Fred Hampton

FRED HAMPTON

Fredrick Allen Hampton (August 30, 1948 – December 4, 1969)

Fred Hampton
In December 1969, Hampton was shot and killed in his bed during a predawn raid at his Chicago apartment by a tactical unit of the Cook County State's Attorney's Office in conjunction with the Chicago Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation; during the raid, Panther Mark Clark was also killed and several others were seriously wounded.

Fred Hampton
was an American activist and revolutionary socialist. He came to prominence in Chicago as chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP), and deputy chairman of the national BPP.

Fred Hampton
About the same time that Hampton was successfully organizing young African Americans for the NAACP, the Black Panther Party (BPP) was rising to national prominence. Hampton was quickly attracted to the Black Panthers' approach, which was based on a Ten-Point Program that integrated black self-determination with class and economic critique from Maoism.

Fred Hampton
Over the next year, Hampton and his friends and associates made a number of significant achievements in Chicago. Perhaps his most important was his brokering of a nonaggression pact among Chicago's most powerful street gangs.

Fred Hampton
Emphasizing that racial and ethnic conflict among gangs would only keep its members entrenched in poverty, Hampton strove to forge a class-conscious, multiracial alliance among the BPP, the neo-confederate Young Patriots Organization, and the Young Lords under the leadership of Jose Cha Cha Jimenez, leading to the Rainbow Coalition.

Fred Hampton
Hampton rose quickly in the Black Panthers, based on his organizing skills, substantial oratorical gifts, and personal 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 6am, and launched a project for community supervision of the police.

Fred Hampton
Hampton's effective leadership and talent for communication marked him as a major threat to the FBI. It began keeping close tabs on his activities. Investigations have shown that FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover was determined to prevent the formation of a cohesive Black movement in the United States. Hoover believed the Panthers, Young Patriots, Young Lords, and similar radical coalitions Hampton forged in Chicago were a stepping stone to the rise of a revolution that could threaten the U.S. government and society.[18] 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 a monthly stipend, O'Neal agreed to infiltrate the BPP as a counterintelligence operative.

Fred Hampton
In December 1969, Hampton was shot and killed in his bed during a predawn raid at his Chicago apartment by a tactical unit of the Cook County State's Attorney's Office in conjunction with the Chicago Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation; during the raid, Panther Mark Clark was also killed and several others were seriously wounded. In 1967, Hampton was identified by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a radical threat. The FBI tried to subvert his activities in Chicago, sowing disinformation among black progressive groups and placing a counterintelligence operative in the local Panthers.

Fred Hampton
A civil lawsuit was later filed on behalf of the survivors and the relatives of Hampton and Clark. It was resolved in 1982 by a settlement of $1.85 million; the City of Chicago, Cook County, and the federal government each paid one-third to a group of nine plaintiffs.

Fred Hampton
Hampton was born on August 30, 1948, in present-day Summit, Illinois, and grew up in Maywood, both suburbs of Chicago. His parents had moved north from Louisiana, as part of the Great Migration of African Americans in the early 20th century out of the South. They both worked at the Argo Starch Company. As a youth, Hampton was gifted both in the classroom and athletically, and he hoped to play center field for the New York Yankees.

Fred Hampton
Hampton graduated from Proviso East High School with honors and varsity letters and a Junior Achievement Award in 1966 and 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 defense against police.

Fred Hampton
When he and fellow Black Panthers later followed police in his community supervision program, watching out for police brutality, they used his knowledge of law as a defense. 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 began to demonstrate natural leadership abilities;

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