Who is Fred Hampton?

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was formed in 1966 by a pair of Black college students in Oakland, California. With their military-style berets and raised-fist salute, the Black Panthers preached Black empowerment and armed resistance to racist violence, including at the hands of police. The Black Panther party also started a wealth of social initiatives, including a free breakfast program that helped feed thousands of hungry kids before school.

Hampton was an honors student from the Chicago suburbs who, as a youth leader with the NAACP, successfully campaigned to have a non-segregated swimming pool built in his hometown. When he joined the Illinois Black Panther Party in 1968, he quickly gained a reputation as a powerful speaker and a coalition builder across racial lines to fight police brutality and address poverty in Chicago’s most neglected neighborhoods.

“Hampton was this incredibly charismatic, young, dynamic leader who formed this ‘rainbow coalition’ with Puerto Ricans and poor whites from Appalachia,” says Jeffrey Haas, one of the founders of the People’s Law Office in Chicago and a member of the legal team that sued the Chicago Police and the FBI over Hampton’s killing. “He started a health clinic and a free breakfast program.”

That’s not to say that Black Panthers in Chicago shied away from confrontation and armed provocation.

“They very much had a militant, anti-police position of community control of police,” says Haas, who is also the author of The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther. “‘Off the pig!’ was one of their very provocative slogans, which to Panthers meant getting abusive police out of the community, but I’m not sure the police necessarily saw it that way.”

Chicago at the time was a hotbed of political protest and violent clashes with the police. When crowds took to the streets after the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Chicago mayor ordered police to shoot suspected arsonists. Later that year, police and National Guard troops pummeled antiwar protestors outside of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

When Haas and his legal partner Flint Taylor at the People’s Law Office first took on Hampton and Clark’s case, it quickly became clear that the state’s attorney’s version of the story was bunk. Ballistics experts found that all but one of the bullets fired in the apartment came from police weapons in contradiction to a false report from the Chicago Police’s own crime lab.

It was obvious that Hanrahan, the state’s attorney, was hiding the real reason for the violent raid, but no one at the time could have imagined how high up the conspiracy went to target Hampton and cover up his murder.

Then, in 1971, a group of antiwar activists broke into an FBI office in the suburbs of Philadelphia looking for evidence that the FBI was spying on leaders of the antiwar movement. What they accidentally uncovered was documented proof of the existence of a secret FBI scheme called COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) with orders to “disrupt, misdirect and otherwise neutralize” Black power movements.

It was under the auspices of COINTELPRO that the FBI spied on and harassed civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcom X. It was all part of Hoover’s efforts to prevent, in his words, the “rise of a messiah that would unify and electrify the militant nationalist movement.”

To the FBI, Hampton was another potential “messiah” rising up through the ranks of the Black Panther Party and being groomed for national leadership.

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