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For such a short life there is much to celebrate. A gifted communicator and natural leader, Fred was organizing other
high school students at the age of 15. A brilliant student, he had passed up the chance to go to an elite college and the straight road to some lucrative and
prestigious career. Inspired by examples from the civil rights movement to anti-colonial struggles in Vietnam and Africa, Fred chose to live and work on the West
Side of Chicago and devote all his talents and energies to ending the oppression of woman and man by man, helping to organize and lead the Black Panther Party in
Chicago.
Chairman Fred led by example. He had high standards and challenged all those in his orbit to get up as early, to read as much, and to work and study as hard and
as productively as he did. I never saw anybody meet that challenge for long, but he made us want to keep trying. Fred sought out principled critiques of his
own practices, and taught us the vital role of constructing, receiving and acting on such criticism in building a sound organization.
Fred assumed a lead role in organizing the party’s Breakfast for Children Program, in which we provided or recruited the labor and solicited the
materials to serve free hot breakfasts to children on the way to school in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods where local authorities assured us that no
hunger problem existed. Not long afterward the city of Chicago began using federal funds to provide hot breakfasts to children in lower income neighborhoods across
the city, and continued doing so well after the Black Panther Party was just a memory. Fred worked with the Medical Committee for Human Rights to open the Black
Panther Party’s free medical clinic on the West Side of Chicago where authorities again solemnly declared there were no shortage of such services. And again,
not long afterward the Chicago Board of Health was persuaded of the need to open a network of clinics providing free and low-cost services in the city’s poorer
areas, several of which operate decades later.
Fred reached out to work with the Young Lords Organization in Chicago’s Puerto Rican community, and to a group of white working class
youth who called themselves the Young Patriots. He made time to speak to and with student groups in high schools and colleges all over Chicago and the surrounding
area. He organized community surveys to get snapshots of the actual and perceived needs of some neighborhoods. 1969 was well before the epidemics of powdered
and crack cocaine put large and permanently corrupting sums of money into the hands of gang leaders. Fred was instrumental in crafting a principled approach not
just to individual members but to the rank and file and leaderships of black Chicago’s two major street gangs to put aside their differences and work for the good
of the entire community. His efforts met with some initial success, and earned him some extra special attention from the FBI.ram, in which we solicited
donations of food and facilities and prov
“Chairman Fred called us to a lifetime of service to humanity.”
There was much more, really an awful lot going on for a young man of 20 or 21, all the more amazing as most members of the organization he led were a year or two or
three younger than Fred. Despite arrests and threats of imprisonment or death hanging over him, Fred persevered and challenged us to do the same. He was
impatient with injustice, as the finest young people of every age always are. Fred was animated, almost consumed by a love for our people and for all of humanity
and determined to do whatever it took to end the exploitation of woman and man by man.
Times do change and the mechanisms of oppression evolve into new forms. Political organizations and strategic visions crafted for the needs of one era
don’t make the grade in another. If Fred was alive today he’d be a middle-aged grandfather in his late fifties. It’s hard to know exactly
how he’d be doing but there is no doubt that Fred would still be teaching and learning and inspiring, still tirelessly organizing and struggling in the great cause
of human liberation. Chairman Fred called us to a lifetime of service to humanity. If we weren’t doing something revolutionary, Fred told us many
times, we should not even bother to remember him. So we continue to work hard to be worthy of his memory.
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