working-class uprising.
Stokely Carmichael once proudly said that SNCC was practicing “anti-racist racism,” but Hampton firmly rejected such a position:
When I talk about the masses, I'm talking about the white masses, I'm talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too. We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity.
After the Rainbow Coalition was formed, Fred Hampton’s criticism of Carmichael and anti-whiteness became ruthless:
People talking about the Party co-opted by white folks. That’s what that mini-fascist, Stokely Carmichael said. [He’s] runnin’ around talking about “We gonna love all black people. We have an undying love for all black people.” And you know what? That if Malcolm came back, he’d walk past a million Klansmen to get to Stokely and whoop his motherfuckin’ ass. Because…the man who murdered Malcolm X is a black man.
“Malcolm was standing right like this in a room,” Hampton declared, “where white people weren’t even allowed. You hear me? They wouldn’t allow no white people in there. But Malcolm’s dead.” Malcolm’s lieutenants at the Audubon Ballroom had all been “blacker than black” with Afrocentric names, but their fixation on white attackers left them open to black assassins.
Much of the black left shared the BPP’s antipathy to cultural nationalism. John Watson, a co-founder of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers told an interviewer that “We oppose Stokely. There are a number of different kinds of black nationalists…There are black capitalists, there are black mystics…We take a Marxist-Leninist position…Black men are exploited as a function of the capitalist system as a whole… Racism is a tool which the man uses to carry out his exploitation [and ] we are against a separate state in which a black capitalist class exploits the black proletariat.” Watson also noted that Carmichael’s vaguely stated anti-capitalism was meaningless if he had no real plan to get out of the system (“We are opposed also to all sorts of haphazard analyses which certain revolutionaries talk, even with semi-socialist terms…”) and expressed concern that “Stokely has capitulated to the cultural nationalists.” The fact that tension between Carmichael and black Marxists escalated into physical threats might be attributed to COINTELPRO, but the political disagreement itself was principled and inevitable.
Hampton gave no ground on this: “We say primarily that the priority of this struggle is class…Those that don't admit to that are those that don't want to get involved in a revolution, because they know that as long as they're dealing with a race thing, they'll never be involved in a [social] revolution.” Stokely Carmichael’s life did nothing to disprove this contention. Chatting with The Sunday Times in November 1969 (shortly after he’d married pop singer Miriam Makeba and received an invitation to work for Sekou Toure, the president of Guinea) he seemed to acknowledge that his move from the US was informed by personal concerns about his safety and freedom as much as by his Pan-African ideology. Despite saying in this very interview that he would “take a bullet” for his brothers, Carmichael also insisted, “The revolution is not about dying. It’s about living. There’s no point in me being shut away for 10 or 15 years.” Remarkably, he also admitted not having a vision of revolution in America “I do not know how to begin to cope with the problems…so for me to stay there and to pretend that I do is for me to deceive myself and my people.”
On other occasions, Stokely used a more political frame. According to biographer Peniel Joseph: “He compared his designation of Africa as a power base for blacks to Jews’ love for Israel…Carmichael proceeded to discuss the need for land as a basis for a Pan-African revolution. This need explained why he had moved to Africa, since the prospect of securing an independent land base in America would be impossible.”
The solution of Pan-Africanism could work for Stokely Carmichael, a tall, handsome rhetorical genius who married an international superstar and was adopted as a personal protégé by an African head of state, but it didn’t work for the masses of black proletarians in America. In Fred Hampton’s eyes, they’d have to fight where they are, which means they’d have to fight alongside their white neighbors.
All Power For All People
As important as Hampton was, he didn’t start the Rainbow Coalition alone. He built on the work of Bob Lee and William “Preacherman” Fesperman. Fesperman and the founders of the YPO were migrant white workers from Appalachia who lived in the slums of uptown Chicago. Although firmly leftist, the YPO were held in contempt by the middle-class radicals who dominated the city’s activist scene, and when Illinois Black Panther Bob Lee first encountered them, the Patriots were being dressed down by petit bourgeois white leftists. Faced with a choice between a group of professionals who represented a nominally anti-racist constituency and a working-class group with a largely racist constituency, the Black Panther leader had no difficulty siding with the working-class one.
A contention presented by Jimmy Dore, including in regards to the debate with Cornel West, is that Fred Hampton worked tactically with racists in the Rainbow Coalition. This has drawn much umbrage from modern Anti-Racists, who point to the YPO endorsing black equality in their literature. A complicating factor though, is that modern Anti-Racism, as articulated by its thought leaders like Ibrahim Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates, states that all white people are inherently racist whether they wish to be or not, and all predominantly white organizations are effectively racist organizations. And by that definition, the Patriots would surely qualify. If you don’t believe me, you can take the word of YPO leader Hy Thurman:
I’d be the first one to say that we were racist, okay? We can't turn racism on and off, we can say that we can, but we can't…Now we wore a confederate flag and we used a racist symbol, the best we knew how, to reach racist people. Fred Hampton said you know, “I hate that damn flag” and Bobby Lee said “I hate the damn flag,” but if that's gonna get you to reach more people then go do it.
The Patriots not only didn’t lead their presentations with “opposing white supremacy,” they advanced anti-racist content by employing white supremacist gestures—much like Huey Newton’s namesake, Governor Huey P. Long.
“While recognizing that impoverished Whites often displayed the most extreme racial prejudices,” wrote historian Chris Booker, “the Party felt secure enough to plan alliances with poor Whites,” With an attitude 180 degrees from “check your privilege,” and “It’s not my job to educate you,” Bob Lee recalls meeting working-class whites where they were: “We asked the Patriots if they could work with the Panthers and they said yes…I had to run with those cats, break bread with them, hang out at the pool hall. I had to lay down on their couch, in their neighborhood. Then I had to invite them into mine. That was how the Rainbow Coalition was built, real slow.” Lee and Hampton’s devotion to a cross-racial American workers movement was such that they held black power unity to be secondary, willingly shedding anti-white members of the BPP for the sake of the coalition. Lee recounted that,
Many of the Panthers left the group when we built alliances. Some didn’t like the Patriots, some just didn’t like white people in general. They were heavy into nationalism. To tell the truth, it was a necessary purging, except these niggers took themselves out of the organization.
Woke-washing the Panthers
This view of the Illinois BPP flies in the face what many current academics have written about Hampton and the YPO, but recent Panther scholarship has often been shamefully false. For instance, one of the most celebrated current scholars of Fred Hampton, Dr. Jakobi Williams, wrote in his peer-reviewed book From the Bullet to the Ballot that “Both Huey Newton and Stokely Carmichael agreed that neither communism nor socialism was appropriate for African Americans.” This is an outrageous lie, as the primary sources quoted above demonstrate. During the peak of the Black Panthers’ influence, when Fred Hampton was their most visible leader, their line was Marxist-Leninist and class-first.
The academic Woke-wash of the Panthers was condemned by Bruce A. Dixon, an old comrade of Fred Hampton, who went on to found Black Agenda Report. Within that journal, he wrote,
In From the Bullet to the Ballot, all mention of socialism, class struggle and explicit opposition to capitalism—every one of which were prominently featured in Chicago and national BPP speeches, publications and political education classes—is made to disappear…How historians like Dr. Williams can read and hear us talking up socialism and proletarian internationalism, and never bother to ask where any of that came from is beyond me, unless they are simply observing the traditional American taboo over the s-word… Curiously, he then assigns the BPP to what they all call the “Black Power Movement,” something not especially well known for coalitions across racial lines.
According to Dixon, pseudo-radical academics avoid the issue of class struggle because “it leads away from where they need to go, to the happy endings of electing black mayors and congressmen, to black generals and corporate functionaries and to Barack Obama.” It’s worth remembering that Cornel West worked diligently for the 2008 election of Obama, despite substantial evidence that Obama’s central policies, like the Affordable Care Act, were fundamentally neoliberal. This was a mistake that the late Bruce Dixon, a long-time enemy of what he called “the black mis-leadership class,” did not make. Dixon had initially participated in the Democratic Party’s co-optation of the rainbow coalition concept in the 1980s and deeply regretted it.
As Dr. West now withdraws from the Green Party to attempt a non-affiliated candidacy, there is further speculation that he is deliberately handicapping himself to assist the party of Obama—seemingly confirming an accusation that Jimmy Dore had made for several weeks. This would follow naturally from West’s ideological belief that MAGA white supremacy is the leading threat to black Americans. Although West doesn’t identify as a cultural nationalist, his recent rhetoric and political decisions seem to follow far more from the legacy of Stokely Carmichael than Fred Hampton. This is indicated partly by West’s frequent implication that his love of black culture is innately political, but even more so by Stokely Carmichael’s unsung influence on both the black establishment and the present anti-MAGA obsession of the left.
As Carmichael re-established himself as a fixture on American college campuses in the 1970s, one of his warmest hosts was the father of future Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. A black conservative college administrator who gradually incorporated identity politics and a smattering of progressivism into his repertoire, John W. Rice often invited Carmichael (who eventually changed his name to Kwame Ture) to speak to students. Condi Rice has fondly recalled that “One of the people I got to know very well was Stokely Carmichael. He was a good family friend. And you know, he was actually wonderful to be around.”
As campus anti-war activism had escalated in 1970, John W. Rice became a vocal opponent of the war in Vietnam. It seems however, that under the influence of Carmichael, Rice viewed US imperialism as simply being an expression of white supremacy; Therefore he could not see that his black daughter was developing into one of the worst US imperialists of all time. John Rice did not live to see Condi work on the Cheney-Bush torture program and Iraq War disinformation campaign, but it probably should’ve given him pause when Chevron corporation—notorious for neocolonial exploitation in Africa—named an oil tanker The SS Condoleezza Rice shortly after she joined its board of directors in 1991. One wonders if Condoleezza rationalized her work for US state aggression as a bulwark against the “white supremacist imperialism of Russia” that now haunts the minds of those leftists who support the disastrous NATO war in Ukraine.
Another significant legacy of John Rice is that he mentored one of the founders of the modern Antifascist movement, Chip Berlet. Berlet wrote that “[Rice] taught me about working for progressive social change and opposing institutional racism. He taught me that White people like me enjoyed privileges routinely denied to Blacks. He taught me that the proportion of Blacks serving in Vietnam was tied to economic and social policies at home. And he pointed out that along with this knowledge came an absolute moral imperative to act.“ Through a network that included his think tank Political Research Associates, Berlet went on to center populism as the major threat to democracy and human rights in the US. Across hundreds of publications, Berlet promoted the theory that populism and fascism were intrinsically linked. In particular, Berlet has pushed Christian progressive leaders like Cornel West to denounce right-wing populism at all costs.
Here we see the contours of the anti-populist left that Cornel West inhabits and that Jimmy Dore is an outcast from. It’s a left that shuts down every conceivable collaboration between the black and white working-class, while leaving the door open to a more diverse and inclusive group of elite war criminals. This is diametrically opposed the to priorities of Fred Hampton, who foresaw the looming threat of “Negro imperialists” if a multi-racial working-class movement against both the white and black bourgeoisie was not formed. As Hampton stated shortly after becoming a Black Panther Party Central Committee member, “Our ten point program is in the midst of being changed right now, because we used the word ‘White’ when we should have used the word ‘capitalist.’”