Just 21 years old when he was murdered, Fred Hampton nonetheless helped shape the course of the civil rights movement.
He grew up in Maywood, Illinois, a suburb just west of Chicago, and from an early age, he showed a rare ability to bring people together in a meaningful way and connect local concerns to much larger political ideas. As he rose within the Black Panther Party (BPP), he became known as a powerful speaker and strategist who believed change had to start at the neighborhood level.
Much of his work in the Black liberation movement focused on coalition-building and multiracial solidarity, which at that time made him both influential and threatening in a deeply divided nation. In order to truly understand who Fred Hampton was, it’s important to look at where he came from and what he was working toward that ultimately led to his tragic assassination in 1969.
Hampton’s Early Life in Maywood
Fred Hampton was born on August 30, 1948, on Chicago’s South Side to parents who had migrated from Louisiana. Like many other African American families in Illinois in the mid‑20th century, the Hampton family moved from the city to Maywood to seek better housing and schools amid ongoing segregation. Neighbors and teachers knew the Hampton family as rooted in community life, and many remembered Fred as a young man who had always been drawn to questions of fairness and justice.
During the 1950s and ’60s, Maywood, like many other towns, saw ongoing fights over who was allowed to use its public spaces, with white residents often resisting Black residents’ full access to facilities such as parks and pools. This shaped Fred Hampton’s early understanding that the fight for civil rights needed to take place at local as well as national levels.
Hampton’s Time as a High School Organizer
As a teenager, Fred Hampton attended Proviso East High School, where he became known as a strong student as well as an athlete. He quickly stepped into leadership roles on campus, one of which was serving on interracial student committees that tried to bring Black and white students into honest conversations about opportunity at a time when many suburban districts were only beginning to grapple with civil rights demands.
Hampton also joined and helped lead a local NAACP Youth Council connected to the West Suburban Branch of what was then called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In this role, he organized programs focused on tutoring and leadership development for Black youth in Maywood. He also pushed for better recreational facilities and safe spaces in Black neighborhoods at a time when Black neighborhoods typically received far fewer public investments than nearby white areas. In the late 1960s, he helped organize and lead protests over access to a public swimming pool in Maywood’s Melrose Park, which Black residents described as still being whites‑only, even though civil rights law barred racial segregation in public facilities. This and similar demonstrations led to arrests, including charges against Hampton, as law enforcement officers at the time typically treated civil rights organizers as troublemakers rather than community advocates. Many of these early experiences laid the groundwork for Hampton’s role in the Black Panther Party.
Hampton’s Involvement with the Black Panther Party
After graduating from high school in 1966, Fred Hampton enrolled at Triton College, where he studied pre‑law, determined to defend the rights of people facing discrimination and police brutality, all while remaining engaged with the concerns of the Black community around him.
During these years, Hampton learned from leaders such as Malcolm X and read texts from global anti‑colonial movements. He developed a Marxist‑influenced analysis that linked racism, economic inequality, and state power, arguing that change required both community programs and structural transformation to come to fruition. This philosophy led him to the Black Panther Party, which had been founded in California by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale and had quickly spread to Chicago, New York, and other cities.
In 1968, Hampton joined the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party and quickly rose to become deputy chairman of the Illinois chapter. Within the organization and in media coverage, he was sometimes referred to as a national deputy chairman of the Black Panther Party and became widely known as “Chairman Fred.”
Community Programs and the Rainbow Coalition
In Chicago, Fred Hampton was a key organizer of what became known as Black Panther Party “survival programs,” aimed to help people meet their basic needs while building collective power. One of the most influential of these initiatives was the Free Breakfast for School Children Program, which provided meals to kids while drawing attention to food insecurity in Black neighborhoods. Some historians argue that the free breakfast program helped inspire institutional programs addressing school breakfast and nutrition for low‑income children. The Panthers also helped launch health clinics and legal aid projects as well as increased local efforts to document police brutality in the area.
Hampton also worked to build the Rainbow Coalition, an alliance that brought together the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords (a Puerto Rican organization in Lincoln Park), and the Young Patriots (a group of poor white migrants from the South), along with other grassroots organizations. This coalition focused on issues such as housing conditions, health care access, low wages, public education, and excessive policing. The group’s goal was to focus on shared struggles and solutions, rather than reducing the struggles to a single community. The Rainbow Coalition’s cross‑racial, working‑class focus made Hampton stand out among Black power and civil rights leaders, drawing national attention to his work.
Growing Surveillance and the 1969 Raid
As the Black Panther Party grew, so did the focus from federal and local authorities. Under director J. Edgar Hoover, the Federal Bureau of Investigation launched and expanded COINTELPRO, a secret counterintelligence program that targeted civil rights and anti‑war organizations, especially the Black Panther Party, which Hoover considered to be a major threat. Through COINTELPRO, federal agents allied with local law enforcement and used surveillance, informants, disinformation, and legal pressure in an attempt to weaken the Panthers and other similar organizations.
Fred Hampton’s role as the deputy chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, as well as his keen ability to unite disparate groups, made him a particular focus of attention. The Chicago Police Department started monitoring his activities, with some officials portraying him as an agitator rather than a community organizer, language that made harsh responses from law enforcement much easier to defend. This increased local prosecutions, including the controversial “ice cream truck” case, in which Hampton was accused of taking ice cream from a vendor and giving it to children. These events were covered by outlets such as the Chicago Tribune and coincided with intensifying surveillance of Hampton by local and federal authorities.
On December 4, 1969, a special unit including Chicago police officers and staff from the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office under Edward Hanrahan carried out a police raid on Hampton’s apartment on Chicago’s West Side, which served as a base for the Illinois BPP chapter. At the apartment that night were Peoria organizer Mark Clark and Hampton’s partner, Deborah Johnson, who later took the name Akua Njeri. Reporters would describe a brief shootout during the raid, but later evidence showed that the overwhelming majority of shots were fired by police. Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed during the raid; Deborah Johnson survived.
It was later revealed that an FBI informant, William O’Neal, had given a detailed floor plan of Hampton’s apartment to authorities before the raid. During the investigation, there was evidence, including toxicology results, that Hampton had likely been drugged and was not awake when the raid began, suggesting he was likely incapacitated in bed and unable to participate in any alleged shootout. Hampton’s death and the killing of Mark Clark became the focus of a long civil rights lawsuit that ended in a settlement with law enforcement agencies that civil rights lawyers and commentators have described as an acknowledgment of serious wrongdoing. Today many historians and advocates refer to these events as the assassination of Fred Hampton or the murder of Fred Hampton, arguing that they clearly reflected coordinated actions by law enforcement instead of an operation gone wrong, as painted by some news outlets.
How Fred Hampton Is Remembered Today
More than 50 years after his death, Fred Hampton remains an influential figure in public activism. Educators and community leaders remember and teach his vision of multiracial working-class solidarity. In classrooms his life is often discussed alongside other major figures of the civil rights era, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.
Hampton’s death and the legal battles that followed have been the subjects of books and documentaries, including work by civil rights attorney Jeffrey Haas. Hampton’s story has also found audiences through artistic works, including the film Judas and the Black Messiah, which introduced many viewers to his life and his role in the Black Panther Party, as well as through firsthand accounts of the raid by Akua Njeri. Together, these works continue to keep the memory of Hampton alive.
And although Hampton is known nationally, his legacy remains deeply rooted in Maywood, where so many of his community-led initiatives started. These places, including the Fred Hampton House, are part of a living history that connects Hampton’s wide-reaching impact to the childhood experiences that shaped him and keep his mission living on.
Photo
Fred Hampton and Benjamin Spock at a protest rally outside the Everett McKinley Dirksen U.S. Courthouse, Chicago, 1969.
Public-domain photograph via Wikimedia Commons.