Leading Black Panther Fred Allen Hampton was born. on the 30th of August 1948 in Summit ,Illinois to Francis and Iberia Hampton two factory workers who had migrated north as part of the Great Migration of Black Americans out of the south..Fred Hampton was key in forming links between the Panthers and working-class people of all races.
Hampton grew up with an older brother and sister. His family was friendly with the family of Emmett Till before Till's 1955 murder. Hampton's family moved to Maywood, another Chicago suburb when Hampton was 10. Hampton attended Irving Elementary School and Proviso East High School. In high school, he led the school's Interracial Committee. He also protested the school only nominating white girls to run for homecoming queen, which resulted in the inclusion of Black girls.
After graduating with honors from Proviso East High School, Hampton studied pre-law at Triton Junior College. He also attended Crane Junior College (later Malcolm X College) and the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle.
Hampton became involved in the civil rights movement, and led the Youth Council of the NAACP's West Suburban chapter, growing membership to more than 500. He advocated for a community pool in his hometown of Maywood, which led to an arrest for "mob action."
In November 1968, Hampton helped found the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. From his base in Chicago, he served as chairman of this local chapter. Though Hampton was just 20, he became a respected leader in the Party, aided by his talent for public speaking and experience in community organising.
Like so many brave, selfless revolutionaries at that time, Fred was extremely young when he joined the struggle. He was eighteen when he emerged as the head of the NAACP and then joined the Panthers. He graduated from H.S. in 1966 with honors and with hopes of playing center field for the NY Yankees. But Fred had a vision that got in the way of his baseball dreams; he wanted genuine freedom for the Black community.
He majored in pre-law in college to familiarize himself with the legal system, and “use it as a defense against police.”
Fred swiftly rose up in the ranks of the NAACP in the small suburb of River Grove, IL —a community of 27,000— where he and other leaders recruited a youth group of 500 members.
When forces colluding with the US government assassinated Malcolm, the Panthers picked up the mantel of his leadership. Principled self-defense of the Black community inspired the formation of the Black Panther Party.
This stance was what inspired Fred to leave the more moderate NAACP and join the Panthers. Like Cop Watch today, Fred and fellow BPP members followed the police, documenting and intervening in cases of police brutality, and using their knowledge of law to patrol the patrollers and surveille the surveillance state.
The Panthers created a 6 week period —what we can call a candidacy period, though ours is 6 months— when new members learned what it meant to conduct themselves and organize their lives as Panthers, or professional revolutionaries. Calling out phony Black nationalism or Black capitalism, Hampton said that no matter the color of the exploiter, they were enemies of the community.
For example, he denounced Papa Doc Duvalier —the Haitian dictator who functioned as a US puppet during the Cold War— but hid behind a false claim to negritude. He famously said that “If anyone comes into the community, no matter what color, to exploit the people, I, Fred Hampton, will beat them up with a Black Panther Party newspaper.”
Hampton was a community-builder who brokered a nonaggression pact between Chicago’s most powerful street gangs, urging them to turn their anger and guns around on their oppressors, not on one another.
He created the Rainbow Coalition, a class-conscious and multi-racial alliance between the Panthers, the Young Patriots Organization, the Young Lords, Students for a Democratic Society, the Brown Berets, and the Red Guard Party. Although Jessie Jackson receives credit for another version, a liberal version, of the Rainbow Coalition, it was Hampton who coined the idea.
He emphasized that racial and ethnic conflict between gangs only perpetuated poverty and stressed that multinational unity was the most strategic tactic to achieve everyone’s liberation.
Fred inspired a military-like discipline in others. He organized former alcoholics and what this society calls “junkies” (we call them oppressed) to wake up early and do revolutionary fitness.
He oversaw rehabilitation programs for super-oppressed individuals struggling to find a purpose and identity in society.
The Panthers and the freedom struggle restored an identity to Black and Brown individuals alienated from their roots, their community and themselves,
Commanding the respect of intellectuals and rapping to the brothers and sisters on the block, he related to different strata of the oppressed. These characteristics were what made Fred Hampton’s leadership so special. He was a unifier.
Chairman Fred also had outstanding oratorical skills and charisma, which added to his leadership skills. The FBI however hired informants to infiltrate the Panther party and opened a file on Hampton by 1967, before he ever joined the Panthers. The file expanded in the next 2 years to over 12 volumes and over 4,000 pages. A wiretap was placed on Hampton’s mother’s phone in Feb. 1968. By May, US intelligence services placed him on the “Agitator Index,” and designated him as a “key militant leader.”
Many saw Hampton as the next possible Martin Luther King or the next Malcolm X, or perhaps the next great leader of Black Americans. He combined a huge personality with a brilliant, critical mind and became a charismatic educator and speaker. His public statements on capitalism, racism, politics, Marxism and socialism were peppered with slang and profanity that refused to bow to the rules of the system. He sought to unite people through socialism, against the capitalist system, fighting against racism and discrimination through practice and deeds, seeking to find solutions that would improve poor and working peoples lives, through struggle, without getting bogged down in watered down reformity.
He sought to do this through observation and practice. Such interracial working class organizing and open criticism of the capitalist economic system made him dangerous. It was one thing to organize along racial lines. It was another to try to unite the white, Black and Hispanic workers together in working class solidarity! A dangerous message then, still is today I guess.
Fred Hampton was a dedicated revolutionary who studied theory and carried this through into everyday action. Throughout 1969, he maintained a demanding speaking schedule; he organised weekly rallies in support of BPP members in jail or on trial.
His organisation provided breakfasts for poor school children and a free medical clinic for those that needed it. Hampton himself also taught political education classes. He also managed to persuade two of Chicago's most powerful street gangs to stop fighting one another.
His attempt at unification of different peoples struggles bought him to the attention of J.Edgar Hover and the F.B.I. From the 1950s until the 1970s, the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) had already been targeting leaders of activist organizations like Fred Hampton. The program served to undermine, infiltrate, and spread misinformation (often through extrajudicial means) about political groups and the activists who belonged to them. COINTELPRO targeted civil rights leaders such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as well as radical groups like the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement among others. As Hampton’s influence in the Black Panthers grew, the FBI began to focus on his activities, opening a file on him in 1967.
The FBI enlisted a man named William O'Neal to infiltrate and sabotage the Black Panthers Party. O'Neal, who had been previously arrested for car theft and impersonating a federal officer, agreed to the task because the federal agency promised to drop the felony charges against him. O’Neal quickly gained access to Hampton by becoming both his bodyguard and a security director in Hampton’s Black Panther Party chapter.
During an early morning police raid,on December 4, 1969, he and fellow Black Panther Mark Clark were assassinated in a hail of bullets by the FBI and Chicago police. Hampton who was only 21.had been asleep when first hit, and, as he lay prone on the floor, was shot twice at point-blank range in the head. His body was then dragged into the doorway in a pool of blood.
The police opened fire on the remaining bedroom, hitting several Panthers repeatedly. The survivors were beaten, dragged into the street, and arrested on a charge of the attempted murder of the police officers who had carried out the raid, and aggravated assault.
Many in the Chicago African American community were outraged over the raid and what they saw as the unnecessary deaths of Hampton and Clark in what was seen as a serious attempt to undermine the Black Panthers powerful message, his death was an act of police brutality.
This was not an isolated instance. This was US government policy. The state “neutralized” Revolutionary Black leadership —this was the FBI euphemism for an assassination campaign of what Hoover called any potential “Black Messiah.”
Just in 1969, 26 Panther leaders were executed, including Bunchy Carter, Mark Clark, George Jackson, Jonathan Jackson and so many of our fearless warriors and warrioresses. Their crime: the white supremacist, class system was determined to prevent the formation of a cohesive Black movement in the U.S., and saw the Panthers and similar “radical” coalitions as the vanguard of a revolutionary body that would topple the dictatorship of the rich.
His death was government-sanctioned murder. His death was an assassination. His death was an execution. 5,000 people attended Hampton’s funeral where Reverends Ralph Abernathy and Jesse Jackson eulogized the slain activist.
It is tempting to look back at the raid as a singular example of law enforcement run amok; a violent and inexcusable governmental reaction to the political climate of the time. And yet, so much of what happened in the aftermath is familiar to anyone who has studied systematic police violence ever since. today
The official investigation into the shootings was a farce, and it was left up to the survivors and the BPP to pursue a civil case against the SPU and the FBI. Finally, in 1983, it was acknowledged that there “had in fact been an active governmental conspiracy to deny Hampton, Clark and the BPP plaintiffs their civil rights”.
Damages of $1.85m were awarded to the survivors and the families of the deceased. #In 1990, and later in 2004, the Chicago City Council passed resolutions commemorating December 4 as Fred Hampton Day.
While he met a tragic and untimely end, it is important to remember that he was killed for his ideas, because those ideas carried so much weight and . they still do. Although many years have since gone since his passing, the peoples love for this man remains strong. His powerful message remains strong. People still fighting discrimination and ongoing racism.Fred Hampton is a hero in the struggle for Black liberation, revolution and socialism. He should be remembered and his example should be followed by all progressive and revolutionary people.In 2004 the Chicago City Council passed a resolution commemorating December 4 as Fred Hampton Day.
In the courtroom at a 1969 trial for a trumped up robbery charge, only months before he was killed, the 21 year old gave an amazing speech defending himself and all Black people, while at the same time calling on all working people to unite in revolutionary solidarity. There is no better way to end this article than with his words, passionately explaining the beliefs that he died for.
" We got to face some facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower classes, and I talk about the masses, I'm talking about the white masses, I'm talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses.
We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're going to fight racism with solidarity.
We say don't fight capitalism with no black capitalism, you fight capitalism with socialism. "
In 2004 the Chicago City Council passed a resolution commemorating December 4 as Fred Hampton Day.
Assassinated at 21, a defender of all oppressed communities, and unifying force for working people from all walks of life who understand they have a common enemy who said He said, “While the buffoons are busy going to the moon, we’re down here on earth giving free food and medical services to oppressed people.”. Today, freedom fighters continue to stand on his shoulders. Hampton’s courage in the face of injustice and his relentless advocacy for the oppressed inspire us to continue fighting for change.
Fred Hampton Jnr was born a few months after his father’s murder. He, too, is active in the African-American revolutionary movement and has spent almost nine years in jail on politically-related charges.
Fred Hampton understood lets not forget beleived that liberation could never be won through division. He fought for Black liberation while building solidarity among Black, Brown, and White working class people against racism, capitalism, and imperialism.
They killed Fred Hampton, but they could never kill his ideas. A brother who fought the oppressor, who attacked the suppressor, people continue his fight, discrimination has not ended, nor has the struggle. the dream of freedom is kept alive, some people pay the price, when they try to fight back, you can kill a revolutionary, but you cant kill the revolution. the spirit, lives on.
Fred Hampton - Political Prisoner
I am a revolutionary - Fred Hampton
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