Fred Hampton (1948-1969), also called Chairman Fred, was a black American revolutionary, a rising star of the Black Panthers in Chicago. In 1969, with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King dead, Hampton was the most promising black leader alive. But then he was murdered in what turned out to be an FBI plot.
Hampton grew up in Maywood, a suburb of Chicago. In 1966 he went to Triton Junior College in hopes of becoming a lawyer. He joined the NAACP and got hundreds to join.
In 1968, after the death of Martin Luther King, he joined the Black Panthers and moved to the West Side of Chicago. He helped to start and run its services, like free breakfast for poor children, a free health clinic and political education classes. In 1969 he made peace between the main Chicago gangs.
Hampton was able to pull people together, even across lines of race and class. It was he who came up with the term “the rainbow coalition”. He made people believe in themselves and their power. It was hard to hear him speak and not be moved.
Most white people and the Chicago police saw the Panthers as a threat because they had guns – overlooking the fact that they only used them in self-defence, the right of all citizens.
Hampton lived at 2337 W. Monroe St. with his girlfriend and seven other Panther friends. On December 4th 1969 at 4:45 am the police came to his door.
As Edward Hanrahan, the state attorney general, tells it, the police knocked on the door and said they had a search warrant. In answer the Panthers opened fire. In the shoot-out that followed Hampton and Panther Mark Clark were killed; the others were arrested for attempted murder.
Hanrahan added:
We wholeheartedly commend the police officers’ bravery, their remarkable restraint and discipline in the face of this vicious Black Panther attack, and we expect every decent citizen of our community to do likewise.
Over 5,000 came to Hampton’s funeral. There Jesse Jackson said:
When Fred was shot in Chicago, black people in particular, and decent people in general, bled everywhere.
For two weeks after the shooting the Panthers let people walk through the house. It was clear that the police had come to gun down Hampton: the wall to his bedroom was full of bullet holes from a submachine gun (somehow they knew where his bedroom was beforehand). His mattress was soaked in blood. It was later proved that over 90 shots were fired, not a single one at the police.
The Panthers and the families of Hampton and Clark took the police and Hanrahan to court. It went on and on for 14 years with the government lying and denying the whole way. But then a judge made the FBI turn over 500 boxes of papers. And there among the papers was the hand-drawn layout of Hampton’s house. Another paper showed that the FBI paid a $300 bonus to William O’Neal – Hampton’s bodyguard.
Cointelpro. Look it up.
See also:
Yay, Fred! One of my personal heroes.
Great post, Abagond.
Ward Churchill’s “Agents of Repression” has an excellent overview of this material and what was found in those boxes.
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Great post!
It is amazing (not really) how the terms “legal”, “justice” and “law” could mean treacherous things to different people’s lives here in good old America.
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a sad, but moving, story. thank you for sharing this piece of history, i’m from the west side myself. his house is close to the cook county clinic (and the university of illinois in chicago), an area that’s becoming gentrified. whenever i go through there i always notice the amount of police patrols on the ‘border’ between the gentrifying (eastern) part and the western black part.
unfortunately chicago hasn’t changed much.
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Brilliant as usual, Abagond. Thank you for this.
There are times when this country really sucks.
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I don’t get it. Why would the panthers open fire when the police had a search warrant?
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They didn’t–that was proved later on. The FBI made a floor plan of his house (apartment?), went inside, and started shooting.
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The cops had the floor plan because they wanted to know EXACTLY where Fred would be sleeping. They came in shooting (claiming the Panthers had attacked them – they hadn’t) and several bullets “just happened” to riddle the very corner where Fred slept.
Funny how those coincidences work out, huh?
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I’ve read about this too. Good post. Cointelpro was something. Wonder what is going on today…
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We’ll probably only find out 20-30 years from now, if ever.
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@ Thad: you are absolutley right, and then if we are lucky.
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One of the problems is that today’s computer archives don’t leave a paper trail. We only found out about half the sh** COINTELPRO did because of the Media Pennsylvania FBI office break-in.
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@Thad: my thoughts exately. Besides, goverments are having a field day today compared the things FBI had to do back then: phonetapping, break ins, tailing, deep cover provocateurs etc.
NSA, FBI etc. use this media too for all kinds of things.
I asked recently how man can avoid detection today from a security expert (specialising in Net security etc.) and his answer was telling: by using letters or walking to the guy and telling him. Everything else can and will be traced, archived and secured and, most importantly, followed in real time.
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But don’t you trust your government, Sam? 😀
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Whew! Just when I think I can’t get anymore horrified at the things my birth nation are capable of, I get on this blog and educated (admittedly), yet appalled anew. Between this and the Adrian Schoolcraft post, you have to wonder if there’s any hope for America at all.
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@ Thad 😀 ööööööööööööhh… No.
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I didn’t know about this, man.
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Few people do, Danila, and those who do are routinely called conspiracy theorists, which is appalling given that COINTELPRO left quite a paper trail.
More people probably believe the government has alien bodies stuffed away in a hangar in Area 51 than know about COINTELPRO, let alone believe what happened really happened.
A sad commentary on America, indeed.
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I once had a “discussion” with a guy who believed that they have ufo humanoids captured in 1947 but refused to belive that FBI could have done anything like this. He was very angry that I had the audacity to even suggest something like this. He also believed that it was the panthers and hippies who tried to destroy America and was sure that FBI guys were just doing their job in Oglala reservation 😀
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Well, to give that guy the benefit of the doubt, the Panthers at least really WERE trying to destroy America. At least the America he believes in and loves. And the FBI WAS doing its job on Pine Ridge – Ward Churchill shows that. It’s just that its job is not what most Americans think
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@ you really think panthers were trying to destroy America? Whow! I know they liked to talk about it sometimes, but for real? Bunch of black guys, university educated guys, some war veterans, really believed that they could destroy the army, police, national guard, CIA, secret service etc.?
Some smaller fry apparently did, but I doubt how many of the leaders did. They must have known that neither mr Hitler nor the japanese could do it. How then some few hundred black dudes?
There are some pretty conflicting views about the FBI and what it did in the reservations back then, who was doing what etc. but it certainly was not that clear cut what you say, Thad, and you know it yourself too.
Well, maybe if we think that Cointelpro was its job then it certainly was doing its job…
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Well, check out the main texts they wrote. Check out, frex, Assata Shakur. Yeah, the stated goal back in those days for AIM, the Weathermen and the Panthers was to tear the motherf***ing thing down and put something new in its place.
Revolution, you see.
And yeah, it seems now that they were biting off more than they could chew, but back in the day, it seemed likely that the whole rotten structure would crumble with one little push. The Panthers were heavily influenced by South American urban guerrilla and revolutionary theater theory. The same general thing here in lead to people like my Professor, Daniel Aarãi Reis, taking on the U.S. government and the Brazilian government simultaneously and doing a fairly respectable job of it, too.
They thought big back in the day, gotta give them that.
Regarding the FBI on the rezes… It’s pretty clear they thought AIM to be a threat and they pulled no stops at going after them. A lot of AIM guys got killed and very few of their opponentes did. Furthermore, AFAIK, no one who was on the U.S. government’s side in the Pine Ridge civil war ever served hard time, no matter what evidence or witnesses were about.
You have another interpretation of that, I’d love to hear it.
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