Fred Hampton was an American activist, who rose to prominence in Chicago as deputy chairman of the National Black Panther Party and chair of the Illinois chapter. He also founded the anti-racist, anti-classist Rainbow Coalition, a prominent multicultural political organization that included whites, black and Hispanic people working for social change. Hampton was considered a radical threat by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was shot and killed during a predawn raid at his Chicago apartment in December 1969
Biography
Fred Hampton was born on August 30, 1948, in Illinois. As a youth, Hampton was gifted both in the classroom and athletically and hoped to play centre field for the New York Yankees. He started his fight against injustice at a young age. At 10 years old, he started hosting weekend breakfasts for other children from the neighbourhood, cooking the meals himself in what could be described as a precursor to the Panthers’ free breakfast program.
In high school, he led walkouts protesting black students’ exclusion from the competition for homecoming queen and calling on officials to hire more black teachers and administrators. Hampton graduated from Proviso East High School with honours and varsity letters, and a Junior Achievement Award, in 1966. He enrolled at Triton Junior College in nearby River Grove, Illinois, where he majored in pre-law. He planned to become more familiar with the legal system to use it as a defence against the police.
Fred Hampton became active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and assumed leadership of its West Suburban Branch’s Youth Council. In his capacity as an NAACP youth organizer, he demonstrated natural leadership abilities: from a community of 27,000, he was able to muster a youth group of 500 members strong. He worked to get more and better recreational facilities established in the neighbourhoods and to improve educational resources for Maywood’s impoverished black community.
Impact
At the time that Fred Hampton was successfully organizing young African Americans for the NAACP, the Black Panther Party (BPP) was rising to national prominence. He was quickly attracted to the Party’s approach, which was based on a Ten-Point Program that integrated black self-determination with class and economic critique from Maoism. He joined the party and relocated to downtown Chicago. In November 1968, he joined the party’s nascent Illinois chapter, founded in late 1967 by Bob Brown.
Hampton rose quickly in the Black Panthers based on his organizing skills, oratorical gifts, and charisma. Once he became leader of the Chicago chapter, he organized weekly rallies, participated in strikes, worked closely with the BPP’s local People’s Clinic, taught political education classes every morning at 6 am, and launched a project for community supervision of the police.
Over the next year, Fred Hampton and his friends and associates achieved many successes in Chicago. Perhaps the most important was a nonaggression pact among Chicago’s most powerful street gangs. Emphasizing that racial and ethnic conflict among gangs would only keep its members entrenched in poverty, Hampton strove to forge an anti-racist, class-conscious, multiracial alliance among the BPP, the Young Patriots Organization, and the Young Lords, leading to the formation of the Rainbow Coalition.
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FBI Investigation
The FBI believed that Hampton’s leadership and talent for communication made him a major threat among Black Panther leaders. It began keeping close tabs on his activities. Investigations have shown that the then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was determined to prevent the formation of a cohesive Black movement in the United States. He also believed that Hampton’s Rainbow coalition was a stepping stone to the rise of a revolution that could cause a radical change in the U.S. government.
The FBI opened a file on Hampton in 1967. It tapped Hampton’s mother’s phone in February 1968 and by May placed Hampton on the bureau’s “Agitator Index” as a “key militant leader”. In late 1968, the Racial Matters squad of the FBI’s Chicago field office recruited William O’Neal to work with it; he had recently been arrested twice for interstate car theft and impersonating a federal officer. In exchange for having his felony charges dropped and receiving a monthly stipend, O’Neal agreed to infiltrate the Black Panther Party as a counterintelligence operative
O’Neal joined the party and quickly rose in the organization, becoming Director of Chapter Security and Hampton’s bodyguard. He alongside the FBI instigated a clash and a split between the Panthers and the Blackstone Rangers. In October 1969, Hampton and his girlfriend Deborah Johnson, who was pregnant with their child rented a four-and-a-half-room apartment at 2337 West Monroe Street to be closer to BPP headquarters. O’Neal reported to his superiors that much of the Panthers’ “provocative” arms stockpile was stored there. He drew them a map of the apartment.
Assassination
On December 4, 1969, a heavily armed police team stormed Fred Hampton’s apartment At 4:45 am, they stormed the apartment. Mark Clark, sitting in the front room of the apartment with a shotgun in his lap, was on security duty. The police shot him in the chest, killing him instantly. Clark’s gun discharged once into the ceiling after he was shot. This was the only shot fired by the Panthers.
Hampton who had been previously drugged by barbiturates, was sleeping on a mattress in the bedroom with Johnson, who was nine months pregnant with their child. Police officers removed her from the room while Hampton lay unconscious in bed. According to a past report, twelve officers opened fire, killing the 21-year-old Hampton.
Hampton’s body was dragged into the bedroom doorway and left in a pool of blood. The officers directed their gunfire at the remaining Panthers who had been sleeping in the other bedroom. They were seriously wounded, and then beaten and dragged into the street. They were arrested on charges of aggravated assault and attempted murder of the officers.
Aftermath
Police also seriously wounded four other Panther members. Five thousand people attended Hampton’s funeral. He was eulogized by black leaders, including Jesse Jackson and Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King Jr.’s successor as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In his eulogy, Jackson said that “when Fred was shot in Chicago, black people in particular, and decent people in general, bled everywhere.”
At a press conference the next day, the police announced the arrest team had been attacked by the “violent” and “extremely vicious” Panthers and defended themselves accordingly. However, The Commission of Inquiry into the Black Panthers and the Police, noted that the Chicago police had killed Hampton without justification or provocation and had violated the Panthers’ constitutional rights against unreasonable search and seizure. The Commission further alleged that the Chicago Police Department had imposed a summary punishment on the Panthers.
A federal grand jury did not return any indictment against any of the individuals involved with the planning or execution of the raid, including the officers involved in killing Hampton. O’Neal, who had given the FBI the floor plan of the apartment and drugged Hampton, later admitted his involvement in setting up the raid. He committed suicide on January 15, 1990.
