Cascade Media Group New Series? who is this and what does he mean to you what does he mean to the black community at large And why should you know him if you are a part of the black community do your kids know him? Has he made any contribution to further the black agenda who is this man? This Is The Wake-Up Fredrick Allen Hampton (August 30, 1948 – December 4, 1969) was an American activist and revolutionary socialist.[1] He came to prominence in Chicago as chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP), and deputy chairman of the national BPP. In this capacity, he founded the Rainbow Coalition, a prominent multicultural political organization that initially included the Black Panthers, Young Patriots, and the Young Lords, and an alliance among major Chicago street gangs to help them end infighting and work for social change.
In 1967, Hampton was identified by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a radical threat. The FBI tried to subvert his activities in Chicago, sowing disinformation among black progressive groups and placing a counterintelligence operative in the local Panthers. In December 1969, Hampton was 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 in conjunction with the Chicago Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation; during the raid, Panther Mark Clark was also killed and several others were seriously wounded. In January 1970, a coroner’s jury held an inquest and ruled the deaths of Hampton and Clark to be justifiable homicide.[2][3][4][5]
A civil lawsuit 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; the City of Chicago, Cook County, and the federal government each paid one-third to a group of nine plaintiffs. Given revelations about the illegal COINTELPRO program and documents associated with the killings, scholars now widely consider Hampton’s death an assassination under the FBI’s initiative.[6][7][8]
