Fred Hampton, Twenty-One Years Old

Fred Hampton was twenty-one years old. He had grown up in Maywood, a suburb west of Chicago, where he had been an honor student and a youth organizer for the NAACP before joining the Black Panther Party. By the fall of nineteen sixty-nine, he was the Illinois chapter's chairman and one of the most effective young organizers in the country. He had done something that most people with power in Chicago considered genuinely dangerous: he had put together an interracial coalition that included Chicago street gangs, a white Appalachian working-class youth group called the Young Patriots, and Puerto Rican activists from the Young Lords. He called it the Rainbow Coalition. The FBI's COINTELPRO program had been targeting him for months.

At four thirty in the morning on December fourth, nineteen sixty-nine, officers from the Cook County State's Attorney's Office, working with FBI intelligence, raided the apartment at two thousand three hundred thirty-seven West Monroe Street on the city's West Side. The raid lasted less than two minutes. Hampton was shot while he was in bed, beside his eight-months-pregnant fiancee. He was killed there. Mark Clark, another Panther, was killed in the same raid. The State's Attorney called it a fierce gun battle. Physical evidence later showed that the occupants of the apartment had fired one shot, probably as Clark fell, while the raiding party had fired more than ninety.

A federal lawsuit proceeded for thirteen years. It settled in nineteen eighty-two for one-point-eight-five million dollars. There was no admission of wrongdoing. Evidence that emerged during the litigation included the apartment's floor plan drawn by an FBI informant who had been inside the unit before the raid, and toxicology findings suggesting Hampton had been sedated before the officers entered.

The apartment building is gone. A small memorial in the neighborhood marks where it stood. Hampton was twenty-one years old, and he had been organizing in Chicago for less than three years.