Frederick Allen Hampton was born on August 30, 1948, in Chicago, IL. Fred was the youngest of three children and grew up with his parents, Francis and Iberia, and his brother and sister in the Chicago suburbs. 

In the summer of 1955, a Hampton family acquaintance, Emmett Till, was lynched by White men while visiting family in Mississippi. The situation gave Hampton a front-row seat to the racial injustice that was occurring all around him. While still in high school, Hampton organized a student chapter of the NAACP, served on his school’s Interracial Cross Section Committee, and protested the arrest of a classmate, and later the area’s first Black state representative, Eugene Moore. After his high school graduation, Hampton enrolled in a pre-law program at Triton College.

In 1967, Fred Hampton led protests to construct integrated public swimming pools in the Maywood area of the Chicago suburbs. Hampton, along with 17 others were charged with disorderly conduct after windows were broken, a shed was set on fire, and police clashed with protestors. The rallies, however, would succeed and an integrated pool was built.

After considerable clashes with the NAACP and their strict rules, Hampton cut ties and joined the Black Panther Party in 1968. Although the goal of the Black Panther Party was originally to create patrol units for Black neighborhoods, it quickly gained traction as a Marxist group rallying for reparations. They immediately caught the attention of J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, and the group was monitored closely.

The FBI gained information about the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party via 17-year- old informant William O’Neal, in exchange for the charges being dropped after he was arrested for stealing a car. Fred Hampton became of special interest to the FBI while he was the deputy chairman of the group.

Fred Hampton used his position to connect different groups through the Rainbow Coalition in order to provide aid to low-income citizens by combining the member groups’ varied resources. The Rainbow Coalition included the Puerto Rican Young Lords Association, the Poor White Young Patriots Organization, and the Blackstone Rangers street gang. With Hampton’s growing support of and from the Black Community, the Chicago Police Department considered him a threat. 

On December 4, 1969, with a map of Hampton’s 2337 West Monroe Street in Chicago apartment, a 14-man team of police officers raided the home of Fred Hampton, as it was often used as a headquarters for the Black Panther Party. Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were both murdered in the raid, and four others were severely injured. Among the survivors was Fred Hampton’s pregnant common-law wife, Deborah Johnson, later known as Akua Njeri. She and the others were arrested and charged with attempted murder, aggravated battery, and unlawful use of weapons. After the raid, it was revealed that of the almost 100 shots fired, all of them came from police except for one.

Njeri recalled that she could not wake Hampton during the raid, and that a police officer remarked “he’s barely alive” followed by two more shots, and the phrase “he’s good and dead now”. The murder of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark sparked outrage in the city and Black community. Many claimed that Hampton would have ended up becoming an integral member of the Black Panthers’ central committee, had he not been targeted by the FBI’s COINTELPRO program.

Fred Hampton was portrayed by Daniel Kaluuya in the 2021 film Judas and The Black Messiah. The film centered around O’Neal’s betrayal of Hampton.

Sources:

Washington Post

Britannica

 Kassidy Garland has had a great appreciation for reading and writing since she was young. She graduated from West Chester University in 2017 with a Bachelor’s Degree in English & Women and Gender Studies. With a concentration in creative writing, Kassidy has 5 years of experience writing blogs, articles, and for social media. Kassidy is also pursuing a Master’s degree in IT with a concentration in Web Development. Based out of Philadelphia, Kassidy loves to write about a number of topics and looks forward to sharing her passion with those at FunTimes Magazine. 

Read more from Kassidy Garland:

Malcolm X: A Leader By All Means Necessary

Due to Malcolm X’s work, the words to describe African American people changed to “Black” and “Afro-American” rather than “Negro” and “colored”. Read More »