Why Fred Hampton Needs to Be on Your Kids’ American History Syllabus
Hampton’s story, even in the abbreviated form that ‘Judas and the Black Messiah’ provides, is too important not to tell
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My Blackness came to me while I was a student at Ohio State University.
To be clear, I always knew I was Black. My mother, who grew up silt-poor in the mud hills of Nelsonville, Ohio, made sure all of her sons knew we were Black. Not knowing was akin to signing your name to a suicide note. But I did not know its properties, the alchemy of its historical bonds in reaction to my daily life. I only knew its consequences. I was aware of the American problems that pursued my Blackness but could not see the joy that welled from it for what it was. I did not fully learn to wield my Blackness until I was skipping architecture classes, instead sitting in on showings of Black documentaries and heavy discussions in the newly minted Frank W. Hale Black Cultural Center that imbued me with self-awareness.
The early 1990s was a beautiful time to become aware of one’s Blackness. It was the height of the Afrocentric movement, the covers of magazines like Newsweek musing aloud if Cleopatra had been Black, the widening reach of Black studies departments and Spike Lee films. Because I would only attend OSU for two scant quarters before being expelled for failing grades, the whole period felt as if the only reason I had gone to college was to uncover a deeper Blackness, that a destiny had somehow been fulfilled behind the artifice of my architectural pursuits.
I could never tell if the Black man running the screenings in the Hale Center was another student or a local street scholar who snuck onto campus for the express purpose of showing the films, but his weekly inoculations unwound the helix of my political DNA, replacing the white cells with Malcolm X and Kwame Ture speeches. And on the evening that he slid in a bootleg VHS of the 1971 documentary The Murder of Fred Hampton, my life was changed on a primordial level.
All of the theory I had been consuming was suddenly and brutally replaced with…
