Fred Hampton:
The Chairman They Killed at 21

Fred Hampton grows up in Maywood, a suburb of Chicago, where he becomes president of the NAACP Youth Council at 16 — organizing campaigns for equal access to a public swimming pool and a local park that excluded Black children. He is a natural organizer: charismatic, analytically sharp, and capable of making complex political arguments accessible to anyone. When the Black Panther Party reaches Chicago in 1968, he joins and rises quickly. At 20, he becomes chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party.

His analysis differs from some Panther chapters in its explicit focus on class as well as race. He builds alliances with poor white groups — including the Young Patriots Organization, a Southern working-class white group in Chicago — and with Puerto Rican groups including the Young Lords. He calls this coalition-building his "Rainbow Coalition" — a term later taken by Jesse Jackson. His argument: poor people of all races have more in common with each other than with the wealthy people of any race who exploit them.

Hampton's most remarkable achievement is the truce he negotiates between Chicago's rival street gangs — the Blackstone Rangers and the Disciples — and his incorporation of gang members into political organizing. He sees gang members not as criminals but as mis-directed community power: young men with organizational capacity and territorial loyalty who lack political direction. He gives them direction. The gangs begin running Free Breakfast Programs. They begin attending political education classes. The FBI is alarmed.

The Rainbow Coalition at its peak includes the Illinois Black Panther Party, the Young Patriots (poor white Appalachian migrants), the Young Lords (Puerto Rican), the Brown Berets (Mexican-American), the American Indian Movement, and reformed gang members from the Rangers and Disciples. Hampton is building the kind of cross-racial, cross-gang political coalition that the Chicago machine — and the FBI — found genuinely threatening. An FBI memo from this period identifies Hampton as a potential "Black Messiah" who could unify radical movements across racial lines.

At 4:45 a.m. on December 4, 1969, a 14-person Chicago Police Department tactical unit — coordinated with the FBI and armed with a floor plan of Hampton's apartment provided by FBI informant William O'Neal (Hampton's own security chief) — raids the apartment. Hampton is in bed with his pregnant girlfriend, Deborah Johnson. He has been drugged: the FBI had arranged for O'Neal to spike his drinks with secobarbital the previous evening, and an autopsy finds a near-lethal dose in his system.

The initial police account: they were ambushed by Panther gunfire. Physical evidence showed otherwise. Evidence technicians found 99 bullets fired into the apartment from outside — and one, possibly two, fired from inside. Hampton never regained consciousness during the raid. According to Deborah Johnson, two officers entered the bedroom after the initial shooting. She heard one say, "He's still alive." Then two shots. Then: "He's good and dead now." Hampton is shot twice in the head at point-blank range.

The federal government pays Hampton's family $1.85 million in 1982 — an implicit acknowledgment of wrongful death. No officer is ever criminally charged. The FBI's COINTELPRO program, which orchestrated Hampton's killing, is formally ended in 1971 after its documents are stolen by activists and published. It had been running since 1956.