Fredrick Allen Hampton was an American activist and revolutionary socialist. He came to prominence in Chicago as chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. Hampton was shot and killed in his bed during a predawn raid at his Chicago apartment.
About Fred Hampton in brief
Fredrick Allen Hampton was an American activist and revolutionary socialist. He came to prominence in Chicago as chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. In December 1969, Hampton was shot and killed in his bed during a predawn raid at his Chicago apartment. A civil lawsuit was later filed on behalf of the survivors and the relatives of Hampton and Mark Clark. It was resolved in 1982 by a settlement of USD 1. 85 million; the City of Chicago, Cook County, and the federal government each paid one-third to a group of nine plaintiffs. Given revelations about the illegal COINTELPRO program and documents associated with the killings, scholars now widely consider Hampton’s death an assassination under the FBI’s initiative. The FBI tried to subvert Hampton’s activities in Chicago, sowing disinformation among black progressive groups and placing a counterintelligence operative in the local Panthers. In this capacity, he founded the Rainbow Coalition, a prominent multicultural political organization that initially included the Black Panthers, Young Patriots and the Young Lords, and an alliance among major Chicago street gangs to help them end infighting and work for social change. The Rainbow Coalition was later joined nationwide by Students for a Democratic Society, the Brown Berets, Ats Its Berets I, the Red Guard Party and the M.A.S.C.E. The coalition was based on common action of poverty, corruption, substandard housing, and police brutality. If there was a “rainbow in the sky,” it was a sign of hope for the future of the black community, the author says.
In May 1969, the coalition announced that it had formed a nonaggression pact among Chicago’s most powerful street gangs. It led to the leadership of Cha Cha Jimenez, leading to the formation of the Chicago Police Department’s Wicker Park Welfare Office. He was arrested twice with Jose Jose Jimenez at the 18th District Police Station, charged with mob action at a peaceful picket of the office. As a youth, Hampton wanted of playing center field for the New York Yankees. He graduated from Proviso East High School with honors and varsity letters and a Junior Achievement Award in 1966 and enrolled at Triton Junior College in nearby River Grove, Illinois, where he majored in pre-law. In his capacity as an NAACP youth organizer, he began to demonstrate natural leadership abilities; from a community of 27,000, he was able to muster a youth group 500-members strong. In November 1968 he joined the Party’s nascent Illinois chapter, founded in late 1967 by Bob Brown, a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizer. Over the next year, Hampton and his friend and associates made a number of significant achievements in Chicago. Perhaps his most important was his brokering of aNonaggression Pact Among Chicago’s Most Powerful Street Gangs. Hampton strove to forge a class-conscious, multiracial alliance among the BPP, the neo-confederate Young Patriots Organization, and The Young Lords. He used his knowledge of law as a defense.
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This page is based on the article Fred Hampton published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 29, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
