Summary

In a 1969 speech Fred Hampton declared, “We say you don’t fight racism with racism — we’re gonna fight racism with solidarity.” He and his allies knew that the forces against them were so powerful that only by working together would they even begin to achieve equality and justice.

The youngest child of Francis and Iberia Hampton, Fred was raised in the Chicago suburbs with his brother and sister. Among his family’s acquaintances was Emmett Till, a Black child whom Iberia had babysat. In 1955, when Till was a teenager visiting relatives in Mississippi, he was lynched by local white men. The Hampton family’s connection with Till, along with their experience of racial inequity in their suburban community, made Fred keenly aware of racial injustice. While attending high school in Maywood, Illinois, Hampton organized a student section of the NAACP, served on his school’s Interracial Cross Section Committee (a club that helped white students confront their racist beliefs), and protested the unjust arrest of Eugene Moore, a classmate who would later become the area’s first Black state representative. After graduating from high school with honors, Hampton enrolled in a prelaw program at Triton College, a public college near Maywood.

After experiencing a series of negative, occasionally violent, interactions with the police at rallies and demonstrations, in 1968 Hampton parted ways with the by-the-book NAACP and joined the Black Panther Party as one of the Illinois chapter’s original members. The party, founded two years earlier in Oakland, California, by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, had originally been intended to organize patrols of Black neighborhoods and protect residents from police brutality. It quickly evolved into a Marxist revolutionary group that called for paying reparations to African Americans for the centuries of exploitation they had endured, for exempting African Americans from the military draft, and for arming African American communities. According to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, the Black Panthers were “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”

No sooner had the Chicago Black Panthers begun than the FBI began monitoring their activity. Hampton was a possible suspect for what Hoover considered the threat of an emerging “messiah,” a leader who could “unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement.” 

Fred Hampton was assassinated Dec 4th 1969 at age 21as depicted in 2021’s Judas and the Black Messiah. If you would like to learn more about Chairman Fred Hampton check out 2015’s The Black Panthers Vanguards of a revolution. Also Jeffrey Haas’s “The Assassination of Fred Hampton” : How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther