The 21-Year-Old Who Terrified the FBI More Than Any Man Alive HT

 

Everyone knows Fred Hampton got murdered by the FBI. That part is not controversial anymore. The documents came out. The $1.85 million settlement in 1982 basically admitted it. But here is what nobody talks about. 3 months before they killed him, Fred Hampton stood on a stage in Chicago with a white man wearing a Confederate flag patch on his jacket. And they were not fighting.

They were brothers. This was 1969. Cities were burning. Black Panthers and white workingclass people were supposed to hate each other. That is how the system wanted it. But Fred Hampton looked at a group of poor white kids from Appalachia wearing Confederate flags and calling themselves the Young Patriots.

 And he told them, “You are in.” The media called him divisive. The FBI called him dangerous. His own people called him crazy. And honestly, looking back at photos of Black Panthers arm in-armm with men sporting Confederate symbols, it still breaks your brain a little. But Fred Hampton saw something everyone else missed.

 And it scared the government so much they had to kill him for it. Frederick Allen Hampton was born August 30th, 1948 in Summit Argo, Illinois. His parents came up from Louisiana during the great migration. Both worked at the Argo Starch Company. When Fred was 10, they moved to Maywood, a Chicago suburb where black families got the worst schools, the worst facilities, the worst everything.

 At 10 years old, Fred started cooking breakfast for neighborhood kids on weekends. Just him in his mom’s kitchen, scrambling eggs for whoever showed up hungry. That’s basically the origin story of the Black Panther breakfast program that would feed thousands. But in 1958, he was just a kid who noticed other kids were hungry.

 By high school at Proviso East, Fred was organizing walkouts. The school only nominated white girls for homecoming queen. Fred led protests until they changed it. He graduated with honors in 1966, won a junior achievement award, and lettered in three sports. Everyone figured he’d get out, make it, leave Maywood behind.

 Instead, he enrolled at Triton Junior College for pre-law, not because he wanted to be a lawyer, because he wanted to use the law as a weapon against police brutality. And he joined the NAACP. Here is where you see the gift. The NAACP West Suburban Youth Council was basically dead. Fred took it over. Maywood had 27,000 people.

 Fred built that youth council to 500 members. That’s nearly 2% of the entire town, and he was recruiting teenagers. In summer 1967, Fred led rallies because Maywood did not have a public pool. The nearest one in Melrose Park only let white people swim. Police arrested Fred for mob action, but they got their pool. The city named it the Fred Hampton Family Aquatic Center in 1970, right after they killed him.

 But here is what matters about Fred’s NAACP  years. He learned something crucial. Poor white families in Chicago were getting screwed by the same landlords, the same police, the same system. Fred started connecting dots that most civil rights leaders would not touch. In November 1968, Fred co-founded the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party with Bobby Rush.

 He was 20 years old. The Black Panther Party gets remembered for leather jackets and guns. But what Fred Hampton built in Chicago was different. Every morning at 6:00 a.m., he taught political education classes.  He organized free breakfast programs that fed hungry kids. He helped establish free healthc care clinics.

 He organized tenants fighting [music] slum lords. And he could talk. His speeches were not academic. They were electric. He broke down complex political theory into plain language anyone could understand. The crowds got bigger. By mid 1969, the Illinois chapter had hundreds of members. But the thing that made Fred Hampton truly dangerous was not the breakfast programs or the speeches.

 It was what he did in February 1969. He learned that a Puerto Rican organization called the Young Lords had occupied a police station to protest police harassment. The Young Lords started as a street gang. Puerto Rican kids in Lincoln Park getting pushed out by gentrification and brutalized by cops. Fred went looking for their leader, Jose Chaimenez.

He found him. They talked. Within days, both were arrested together at a protest. Fred brought the young lords into an alliance with the Panthers. Chacha later said that Fred took the Young Lords under his wing. He gave us the skills we needed to come right out of the gang and start organizing the community.

 The Young Lords and Black Panthers made sense to people. Both were people of color getting destroyed by the same system. Then Fred did the thing nobody expected. There was an organization called the Young Patriots, Appalachian whites who had migrated from Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia looking for factory work.

 They lived in Uptown, one of the poorest white neighborhoods in Chicago, and they wore Confederate flag patches. A Black Panther named Bob Lee went to a community meeting and heard young patriots talking about their problems, including police brutality, unaffordable rent, lack of jobs, and terrible housing. The same issues.

 Bob Lee stood up and said they were fighting the same enemy. When Bob Lee reported back to Fred Hampton, Fred immediately saw it. This was the revolution he had been talking about. Not black against white, not a race war, a class war. There was a problem, though. Those Confederate flags.

 Fred Hampton made a decision that even now seems impossible. He said the young patriots could keep wearing them. His reasoning was this. These white kids were not wearing Confederate flags because they loved slavery. They wore the patches because it was the only symbol of southern identity they had. They were proud of being working class, proud of not being the rich white people who looked down on them.

 Fred told his Panthers, “We are going to fight racism, not with racism, but with solidarity.” In spring 1969, they made it official. The Rainbow Coalition included the Black Panthers, [music] the Young Lords, and the Young Patriots. Later, students for a democratic society joined. Then, Rising Up Angry, the Brown Berets, the American Indian Movement, and the Red Guard Party.

 They wore buttons striped with black, red, brown, and white. [music] Everyone wore the same button, equal. The visual of it was striking. Fred Hampton in his black beret and leather jacket walking arm in-armm with William Preacher Fesperman of the Young Patriots [music] who had a Confederate flag on his jacket walking into meetings together holding joint rallies.

 The first meetings were tense. Bob Lee introduced himself and a white Appalachian man laughed because his name was Bobby Lee. He joked that his real name was Robert E. Lee. The room laughed and the ice broke. But not everyone thought it was funny. Some Black Panthers quit the party over this. They could not stomach working with white people, especially not ones wearing Confederate flags. Fred let them go.

 In July 1969, [music] Fred changed the Illinois chapter’s Tenpoint program. Where it had said white man, he changed it to capitalist. The media did not know what to make of it. They had spent years portraying the Black Panthers as anti-white militants. Suddenly, Fred Hampton was building the most racially integrated workingclass movement Chicago had ever seen.

 The Chicago police and FBI definitely noticed. They noticed when Fred negotiated a truce between rival street gangs on live television in May 1969, getting the Blackstone Rangers and Black Disciples to stop killing each other and start organizing politically. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had a memo circulating about preventing the rise of a black messiah who could unify the black nationalist movement.

 But Fred Hampton was doing something more dangerous. He was unifying people across race. The FBI tried to sabotage the gang truce by forging notes. They launched disinformation campaigns to break up the Rainbow Coalition. Nothing worked. By summer 1969, Fred Hampton was rising in the National Black Panther Party.

 Other leaders were getting arrested, killed, or fleeing the country. Fred became deputy chairman of the National Party. He was 21 years old. The FBI needed him gone. Here is what the media got wrong about Fred Hampton. They thought he was a black nationalist who happened to work with some white people for tactical reasons.

 That is backwards. Fred Hampton was a Marxist. He studied Marx, Linen, Mau. He believed the fundamental divide in society was not race. It was class. He believed racism was a tool that capitalism used to divide the working class. Keep black workers and white workers hating each other and they will never unite against the bosses.

 When Fred spoke, he would say, “We are not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism. We are going to fight it with socialism.” He would say, “Everything would be all right if everything was put back in the hands of the people.” The Young Patriots were not a prop to Fred. They were there because they belonged there.

 Poor white people getting evicted, getting brutalized by cops, watching their kids go hungry. They were part of the same struggle. Omar Lopez from the Young Lords put it simply. When the groups began to connect, they found they had a lot of the same issues. Their neighborhoods were changing. They lacked access to health care.

 They experienced abuse at the hands of police. The Confederate flag issue makes more sense when you understand this. Fred was not endorsing slavery or racism. He was saying these kids grew up in poverty in Appalachia. They got treated like trash by rich white people and the only cultural identity they have is being southern.

 What matters is who they are fighting for now. For a brief period in 1969, it worked. The Rainbow Coalition held joint rallies that drew thousands. They ran coordinated tenants strikes. They showed up for each other when police came around. They proved it was possible. And that is why the FBI killed Fred Hampton. In 1968, the FBI had recruited a 17-year-old named William O’Neal, who had been O’Neal had been caught stealing a car across state lines.

 Agent Roy Mitchell gave him a deal. Infiltrate the Panthers or go to prison. O’Neal took the deal. By 1969, O’Neal was Fred Hampton’s head of security. He had keys to Panther headquarters. He knew where everyone lived and he was reporting everything back to the FBI for $300 a month. Years later, after O’Neal’s identity as an informant got revealed, he admitted that Fred Hampton was genuinely a good guy.

He couldn’t find any dirt on him. No corruption, no violence, nothing. So, the FBI [music] stopped trying to arrest Fred and just planned to kill him. On December 3rd, 1969, [music] Fred taught a political education class at a church. That evening, he came back to his apartment at 2337 West Monroe Street with his pregnant girlfriend, Deborah Johnson, and several other Panthers.

 William O’Neal prepared dinner for the group. Fred fell asleep around 12:30 a.m. while talking to his mother on the phone. The autopsy would later show Secoarbatl in his system. a powerful seditive. O’Neal left the apartment around 100 a.m. At 4:45 a.m., a 14-man tactical unit burst into the apartment. [music] They fired 99 shots. The Panthers inside fired exactly one shot.

 Mark Clark reflexively pulled the trigger as he died in the first seconds. Fred Hampton never woke up. He was shot twice while unconscious in bed, then dragged into the hallway and shot twice more in the head at point blank range. He was 21 years old. His girlfriend was 8 months pregnant. The police called it a shootout, but forensic investigators saw the Lie.

 One shot from inside, 99 from police. Fred’s bed was soaked in blood. The trajectory proved he was shot while lying down. The Panthers opened the apartment to public tours. Thousands of people came through and saw the evidence. The truth took time to come out. In 1971, anti-war activists broke into an FBI office in Pennsylvania and discovered documents about COINTEL Pro, the FBI’s secret program to neutralize civil rights and black power movements.

In 1973, the Chicago Tribune identified William O’Neal as an FBI informant. In 1975, the Senate Church Committee confirmed that the FBI had specifically targeted Fred Hampton. In 1982, after 13 years of litigation, the federal government, Cook County, and the city of Chicago agreed to pay $1.85 million to the survivors and families.

 Each entity paid $616,333. It was the largest civil rights settlement in history at that time. G. Flint Taylor, one of the attorneys, said that the settlement was an admission of the conspiracy that existed between the FBI and Hanrahan’s men to murder Fred Hampton. On January 15th, 1990, William O’Neal ran into traffic on Interstate 290 [music] and was hit by a car. He died instantly.

 It was ruled a suicide. His uncle later said that O’Neal had cooperated with the FBI to reduce his own potential jail time, then gotten way over his head and was forever tortured by the guilt. O’Neal’s PBS interview about betraying Fred Hampton aired that same night. Here’s what happened to the Rainbow Coalition after Fred died.

 It collapsed without Fred’s unifying presence and organizational genius. It fell apart, but the ideas didn’t die. In 1983, Chicago elected its first black mayor, Harold Washington. Bobby Rush, Fred’s co-founder of the Illinois Panthers, later said Washington’s election was directly linked to Fred Hampton’s organizing groundwork.

 Jose Chaa Gimenez organized a rally for Washington that drew 100,000 Latino residents. The Sun Times described Washington greeting the crowd in Spanish [music] with words about unity and strength. In 1984, Jesse Jackson launched his presidential campaign and called it the Rainbow Coalition. He never credited Fred Hampton.

 He stripped away the class analysis and the socialism and turned it into a standard Democratic Party operation. It wasn’t the same thing, but he took the name and the free breakfast program Fred helped establish. [music] In 1975, six years after they killed him, the federal government institutionalized the school breakfast program.

 They had tried to destroy the Panthers breakfast [music] program, calling it indoctrination. Then they adopted it as official policy. Fred Hampton’s FBI file shows that J. Edgar Hoover was personally involved in targeting him. Hoover feared that Hampton could become the messiah who unified not just black nationalist movements but workingclass people across racial lines.

 Hoover was right to be scared. Fred Hampton proved it was possible. For eight months in 1969, the Rainbow Coalition showed that poor black people, Puerto Ricans, and whites could organize together, fight together, and win together. The media called Fred Hampton divisive. He made white liberals uncomfortable with his Marxism, white conservatives uncomfortable with his militancy, black nationalists uncomfortable with his multi-racial organizing, and the FBI uncomfortable with his effectiveness.

But divisive is the wrong word for someone who united street gangs, built coalitions across racial lines, and fed thousands of hungry children while teaching political education at 6:00 a.m. every morning. Fred Hampton was 21 years old when they killed him. He had been organizing for 5 years. In those five years, he went from hosting weekend breakfast in his mom’s kitchen to leading the most innovative coalition politics Chicago had ever seen.

 People argue about what he could have become if he had lived. Bobby Rush served 30 years in Congress. Chacha Himenez influenced Chicago politics for decades. But the question is not what Fred Hampton could have become. He already was it. At 21, he had built something that scared the FBI enough to assassinate him.

 That is the whole story right there.