The film “Judas and the Black Messiah”, which opens on Friday, is receiving critical acclaim and award nominations as a police drama about the real life story of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and William O’Neal – the FBI informant who cheated on him.
But Puerto Rican activist Felipe Luciano remembers another story about Hampton that happened largely off-screen – the friendship of two activists that starts in prison and sows the seed for a much broader alliance between blacks, Latinos, whites and other members of communities working for civil rights.
“It was he who made Cha Cha move from gang warfare to organization,” said Luciano of Hampton and his friendship with José Cha Cha Jiménez, the founding member of Young Lords, the Puerto Rican activist organization.
“From then on, they became lifelong friends. Cha Cha talks about it with love and admiration often. He met his mother. He met people in his family. He met his wife,” said Luciano. “And the rest is history.”
While most people can associate the term Rainbow Coalition with Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign, the first multicultural Rainbow Coalition was founded by Hampton on April 4, 1969 in Chicago, which Luciano called “the most progressive movement in your time “.
The diverse movement was led by the Chicago chapter of the Black Panthers, and was initially joined by other groups in the city. They included the Young Lords, who became an activist organization for the Puerto Rican and Latin communities, and the Young Patriots – an activist organization composed mainly of whites from the south.
The Young Lords have sparked controversy for their tactics and politics, but they are credited for their advocacy and demands for better housing, health care, education and living conditions for Puerto Rican communities across the country.
“We were all not getting paid. We all lived in low quality houses. We all did not receive an education. We were all being kicked by the police, ”said Luciano, describing the difficulties that many marginalized people of color and whites faced in America in the 1960s.” Why shouldn’t we be together? “
Luciano, who was born in East Harlem and co-founded the New York section of the Young Lords, said Hampton was able to find common ground with other groups because he understood his oppression.
Hampton recruited and assembled coalition groups to support each other in protests, strikes and other actions that required community empowerment and self-determination.
“He was able to go to a meeting point in the Appalachians and say to them: ‘I think we need your help and you need ours’,” said Luciano.
On the screen, “Judas and the Black Messiah” includes historical images of the 1960s Black Panther movement and recreates Hampton’s passionate speeches, galvanizing crowds of activists.
“So, how are we going to win this war? What is our most lethal weapon?” Hampton (played by award-winning Daniel Kaluuya) asks on the screen. “There is strength in numbers. Power wherever there are people.”
Shaka King, the director, said that what resonates with him and many activists today is Hampton’s way with words.
“He had the ability to take these ideas that are often complex and make them incredibly accessible in a way that was also fun, funny and witty,” said King. “He’s an example. When you talk to activists who are doing this job today, they all point you as a godfather and hero.”
Hampton was the vice president of the Illinois section of the Black Panthers and a youth organizer at NAACP.
Galvanizing the oppressed
Luciano remembers meeting Hampton on a trip to Chicago. He said Hampton “had a captivating style” that attracted people from different backgrounds, even when they initially didn’t understand the discrimination that others faced.
“It was difficult for the Appalachians to understand the privilege of white skin,” recalls Luciano as an example of a cultural barrier that Hampton was able to overcome. “But when we got closer, and when we started talking, touching and listening to each other, they started to understand what was going on. But they really understood the oppression of being poor and working class.”
Today, said Luciano, many of the advances to celebrate and defend diversity are due to the first activists who were able to overcome racial barriers to work with each other.
He remembered how the Puerto Rican veterans of the First World War, belonging to the 369th Regimental Army Band, all black, became pioneers in jazz and Latin music.
Among them were the legendary trombonist and composer Juan Tizol Martínez, who played with Duke Ellington, and composer Rafael Hernández Marín, known for hundreds of popular Latin songs, including the bolero “Silencio”.
Luciano also pointed to seminal figures like the black Puerto Rican intellectual and activist Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, who played an important role in documenting Afro-Latin and Afro-American history during the Harlem Renaissance.
Divisions remain
However, the race still divides Latinos and Blacks.
“It is impossible to live in America and have been colonized by the United States and not to internalize this country’s racism. We call this ‘colorism’ in Puerto Rico. In Puerto Rico, every skin color has a value, ”he said.
Luciano said that many Puerto Ricans had relationships with the black community, but still believed that their children should not marry blacks because they endured the greatest burdens of discrimination.
“You don’t want to be them. ‘Con los negroes cannot be janguear’, they used to tell us,” meaning “you can’t go out with blacks,” he said. “And they used to say to our daughters ‘we have to adelantar la raza’, meaning that you have to make progress in the race, you have to make the race move forward.”
And now, both Luciano off the screen and King, through their film, want younger generations to remember the early community activists, like Fred Hampton, who fought against discrimination.
“I think we tried to frame them first as young community organizers, really coming from a place of love for their people,” said King of the Black Panthers, “interested in providing them with the necessary services that they felt the government was not was paying. “
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