Fred Hampton, Revolutionary. Image by UIC Digital Collections via Flickr

By Dr. Barbara K. Iverson

This story needs to open with a flashback. It is about my favorite radical Fred Hampton, who was murdered by the Chicago Police on Dec. 4, 1969. This happened only a few blocks from where I was going to college at University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, now called UIC.

A series of events that took place between April 1968 and Dec. 1969 set that time apart from any other time in American history. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in April, and the West Side exploded in riots. Bobby Kennedy was on track to be nominated for president, but he was shot and killed in June, and as the weather heated up in Aug. 1968, the Democratic National Convention came to town.

Conventioneers, demonstrators, police clashed near Congress and Balbo and the first Mayor Daley called out the National Guard. There was a taxi strike. The Chicago Police rioted, beating demonstrators and journalists bloody while “the Whole World was watching.” The civil authorities conspired to put the blame on “outside agitators” and indicted the “Chicago Eight,” then bound and gagged defendant Bobby Seale and tried him alone, leaving the Chicago Seven.

As the trial stretched into the spring of 1969, the lawyers and defendants took advantage of the proximity of UIC to hold rallies and speak to large crowds of students for the Seven, and others. Fred Hampton, head of the Chicago Black Panthers and his deputy, Mark Clark, spoke at the rallies, too.

What was happening on the local scene, was unique for the time period in America. Gang members, blacks from the West Side and whites, from Uptown, stopped shooting each other, as Fred Hampton, leading the Chicago Black Panthers and Mike James, leading “Rising Up Angry,” a coalition of working class whites from Uptown, began to meet, talk, and engage in social and political action instead of head-banging.

These groups were not part of the “student movement” of the that era. While UIC students protested the war, and then commuted back home to middle class neighborhoods, Fred Hampton and the Panthers talked and lived revolution and social change.

Hampton and the Chicago Panthers Party set up the first free breakfast programs for school children which became models for public schools programs around the U.S. They set up free health clinics in poor neighborhoods.

Fred Hampton was the best political speaker I’ve ever heard. He rejected violence and made a case for unity of people of all races in the face of the common enemy of authoritarian, racist officials. He was young, about 19, and he could deconstruct institutional causes of racism, poverty, and discrimination that were the root causes of violence. He coined the phrase, “the rainbow coalition” to include all the people who were working for social change.

He wasn’t a pacifist. Hampton said people needed to stand up to police and institutional repression and defend themselves as necessary. But as a revolutionary, he believed change would come through self-empowerment and “people power”, not “killing the pigs.”

Fred framed issues from the point of view of class and economic justice, and asked you to see how people in power used race to divide people with common interests. Instead of seeing other working class people as a problem because of their race, he urged working class people to unite and fight corrupt politicians and a system that fostered discrimination and economic inequalities.

He spoke softly but with passion. He was so young, and yet spoke with conviction, compassion, and intelligence. People were listening to Fred Hampton — all kinds of people.

But it was an evil time. On Dec. 4, 1969, Fred Hampton was murdered while he slept,  executed, actually, by a contingent of Chicago Police led by Sheriff Richard Elrod.

I use the word executed literally. Early in 1970, I was in a suburban police station to report an incident with a flasher. As I waited to talk to an officer, I looked around the police station. On the wall was a poster that had a picture of Fred Hampton and over his face was a red rubber-stamped imprint that said “Killed in Action.”

That was America circa 1970. When Obama spoke in Grant Park on Election Night, I thought about Fred Hampton and I was sorry he wasn’t there.

See a trailer for The Murder of Fred Hampton.

Dr. Iverson is an associate professor at Columbia College Chicago

By Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin

You may not know the name James Augustus Henry Murray, and you’ve certainly never met the man, but you have been profoundly affected by him. His tenure as the editor of The Oxford English Dictionary defined what constitutes an authoritative reference text and, in some ways, set the bar for what modern Wikipedia aims to achieve.

Born in 1837 to a Scottish tailor, Murray was largely self-educated and brilliant,  with “an impassioned thirst for all kinds of learning,” according to Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman. Precocious as a boy and prodigious as a young man, he was selected by  the Delegates of the Oxford University Press, “the grandest minds in the land,” to spearhead a daunting project: the creation of an inventory of the English language in its entirety—a dictionary that would include, Winchester writes, “every word, every nuance, every shading of meaning and spelling and pronunciation, every twist of etymology, every possible illustrative citation from every English author.”

Creating this monumental dictionary – 12 volumes, 415,000 words, 1.8 million quotations, 70 years – was unlike any previous such effort. It could not be done as previous dictionaries had been, with small teams of scholars combing through limited numbers of books. This dictionary was created with the assistance of hundreds if not thousands of volunteer amateur lexicographers, whose submissions were vetted by a group of paid subeditors, and ultimately incorporated into the final definitions written by Murray himself. Murray died before the dictionary was completed in 1927; it remains, in Winchester’s words, “the unrivaled cornerstone of any good library, an essential work for any reference collection.”

The first supplement to the OED was published in 1933, and additional ones in 1972 and 1986.  A second edition was released in 1989. In the late 1970s, a two-volume set in a handsome blue binding and a miniscule font was published, and some years later it was advertised in intellectual publications  at a deep discount.

That’s when I bought my copy of the OED, a treasured tome that has graced every bookshelf I’ve had since college, and which I still consult to this day. I love the way it connects me to the origins of words and their evolutions, and I love the chorus of voices it contains.

What a radical achievement lies inside those volumes. Imagine harnessing the wisdom of a legion of readers on both sides of the Atlantic, and incorporating their submissions into an authoritative compendium of the English language. Murray didn’t relegate control; his judgment, as editor, was the final word. But he used crowd-sourcing long before that term was coined; in fact, it still does not appear in the dictionary that could not have been created without it.

Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin is an associate professor in the Journalism Department.

Marry The Night – Lady Gaga

By Trevor Greig

No one else has had such an influence on my life than one person. Sure, I could write about my family or a best friend but that would be doing the same thing as everyone else. I am different just like my radical, Lady Gaga. She changes lives and performs the best she can. Lady Gaga being my influence, whenever I need a boost to do better I just think, “Fight on Little Pony, fight on.”

Born in March of 1986, Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta grew up going to all-girl Catholic school in New York. She was a natural performer growing up doing school plays, singing, and playing piano ever since she could prop herself up and hit the keys on the low end. Her life wasn’t easy growing up. She got made fun of, suffered from bullying, and was even thrown into a trash can on her way home from school one day just for being different.
When Gaga got older, she moved to the lower east side of New York. She lived on her own making just enough money by Go-Go dancing, and waiting tables while pursuing music. She would continuously to go to radio stations, and do interviews and they would tell her, “I don’t get it. You’ll never make it.”

Her sound was so different. It was nothing that they had heard before and because of that she wouldn’t have what it takes to be a star. She would fight endlessly trying to defeat all of the negative comments that she received growing up, by being the star she knows that she could be.
She finally hit the target and got a record deal with Def Jam, only to be let go a few days later. Heartbroken and crying, she went to her grandmother’s house to find some support. She told her, “I’m going to let you cry for the rest of the day but tomorrow you got to pick yourself up and kick some ass.” Gaga told MTV. That was exactly what she did. She landed another record deal with Interscope Records and became a 5 time Grammy Award winner, and had 4 number 1 singles of her debut album: The Fame in 2008. Since then she has become the biggest pop star of the new century.

Lady Gaga is a radical for me because she didn’t let anyone tell her she couldn’t do it. She fought endlessly to reach her dreams. She sells out arenas and has number one songs.  Bullying still haunts her, but she keeps pushing forward. She has made such an impact on my life because of her influences. She taught me that it doesn’t matter where you come from or how much money you have. If you stay true to yourself that you can be whoever it is that you want to be. Fight on little pony.