Fred Hampton and the Rainbow Coalition

Fred Hampton was born in Chicago in 1948 and raised in Maywood, Illinois, a suburb fifteen miles west of the city. He joined the NAACP's youth council at fourteen and led it to organize a successful swimming-pool desegregation campaign in Maywood by his junior year of high school. In 1968, at nineteen, he was recruited to the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. By November of that year he was the chapter's deputy chairman. By early 1969, at twenty, he was its chairman.

Hampton's distinctive contribution to the Black Panther Party was the Rainbow Coalition, a formal political alliance he brokered in 1969 between the Illinois Panthers, the Young Lords (a Puerto Rican organization), and the Young Patriots (a poor-white Appalachian-migrant organization active on Chicago's North Side). The coalition ran joint breakfast programs, joint health clinics, joint community-defense operations. It was, in 1969, the clearest operational demonstration in the United States of the argument that the structures of poverty cut across racial lines even as racial oppression intensified them.

The coalition made Hampton — who was also an extraordinary public speaker, an extremely effective community organizer, and twenty-one years old — a priority target of the FBI's COINTELPRO program. An FBI informant named William O'Neal, who had been installed in Hampton's security detail, provided the Chicago Police Department with a detailed floor plan of Hampton's apartment.

At 4:30 a.m. on December 4, 1969, fourteen Chicago police officers, acting under a warrant secured by the Cook County State's Attorney's office and coordinated with the FBI, raided the apartment. Hampton was shot twice in the head at point-blank range while asleep in bed next to his eight-months-pregnant fiancée, Deborah Johnson. Panther member Mark Clark was also killed. Subsequent investigation established that the Panthers fired at most one shot during the raid; the police fired approximately ninety.

The subsequent civil-rights lawsuit, Hampton v. Hanrahan, was litigated for thirteen years and settled in 1983 for $1.85 million, divided among the survivors and the families of the dead. It remains the most successful civil suit ever brought against the FBI for its COINTELPRO operations. Hampton's son, Fred Hampton Jr., born twenty-five days after his father's death, has spent his adult life working to preserve the political memory of the coalition his father built. The apartment where Hampton was killed is now a Chicago historical landmark.