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49-years ago today, activist Fred Hampton was murdered by Chicago police & the FBI. He was 21, radical, clear-eyed, purposeful. It was his power & potential that made him a target of COINTELPRO & the white supremacist ideology that underwrote it. (thread)
As a teenager, Hampton immersed himself in the writings of Black intellectuals, memorized speeches by Malcolm X & MLK, organized Ss at Proviso East High School to demand more Black teachers, & led a walkout to protest the exclusion of Black nominees for homecoming queen.
In 1965, Hampton helped found & chaired the West Suburban Youth Chapter of the NAACP. Hampton organized young people in a campaign to build a public pool & recreation center in Maywood, the suburb in which he lived with his parents, Iberia and Francis Hampton.
The Hamptons came to Chicago from Louisiana in the 1930s. Their neighbor? Mamie Till. When Till’s regular babysitter was unavailable, Iberia babysat Emmett. Fred was born in 1948. That would make him seven years old when Emmett was murdered in Mississippi. https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/murder-of-emmett-till
As chairman of the Chicago BPP, Hampton organized the free breakfast for children program, taught political education classes, & worked with groups across the city to build something like a “Rainbow coalition.” https://kairoscenter.org/original-rainbow-coalition-seminar/
In Eyes on the Prize, Howard Saffold, of the Afro-American Patrolman's League & the Chicago PD, explains why Hampton was so dangerous to protectors of the status quo:
Director J. Edgar Hoover ordered the FBI to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the Black Panther Party & other Black activist organizations to “prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement.”
Elaine Brown: “Fred was...one of the most dynamic human beings I had ever met...You could not not be moved by Fred Hampton.”
On Dec. 4th, 1969, using a floorplan of Hampton’s apartment provided by an FBI informant, a 14-man team of Chicago police opened fire on the sleeping Panthers at 4:45am. Hampton was assassinated, shot in the head at close range. Panther Mark Clark was also killed in the raid.
14 years after Emmett Till’s body was famously displayed at the A.A. Rayner Funeral Home, as an incontrovertible indictment of the United States’ violent commitment to white supremacy, Fred Hampton’s body was laid out for public viewing — also at the Rayner Funeral Home.
Hampton’s tombstone reads, “Fred said, ‘If I were free, what would I spend my life doing?’”
Today I am remembering Fred Hampton — 21-year old freedom fighter — and thinking about all that is left to do, fight for, struggle against, & achieve in the project for which he sacrificed his life. #TDIH
