History of Fred Hampton in Timeline

August 30, 1948

Fredrick Allen Hampton Sr. (August 30, 1948 – December 4, 1969) was an African American activist and revolutionary socialist. He came to prominence in his late teens and early 20s in Chicago as deputy chairman of the national Black Panther Party and chair of the Illinois chapter. He founded the anti-racist, anti-classist Rainbow Coalition, a prominent multicultural political organization that initially included Black Panthers (which organized African Americans), Young Patriots (which organized White Southerners), and the Young Lords (which organized Puerto Ricans), and an alliance among major Chicago street gangs to help them end infighting and work for social change. Hampton was a Marxist–Leninist, and he considered fascism the greatest threat to African American communities.

August 30, 1948

Fredrick Allen Hampton was born on August 30, 1948, in present-day Summit Argo, Illinois (generally shortened to Summit), and moved with his parents to another Chicago suburb, Maywood, at age 10. His parents had come from Louisiana as part of the Great Migration of African Americans in the early 20th century out of the South. They both worked at the Argo Starch Company, a corn starch processor. As a youth, Hampton was gifted both in the classroom and athletically, and hoped to play center field for the New York Yankees. At 10 years old, he started hosting weekend breakfasts for other children from the neighborhood, cooking the meals himself in what could be described as a precursor to the Panthers' free breakfast program. In high school, he led walkouts protesting black students' exclusion from the competition for homecoming queen and calling on officials to hire more black teachers and administrators. Hampton graduated from Proviso East High School with honors and varsity letters, and a Junior Achievement Award, in 1966.

1966

In 1966, Fred Hampton turned 18. At that time, he started identifying with the Third World socialist struggles, as well as reading communist revolutionaries Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Zedong. Shortly after, Hampton urged not only peace in the Vietnam War, but also North Vietnam's victory.

1967

In 1967, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) identified Hampton as a radical threat. It tried to subvert his activities in Chicago, sowing disinformation among black progressive groups and placing a counterintelligence operative in the local Panthers organization. In December 1969, Hampton was drugged, then shot and killed in his bed during a predawn raid at his Chicago apartment by a tactical unit of the Cook County State's Attorney's Office, who received aid from the Chicago Police Department and the FBI leading up to the attack. Law enforcement sprayed more than 100 gunshots throughout the apartment; the occupants fired once. During the raid, Panther Mark Clark was also killed and several others were seriously wounded. In January 1970, the Cook County Coroner held an inquest; the coroner's jury concluded that Hampton's and Clark's deaths were justifiable homicides.

1967

The FBI opened a file on Hampton in 1967. It tapped Hampton's mother's phone in February 1968 and by May placed Hampton on the bureau's "Agitator Index" as a "key militant leader". In late 1968, the Racial Matters squad of the FBI's Chicago field office recruited William O'Neal to work with it; he had recently been arrested twice for interstate car theft and impersonating a federal officer. In exchange for having his felony charges dropped and receiving a monthly stipend, O'Neal agreed to infiltrate the BPP as a counterintelligence operative.

1968

In 1968, Hampton was accused of assaulting an ice cream truck driver, stealing $71 worth of ice cream bars, and giving them to children in the street. He was convicted in May 1969 and served time in prison. In a memoir, Frank B. Wilderson III places this incident in the context of COINTELPRO efforts to disrupt the Black Panthers of Chicago by the "leveling of trumped-up charges".

1969

In 1969, Hampton, now deputy chairman of the BPP Illinois chapter, conducted a meeting condemning sexism. After 1969, the party officially considered sexism "counter-revolutionary". In 1970, about 40–70% of party members were women.

1969

O'Neal joined the party and quickly rose in the organization, becoming Director of Chapter Security and Hampton's bodyguard. In 1969, the FBI Special Agent in Charge (SAC) in San Francisco wrote Hoover that the agent's investigation had found that, in his city at least, the Panthers were primarily feeding breakfast to children. Hoover responded with a memo implying that the agent's career prospects depended on his supplying evidence to support Hoover's view that the BPP was "a violence-prone organization seeking to overthrow the Government by revolutionary means".

April 02, 1969

Using anonymous letters, the FBI sowed distrust and eventually instigated a split between the Panthers and the Blackstone Rangers. O'Neal instigated an armed clash between them on April 2, 1969. The Panthers became effectively isolated from their power base in the Chicago ghetto, so the FBI worked to undermine its ties with other radical organizations. O'Neal was instructed to "create a rift" between the party and Students for a Democratic Society, whose Chicago headquarters was near that of the Panthers.

May 1969

Hampton met the Young Lords in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood the day after they were in the news for occupying a police community workshop at the Chicago 18th District Police Station. He was arrested twice with Jimenez at the Wicker Park Welfare Office, and both were charged with "mob action" at a peaceful picket of the office. Later, the Rainbow Coalition was joined nationwide by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Brown Berets, AIM, and the Red Guard Party. In May 1969, Hampton called a press conference to announce that the coalition had formed. What the coalition groups would do was based on common action. Some of their joint issues were poverty, racism, corruption, police brutality, and substandard housing. If there was a protest or a demonstration, the groups would attend the event and support each other.

July 16, 1969

Documents secured by Senate investigators in the early 1970s revealed that the FBI actively encouraged violence between the Panthers and other radical groups; this provoked multiple murders in cities throughout the country. On July 16, 1969, an armed confrontation between party members and the Chicago Police Department resulted in one BPP member being mortally wounded, and six others arrested on serious charges.

November 13, 1969

On the night of November 13, 1969, while Hampton was in California, Chicago police officers John J. Gilhooly and Frank G. Rappaport were killed in a gun battle with Panthers; one died the next day. A total of nine police officers were shot. Spurgeon Winter Jr, a 19-year-old Panther, was killed by police. Another Panther, Lawrence S. Bell, was charged with murder. In an unsigned editorial headlined "No Quarter for Wild Beasts", the Chicago Tribune urged that Chicago police officers approaching suspected Panthers "should be ordered to be ready to shoot."

December 06, 1969

Two days after the killings of Hampton and Clark, on December 6, 1969, members of the Weathermen destroyed numerous police vehicles in a retaliatory bombing spree at 3600 N. Halsted Street in Chicago. After that, the group became more radical. On May 21, 1970, the group issued a "Declaration of War" against the U.S. government and, for the first time, used its new name, the "Weather Underground Organization". They adopted fake identities and decided to pursue covert activities only. These initially included preparations to bomb a U.S. military non-commissioned officers' dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey, in what Brian Flanagan later said was intended to be "the most horrific hit the United States government had ever suffered on its territory".

1970

In 1970, the survivors and relatives of Hampton and Clark filed a civil suit, stating that the civil rights of the Black Panther members were violated by the joint police/FBI raid and seeking $47.7 million in damages. Twenty-eight defendants were named, including Hanrahan as well as the City of Chicago, Cook County, and federal governments. It took years for the case to get to trial, which lasted 18 months. It was reported to have been the longest federal trial up to that time. After its conclusion in 1977, Judge Joseph Sam Perry of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois dismissed the suit against 21 of the defendants before jury deliberations. After jurors deadlocked on a verdict, Perry dismissed the suit against the remaining defendants.

January 06, 1970

The blue-ribbon panel convened for the inquest on January 6, 1970. On January 21, they ruled the deaths of Hampton and Clark to be justifiable homicides. The jury qualified their verdict on Hampton's death as "based solely and exclusively on the evidence presented to this inquisition"; police and expert witnesses provided the only testimony during the inquest.

May 15, 1970

Released on May 15, 1970, the reports of a federal grand jury criticized the actions of the police, the surviving Black Panthers, and the Chicago news media. The grand jury called the police department's raid "ill conceived" and said many errors were committed during the post-raid investigation and reconstruction of the events. It said that the surviving Black Panthers' refusal to cooperate hampered the investigation, and that the press "improperly and grossly exaggerated stories".

1971

The Murder of Fred Hampton is a documentary shot from within the movement, released in 1971. It has no narration, relying solely on footage shot from within the Black Panther organization and portraying Hampton and his colleagues on their own terms.

1979

The plaintiffs appealed. In 1979, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago found that the government had withheld relevant documents, thereby obstructing the judicial process. Reinstating the case against 24 of the defendants, the Court of Appeals ordered a new trial. The Supreme Court of the United States heard an appeal by defendants but voted 5–3 in 1980 to remand the case to the District Court for a new trial.

1982

A civil lawsuit for wrongful death was later filed on behalf of the survivors and the relatives of Hampton and Clark. It was resolved in 1982 by a settlement of $1.85 million (equivalent to $6.17 million in 2025); the U.S. federal government, Cook County, and the City of Chicago each paid one-third to a group of nine plaintiffs. Given revelations about the COINTELPRO program and documents associated with the killings, many scholars now consider Hampton's death, at age 21, a deliberate assassination at the FBI's initiative.

1982

In 1982, the City of Chicago, Cook County, and the federal government agreed to a settlement in which each would pay $616,333 (equivalent to $2.06 million per payee in 2025) to a group of nine plaintiffs, including the mothers of Hampton and Clark. The $1.85 million settlement (equivalent to $6.17 million in 2025) was believed to be the largest ever in a civil rights case. G. Flint Taylor, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs, said, "The settlement is an admission of the conspiracy that existed between the FBI and Hanrahan's men to murder Fred Hampton." Assistant United States Attorney Robert Gruenberg said the settlement was intended to avoid another costly trial and was not an admission of guilt or responsibility by any of the defendants.

1990

In 1990, the Chicago City Council unanimously passed a resolution, introduced by then-Alderman Madeline Haithcock, commemorating December 4, 2004, as Fred Hampton Day in Chicago. The resolution read in part:

January 15, 1990

A federal grand jury did not return any indictment against any of the individuals involved with the planning or execution of the raid, including the officers involved in killing Hampton. O'Neal, who had given the FBI the floor plan of the apartment and drugged Hampton, later admitted his involvement in setting up the raid. He committed suicide on January 15, 1990.

2009

Jeffrey Haas, with his law partners G. Flint Taylor and Dennis Cunningham and attorney James D. Montgomery, were the attorneys for the plaintiffs in the federal suit Hampton v. Hanrahan, conducted additional research and wrote a book about these events. It was published in 2009. He said that Chicago was worse off without Hampton:

February 01, 2021

Judas and the Black Messiah is a 2021 film about O'Neal's betrayal of Hampton. The film stars Daniel Kaluuya as Hampton and was directed by Shaka King. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on February 1, 2021. For his performance, Kaluuya won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.