Fred Hampton
*Fred Hampton was born on this date in 1948. He was a Black activist, Marxist-Leninist, and revolutionary socialist.
Fredrick Allen Hampton was born in present-day Summit Argo, Illinois, and moved with his parents to Maywood, Illinois, ten years later, where he grew up. Both are suburbs of Chicago. His parents had moved north from Louisiana as part of the Great Migration of Blacks in the early 20th century out of the South. They both worked at the Argo Starch Company in Summit Argo. As a youth, Hampton was gifted both in the classroom and athletically and hoped to play center field for the New York Yankees. At ten years old, he started hosting weekend breakfasts for other children from the neighborhood, cooking the meals himself in what could be described as a precursor to the Panthers’ free breakfast program.
In high school, he led walkouts protesting black students' exclusion from the competition for homecoming queen and calling on officials to hire more Black teachers and administrators. Hampton graduated from Proviso East High School with honors and varsity letters and a Junior Achievement Award in 1966. At that time, he started identifying with the Third World socialist struggles and reading about communist revolutionaries Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Zedong.
Shortly after, Hampton urged for peace in the Vietnam War and North Vietnam's victory. He became prominent in Chicago as chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and deputy chairman of the national BPP. In this capacity, he founded the antiracist, anti-class Rainbow Coalition, a multicultural political organization that initially included the Black Panthers, Young Patriots (which organized poor whites), and the Young Lords (which organized Hispanics), and an alliance among major Chicago street gangs to help them end infighting and work for social change.
He enrolled at Triton Junior College in nearby River Grove, Illinois, where he majored in pre-law. He planned to become more familiar with the legal system and use it as a defense against the police. When he and fellow Black Panthers later followed police in his community supervision program, watching out for police brutality, they used his law knowledge as a defense. Hampton became active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and assumed leadership of its West Suburban Branch's Youth Council. As an NAACP youth organizer, he demonstrated natural leadership abilities; from a community of 27,000, he mustered a youth group of 500 members. He worked to establish more and better recreational facilities in the neighborhoods and improve educational resources for Maywood's impoverished black community.
In the predawn hours of December 4, 1969, Chicago Police stormed into the apartment of BPP State Chairman Fred Hampton at 2337 West Monroe Street, killing both Hampton (age 21) and Mark Clark (age 22) and causing serious bodily harm to Verlina Brewer, Ronald "Doc" Satchel, Blair Anderson, and Brenda Harris. Hampton and Deborah Johnson, who was eight-and-a-half months pregnant with their child, were sleeping in the south bedroom. Sitting in the apartment's front room with a shotgun in his lap, Clark was on security duty.
