Fred Hampton

Fredrick Allen Hampton was born on August 30, 1948, in Chicago and raised in Maywood, Illinois — a working-class suburb just west of the city. He was a standout student and athlete at Proviso East High School, where he excelled academically and led the school's baseball team. He had an offer to play professionally. He turned it down.

By his late teens, Hampton had joined the Maywood chapter of the NAACP Youth Council, which he built from 700 to 500 to 2,000 members through door-to-door organizing. He secured a swimming pool for Maywood's Black community — the city had been refusing the request for years — not through protest but through sustained political pressure. He was 18. He was already the most effective organizer in the county.

Hampton joined the Black Panther Party in 1968 and rose to Deputy Chairman of the Illinois chapter and then to Chairman within months. He was not promoted because of ideology. He was promoted because he could walk into a room of people who hated each other and make them want to work together. That gift was what made him the most dangerous person J. Edgar Hoover's FBI was tracking in 1969.

Hampton's most extraordinary achievement was the Rainbow Coalition — a multiracial political alliance he built in Chicago in 1969. Its members included the Black Panther Party, the Young Patriots Organization (poor white Appalachian migrants living in Uptown Chicago), and the Young Lords (Puerto Rican nationalists). Hampton also negotiated a ceasefire between the Blackstone Rangers and the Disciples — Chicago's two largest street gangs — and began the process of converting both into political organizations.

The Young Patriots were, on paper, an impossible coalition partner. Their members were from Appalachia, many had Confederate flag patches, many had grown up in communities with deep anti-Black racism. Hampton went to them anyway. He argued that poor white people and poor Black people shared a material enemy — not each other. The Appalachian migrants in Uptown Chicago were being exploited by the same slumlords and excluded by the same city services as the Black residents of the West Side. Hampton called it "class before race" and backed it with specific policy work on housing, health care, and police brutality that affected all of them.

The FBI assessed the Rainbow Coalition as an existential threat — not because it was violent, but because it worked. A multiracial working-class coalition organized around material demands had the potential to disrupt the political coalitions that kept existing power structures in place. Hampton was 20 years old. He had built it in under a year.

William O'Neal was recruited by FBI Special Agent Roy Mitchell in 1968. O'Neal had been arrested for car theft and impersonating a federal officer; Mitchell offered to make the charges disappear in exchange for infiltrating the Black Panther Party. O'Neal joined the Party, gained Hampton's trust, and rose to become his personal bodyguard and chief of security for the Illinois chapter.

In November 1969, O'Neal provided FBI agent Mitchell with a detailed floor plan of Fred Hampton's apartment at 2337 West Monroe Street — marking the location of every room, the positions of the beds, and the location of Hampton's bedroom specifically. Mitchell passed the floor plan to the Cook County State's Attorney's office, which was planning what it described as a weapons raid. The raid was scheduled for 4:00 a.m. on December 4, 1969 — a time when Hampton would be asleep.

O'Neal also, the evidence strongly suggests, drugged Hampton the night before — putting secobarbital in his drink at a late gathering. Hampton fell asleep during a phone call that night, which was unusual for him. The toxicology report from the Cook County coroner found a significant amount of secobarbital in his blood at the time of death. Hampton's comrades who were present that night testified that he was exceptionally difficult to rouse.

The Cook County State's Attorney called it a justified raid on armed revolutionaries. An independent investigation commissioned by the Chicago City Council found that the police had fired 90–99 bullets and the Panthers had fired at most one. The State's Attorney's office had told the press that Panthers were shooting first and asking questions later. The bullet holes in the apartment ran in one direction — inward.

Mark Clark, the Peoria chapter's defense captain, was also killed. He was sitting in a chair by the front door when police entered; his single shotgun round — the only Panther shot confirmed in the entire raid — was fired as a reflex as he was shot, already dying. Everyone else in the apartment survived, including Hampton's fiancée Akua Njeri, who was eight months pregnant with their son, Fred Hampton Jr.

The Cook County Grand Jury declined to indict any officers. The State's Attorney's version — a gun battle initiated by the Panthers — held for years. Then the COINTELPRO documents were declassified in 1976. The floor plan O'Neal had drawn, the FBI's operational role in planning the raid, the intelligence coordination between the bureau and the State's Attorney's office — all of it was in the documents.

Hampton's family, along with the families of other victims, filed a civil rights lawsuit. The case wound through the courts for 13 years. In 1982, the federal government, the City of Chicago, and Cook County settled for $1.85 million. They admitted no wrongdoing. No officer was ever criminally charged. Roy Mitchell, the FBI agent who ran O'Neal and delivered the floor plan, was never charged. William O'Neal received $300 a month from the FBI during his time as an informant, plus expense reimbursements. He died in 1990.

In 2021, the film Judas and the Black Messiah brought Hampton's story to a wide audience. Fred Hampton Jr. — born weeks after his father's assassination, raised by Akua Njeri — has spent his adult life as an organizer in Chicago, running the Prisoners of Conscience Committee. The FBI called his father the most dangerous man in Illinois. His father was 21 years old and had been building a breakfast program and a multiracial housing coalition.

Fred Hampton had been chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party for less than two years when he was killed. In that time he had built a chapter with hundreds of active members, launched free breakfast programs serving thousands of Chicago children, organized free health clinics, negotiated gang ceasefires, and constructed the most significant multiracial working-class political coalition Chicago had seen since the labor movement of the 1930s.

The question the Hampton assassination poses is not whether COINTELPRO was real — the documents establish it was. The question is what it says about a government that identified a 21-year-old community organizer running breakfast programs and housing campaigns as a threat requiring assassination. Hampton was not threatening to overthrow the government. He was threatening to organize the people the government had chosen to abandon. That, the documents show, was what made him the target.