A Revolutionary's Life and Death: The Story of Fred Hampton

Courtesy of Historical Materialism, Photo of Blank Panther Fred Hampton

All power to all the people, by any means necessary. That was the ideal through which Fred Hampton lived his life and the ideal that now dominates his legacy. Those were the values that led him in the late 1960s to steal $71 worth of Good Humor bars and allegedly give them to neighborhood kids, and it was the ideal that also turned his bars into one of a prison cell. It was the goal that led him to give the ultimate sacrifice for what he would consider a just cause. Looking at that life, at that great dedication to both his party and the people, what could we, as historians or the generally curious, take from Mr. Hampton’s life and sacrifice? What was the ultimate effect of his life’s dedication and sacrifices? Did Hampton’s life and his sudden death get America any closer to what he would call a class-based revolution; did it even have a significant effect in making the lives of the people he advocated for any better? Although some would convincingly argue that the forced brevity of Fred Hampton’s active organization within the Black Panther Party led to his influence being minimal and narrow, reasonable people should believe that Hampton’s work in creating community-based programs helped materially improve the lives of his community, his practice of class solidarity over racial barriers, and most importantly the effect his death had on Chicago’s society and America as a whole show that Hampton had an extensive and positive effect on his city and community. 

Fred Hampton, at the age of  21, was shot and killed in a raid orchestrated by the Chicago Police Department most likely at the persuasion of the Federal Bureau of Intelligence (FBI), a raid that even the FBI admits was “unnecessary, unjustifiable, and of questionable legal matter”  The raid is one of the most infamous in a campaign of political repression carried out and orchestrated by the FBI called COINTELPRO, organized into a campaign to cynically “expose, disrupt, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” a cacophony of Anti-Capitalist and Pacifist Anti-War voices under the J. Edgar Hoover FBI. Hampton was in no way the first Panther to be killed by police and the government, with the Black Panther Party being raided three times between June and November of 1969. This compounded with the fact that Hampton only began his Chicago chapter of the Panthers in November of 1968, initially points us to the idea that Hampton, whilst being something of a rhetorical giant, could not have any significant influence on the people of his community with so little of that precious time. This idea is devastatingly and absolutely naïve in its belief both that a year of active organization can only accomplish little, as well as the ignorance in saying that the FBI’s apparent assassination of Hampton had no effect in spurring on action in his locality and in his community in particular. Ignoring his death’s effect on his community would be an egregious example of historical revisionism that ignores both contemporaneous examples of Socialists, African Americans, and Liberal Moderates alike all gathering against the Chicago Police department at the time, with historically anti-panther persons even saying at the time of his death “I didn’t know Fred Hampton but I mourn him. I wasn’t a follower of the Panther cause he led but I was shaken by the news of his predawn death.”. This, if anything, should show any reasonable review without a historical bias that Fred Hampton did, at the very least, have some historical effect on his city, community, and the people of America as a whole. Something which will be further proven by my analysis of his positive effect on his community and people, contrary to the belief of the point expressed before. 

Despite his premature death, Fred Hampton was still able to establish a vast variety of different social programs within his community in order to both provide aid to the ailing and largely impoverished African American community within Chicago, as well as to provide what Hampton described as a “Educational Program” for his beliefs. Programs such as the Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren, Liberation Schools, and Free Medical Clinics were innumerably helpful in providing aid to Hampton’s community, and critical in positively affecting the image of the BPP. The point of these programs were to replace what Hampton and the Panthers viewed as an oppressive colonial type of power instead with a solidarity-based program of providing both social relief to the people, and also providing for the disassembling of colonial power structures. This idea is expressed when Hampton sympathetically rejects the idea of the proliferation of black-operated credit unions saying “I wish you had some literature about the educational thing here. Because, as far as we’re concerned, the way we look at the struggle, this all depends on the educational thing.”Understanding Hampton’s preference for programs that both provided solidarity and aid to his community, as well as providing a practical type of education to the leyman which the Panthers desperately pined for. These programs were also made not only to provide alternatives to colonial power structures, but also to act as a form of acquainting the general public en masse about what Hampton’s view of Socialism was, saying that “People came and took our program, saw it in a socialistic fashion not even knowing it was socialism.”. Any observer viewing from an objective lense can see that these Social Programs organized by Hampton were popping up in areas where the government failed the people, for instance, the Breakfast for Children program fed thousands of Children in Chicago, a city where the year the program was established, starvation increased by 15%. This again shows to the average historian and the generally interested that Hampton’s ultimate goal was a myriad of programs that acted to promote the people and their betterment, as well as to embrace Hampton’s self-acclaimed practically-minded dialectical materialist perspective. Hampton’s actions uniquely paint him as an organizer for a practical revolution, when those around him, both in the ‘New Left’ movement and in the renewed spirit of ‘Africanization’. Hampton insisted throughout his life that “We know that political power does flow out from the sleeve of a dashiki”, instead embracing the Black Panther Party’s ideal of organizing the lumpenproletariat both into a vanguard, and through that vanguard establishing a solidarity-based society. This consequently allowed Hampton and the Chicago Black Panther Party to truly, materially improve the society and community that they found themselves in, and shows how Hampton’s life positively influenced his community and Chicago as a whole. 

Fred Hampton, whilst having an incredibly brief repertoire of active organization within the Black Panther Party, as Hampton established and entrenched the Chicago Chapter of the Black Panther Party as a key force within the dynamic politics of his city and community, he also revealed his own unique style of organizing. That style of organizing was, above all else, an effort to unite the downtrodden and economically disadvantaged of all races into an organized effort to, as Hampton described it, “Fight racism with solidarity . . . fight capitalism with socialism” and build a materially better world for the people and communities around them. The most commonly cited instance of Hampton putting this unique ideology to praxis was the alliance he forged of the Chicago BPP, Young Patriots, and the Young Lords dubbed the ‘Rainbow Coalition’. Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition , with this unity of`Hispanic gangs and the Blackstone rangers shows both the sharply poignant ability for his rhetoric to unite peoples formerly diametrically opposed, but also his ability to put the core idea of the Panthers to praxis, the idea of organizing the lumpenproletariat for a political cause that may free them from the bonds of poverty. Hampton’s strategy of unapologetic class-conscious solidarity actually led him at odds with some in the movement for civil rights who Hampton believes practices an ideal of replacing capitalist oppression with black capitalist oppression, as opposed to breaking these acclaimed unjustifiable power structures with solidarity and socialism. Hampton strongly believed in this class-based ideal of ending racism, repeatedly saying that the two were intertwined, “through historical fact, racism had to come from capitalism. It had to capitalism first and racism a by-product of that”.  Hampton then, along with the Black Panthers and other similarly minded radicals of his time, led his own type of activism that rejected a cultural analysis of the injustices that African American people faced, and instead embraced a dialectical worldview in order to both help his own community, and join forces with the proletarian peoples of other communities in order to escape poverty for all. 

Despite Hampton having a deeply positive impact on his community, with his keen rhetorical ability being able to bring unity, and the BPP’s social programs aiding the impoverishedly, unfortunately , the largest impact Hampton had was not in life, but instead in how he died. His death remains one of the most infamous events of something nearing political repression, orchestrated by the United States federal government. To address how he impacted America and Chicago in death, the erroneous claims that Hampton and the Black Panther Party started the shoot out out must be addressed. According to an autopsy at the time of Hampton’s death, no powder burns could be detected on his hands, clashing with Police Reports that Hampton had shot at themAnalysis of bullet holes around the apartment where the Police killed Hampton showed that Police had massed heavy machine gun fire into the two bedrooms, and that there were at most two possible shots that Panthers could’ve retorted with. Not only were the Police, as a later FBI report would say, “unnecessary” in their violence, according to neighbors interviewed mere days after the raid, Police did knocked once, and then, without waiting for anyone to answer, woke Hampton and his compatriots to the sounds of gunfire in the morning. The compilation of this, along with other built up frustrations against the Police and law enforcement in the 1960s, gave Hampton’s death the significance that he deserved in life. Nearly 5,000 people attended his memorial service where “speakers . . . included youth gang leaders, university professors, welfare workers, businessmen and psychologists” showing how broadly his rhetoric affected his community as a whole, and how quickly his death had spurred people to action. Hampton, from his death, was able to spur the NAACP to personally implore the FBI to investigate the matter and the Police’s treatment of the raid”. Hampton’s ideal of uniting his community with other impoverished ones against a domineering and increasingly oppressive government could only be fully accomplished in death because of what he did with his life, “In martyring Hampton, the police created new black unity and electrified the dormant while liberal establishment” The Police took a man who was predominantly peaceful but controversial in rhetoric, and turned him into a messiah. Hampton’s education and eloquence made any Person of Color worry, even if just for a second, ‘could I be the next victim of a pre-dawn raid?’. If a smart, well-educated man from suburbia could be killed without any form of justice in America, what could a POC do to stay alive? That question is ultimately one of the key components that drove Hampton’s life work to the front pages of history.

Looking back at Fred Hampton's life and death, it can be seen that, despite the brevity of his time actively organizing within the Black Panthers, Hampton was still able to positively affect his community and country by establishing social programs to directly aid people in his community, practicing a rhetorical and organizational strategy of class-based solidarity, and solidifying his message and ideas in his martyrdom.  Hampton , through all of his life’s work and his death, embraces the idea and ideals of a well-groomed Revolutionary, Hampton lived his life as a skilled orator who used a class-based narrative to unite the lower-classes in what he viewed as an essential struggle for the people to have the power, recognition, and dignity that they under all circumstances derived. Hampton lived his life on the revolutionary principle of providing the basic wills and needs of the people to them. On the revolutionary principles of dedication, education, oratory, and organization. And ultimately, Fred Hampton took full embrace of the all too common principle of Revolutionary Suicide. Academically, the idea is to give yourself in soul and body completely to the cause of the people’s betterment. Hampton embraced that concept in totality, something even the furthest right of reactionaries could admire in principle. Today, the question today is whether the next generation of Progressive leaders can or will dedicate themselves, completely, to that idea. Dieing a revolutionary suicide, and living a revolutionary’s life. 

Author: John Valat de Cordova

This piece was initially submitted as a research paper in the Authors Honors U.S. History Class, but was then later revised to be published on this website

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