by Patrick Chura, Ph.D.,
University of Akron
Watching Judas and the Black Messiah this week, I was struck by how well the story fits the traditions of leftist, proletarian art. The new film, directed by Shaka King, is a condensed biography of Chicago revolutionary Fred Hampton, who faithfully lived out the creed that “wherever there’s people, there’s power.”
At the age of 7, Hampton stood in line with his mother and thousands of mourners to view the mutilated body of Emmett Till. Stunned by the visual evidence of hate, Hampton later said that he never stopped seeing Till’s body and expected a similar death for himself.
By the fifth grade, he was a community organizer. He led civil rights protests in high school, embraced communism at 18, and joined the Black Panthers at 20. A year later he was violently murdered in his sleep by the Chicago police, who were helped by the FBI.
The more I learned about Hampton’s life, the more I was reminded of Black Thunder, a 1936 novel by Arna Bontemps. A work of historical fiction based on Gabriel Prosser’s slave revolt, Bontemps’ novel asserts ideological links between the attempted liberation of chattel slaves in 1800, and the hoped-for liberation of wage slaves during the Depression.
Looking at Black Thunder and Black Messiah side-by-side, one can easily make comparisons and draw lessons for today.
Both Gabriel and Hampton are proletarian heroes, striking examples of black masculinity who form grassroots partnerships across racial barriers. In Black Thunder, Gabriel recruits a coalition of eleven hundred–including slaves, free blacks and radical whites–to fight for freedom. The African-American critic George Schuyler remarked on the class-conscious arguments of Black Thunder and placed it without hesitation in the category of proletarian art.
This is exactly what current film critics are saying about Judas and the Black Messiah. In the film, Hampton’s electrifying speeches, much like Gabriel’s rhetoric, boil down to a color-blind Leninist message of “power to the people.” And as chairman of the Chicago Panthers, Hampton united surprisingly diverse groups, merging black activists with the Puerto Rican Young Lords and white Appalachian Young Patriots in a Rainbow Coalition.
Coalition-building is the thing that most terrifies the status quo. The discovery of Gabriel’s united mass action touched off a barbaric crackdown by white “mad dogs,” a manhunt that displayed a level of police brutality previously unseen in the young country. Yet Gabriel’s last words, delivered on the gallows, signal tranquility: “I been free, and I’s free from now on. . . Let the rope talk.”
In Hampton’s case, it was the effectiveness of the Rainbow Coalition that elevated his threat level and prompted murder. Moments before the film’s depiction of the bloody raid that killed Hampton, the “Black Messiah” shows Gabriel-like calmness. When Puerto Rican allies offer him a money-filled envelope as a donation to his legal defense, he gently refuses the gift. With love for the people, he suggests that the money go instead to buy meals for children. A total of a hundred shots were fired in the murderous “shoot-in,” ninety-nine of them by the police. But it was the Panthers who were charged with attempted homicide.
In the stories of both Gabriel and Hampton, there is a Judas. Gabriel is betrayed by the house slave Ben, who is more loyal to his master than to freedom. Hampton’s Judas is William O’Neal, the informant who infiltrated the Panthers for sixteen months. At the FBI’s request, O’Neal drew a floor plan of Hampton’s apartment to help the assassins find their target.
Maybe it’s a poetic coincidence that early in 1968, the year Fred Hampton joined the Panthers, Beacon Press decided to republish the novel about Gabriel’s revolt. The many parallels in the two men’s lives carry messages about history and hope.
Arna Bontemps was still mourning the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. when he paused to write a new preface for the ‘68 edition of Black Thunder. He used his anguish to remind readers that “Time is not a river. Time is a pendulum”–by which he meant that the pattern of history was back and forth, rise and fall. The arc of time offered opportunities in each era, along with chances for new outcomes. Seizing an example, Bontemps insisted that the country was now better “prepared to contemplate black self-assertion” than before King’s death.
If Bontemps was right in stating that humanity had suddenly become ready for Gabriel’s message, it might also be true that the world is ready for Hampton’s message now.
In proletarian art, optimism is a binding requirement. To the extent that the Black Thunder novel and the Black Messiah film resurrect buried heroes, they are optimistic works. Their message is that the brave die free, and that if poverty and oppression are unending, so are resistance and rebellion.
