Fred Hampton

Fredrick Allen Hampton was born in Summit, Illinois, on the thirtieth of August 1948. He led the NAACP Youth Council in Maywood while still in high school, took early law-school courses at Triton Junior College, and in November 1968 became chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party.

He was, by every available account, the most politically formidable Panther leader of his generation. He brokered the Rainbow Coalition in spring 1969 — a multiracial alliance among the Panthers, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, the white-Appalachian Young Patriots, and the Latino Brown Berets — which built the first organized political bridge across the racial divisions Chicago had been engineered to enforce. He oversaw the Panthers' free breakfast program, free medical clinic, and political-education classes for thousands of children and young workers across the city's South and West sides.

He was twenty-one years old.

The FBI's COINTELPRO operation, under J. Edgar Hoover's personal direction, identified Hampton in 1968 as the single most dangerous potential Black political organizer in the country — the figure most likely to bridge the gap between revolutionary Black politics and a viable multiracial American left. The Bureau cultivated an informant inside Hampton's circle, William O'Neal, who supplied a detailed floor plan of Hampton's apartment to the Chicago Police Department.

At 4:45 AM on the fourth of December 1969, fourteen officers of the Chicago Police Department, acting on a federal warrant, raided the apartment. Ninety-nine rounds were fired into the apartment by the police. One was fired out. Hampton was found unconscious in his bed — likely drugged earlier in the evening by O'Neal — and was shot twice in the head at point-blank range. He was twenty-one.

His son Fred Hampton Jr., born twenty-five days after his father's murder, is the chairman of the Black Panther Party Cubs.

He is honored here as the organizer whose Rainbow Coalition the state would not permit to exist.