Fred Hampton facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Fred Hampton
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| Born |
Fredrick Allen Hampton
August 30, 1948 |
| Died | December 4, 1969 (aged 21) Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
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| Cause of death | Assassination |
| Education | Triton College |
| Occupation | Activist, revolutionary |
| Years active | 1966–1969 |
| Known for | Chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party |
| Political party | Black Panther |
| Partner(s) | Akua Njeri |
| Children | Fred |
Fredrick Allen Hampton Sr. (August 30, 1948 – December 4, 1969) was an American activist. He came to prominence in Chicago as deputy chairman of the national Black Panther Party and chair of the Illinois chapter. As a progressive African American, he founded the anti-racist, anti-classist Rainbow Coalition, a prominent 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. A Marxist–Leninist, Hampton considered fascism the greatest threat, saying, "nothing is more important than stopping fascism, because fascism will stop us all.”
Contents
Biography
Early life and youth
Hampton was born on August 30, 1948, in present-day Summit Argo, Illinois (generally shortened to Summit), and moved with his parents to another Chicago suburb, Maywood, at age 10. His parents had come from Louisiana as part of the Great Migration of African Americans in the early 20th century out of the South. They both worked at the Argo Starch Company, a corn starch processor. As a youth, Hampton was gifted both in the classroom and athletically, and hoped to play center field for the New York Yankees. Fred couldn't accept injustice anywhere. At 10 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. 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 to use it as a defense against police. When he and fellow Black Panthers later followed police in his community supervision program, watching out for police brutality, they used his knowledge of the law as a defense.
In 1966, Fred Hampton turned 18. At that time, he started identifying with the Third World socialist struggles, as well as reading communist revolutionaries Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Zedong. Shortly after, Hampton urged not only peace in the Vietnam War, but also North Vietnam's victory.
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. In his capacity as an NAACP youth organizer, he demonstrated natural leadership abilities: from a community of 27,000, he was able to muster a youth group of 500 members strong. He worked to get more and better recreational facilities established in the neighborhoods and to improve educational resources for Maywood's impoverished black community.
Activity in Chicago
At about the same time that Hampton was successfully organizing young African Americans for the NAACP, the Black Panther Party (BPP) was rising to national prominence. Hampton was quickly attracted to the Black Panthers' approach, which was based on a Ten-Point Program that integrated black self-determination with class and economic critique from Maoism. He joined the party and relocated to downtown Chicago. In November 1968, he joined the party's nascent Illinois chapter, founded in late 1967 by Bob Brown, a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organizer.
In 1968, Hampton was accused of assaulting an ice cream truck driver, stealing $71 worth of ice cream bars, and giving them to kids in the street. He was convicted in May 1969 and sentenced to two to five years in prison. Writer Frank B. Wilderson III places this incident within the framework of COINTELPRO efforts to disrupt the Black Panthers of Chicago, in this case by "leveling [...] trumped-up charges".
In 1969, Hampton, now deputy chairman of the BPP Illinois chapter, conducted a meeting condemning sexism. After 1969, the party considered sexism counter-revolutionary. In 1970, about 40–70% of party members were women.
Over the next year, Hampton and his friends and associates achieved many successes in Chicago. Perhaps the most important was a nonaggression pact among Chicago's most powerful street gangs. Emphasizing that racial and ethnic conflict among gangs would only keep its members entrenched in poverty, Hampton strove to forge an anti-racist, class-conscious, multiracial alliance among the BPP, the Young Patriots Organization, and the Young Lords under the leadership of Jose Cha Cha Jimenez, leading to the Rainbow Coalition.
Hampton met the Young Lords in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood the day after they were in the news for occupying a police community workshop at the Chicago 18th District Police Station. He was arrested twice with Jimenez at the Wicker Park Welfare Office, and both were charged with "mob action" at a peaceful picket of the office. Later, the Rainbow Coalition was joined nationwide by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Brown Berets, AIM, and the Red Guard Party. In May 1969, Hampton called a press conference to announce that the coalition had formed. What the coalition groups would do was based on common action. Some of their joint issues were poverty, anti-racism, corruption, police brutality, and substandard housing. If there was a protest or a demonstration, the groups would attend the event and support each other.
Jeffrey Haas, who was Hampton's lawyer, has praised some of Hampton's politics and his success in unifying movements. But Haas criticizes the way Hampton and the BPP organized in a pyramidal/vertical structure, contrasting this with the horizontal structure of Black Lives Matter.
Hampton rose quickly in the Black Panthers based on his organizing skills, oratorical gifts, and charisma. Once he became leader of the Chicago chapter, he organized weekly rallies, participated in strikes, worked closely with the BPP's local People's Clinic, taught political education classes every morning at 6 am, and launched a project for community supervision of the police. Hampton was also instrumental in the BPP's Free Breakfast Program. When Bob Brown left the party with Kwame Ture, in the FBI-fomented SNCC/Panther split, Hampton assumed chairmanship of the Illinois state BPP. This automatically made him a national BPP deputy chairman. As the FBI's COINTELPRO began to decimate the nationwide Panther leadership, Hampton's prominence in the national hierarchy increased rapidly and dramatically. Eventually, he was in line to be appointed to the party's Central Committee Chief of Staff.
Assassination
In 1967, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) identified Hampton as a radical threat. It tried to subvert his activities in Chicago. In December 1969, Hampton was assassinated in his Chicago apartment by a tactical unit of the Cook County State's Attorney's Office, who received aid from the Chicago Police Department and the FBI leading up to the attack.
Aftermath
Five thousand people attended Hampton's funeral. He was eulogized by black leaders, including Jesse Jackson and Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King Jr.'s successor as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
A federal grand jury did not return any indictment against any of the individuals involved with the planning or execution of the raid.
Personal life
Hampton was very close with Chicago Black Catholic priest George Clements, who served as his mentor and as a chaplain for the local Panther outfit. Hampton and the Panthers also used Clements's parish, Holy Angels Catholic Church in Chicago, as a refuge in times of particular surveillance or pursuit from the police. They also provided security for several of Clements's "Black Unity Masses", part of his revolutionary activities during the Black Catholic Movement. Clements spoke at Hampton's funeral, and also said a Requiem Mass for him at Holy Angels.
Legacy
In 1990, the Chicago City Council unanimously passed a resolution, introduced by then-Alderman Madeline Haithcock, commemorating December 4, 2004, as Fred Hampton Day in Chicago.
Monuments and streets
- A public pool was named in his honor in his hometown of Maywood, Illinois.
- On September 7, 2007, a bust of Hampton by sculptor Preston Jackson was erected outside the Fred Hampton Family Aquatic Center in Maywood.
In March 2006, supporters of Hampton's charity work proposed the naming of a Chicago street in his honor. Chicago's chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police opposed this effort.
See also
In Spanish: Fred Hampton para niños
