Chicago To Mark 55th Anniversary Of Fred Hampton Assassination With Cultural Events

According to Jakobi Williams, a professor and historian, it was Hampton's work with the Rainbow Coalition that led to his assassination

On Dec. 5, several events in the City of Chicago are set to honor the life and tragic assassination of Fred Hampton, 55 years after he and another Black Panther Party leader, Mark Clark, were killed in a raid by the Chicago Police Department.

According to ABC 7, several events are planned to mark the anniversary across Chicago.

Organizers of the events are referring to the day as “International Revolutionary Day,” and the slate of events will begin at noon with an event at the home Hampton was in at 2337 West Monroe Street when he was murdered.

Following the West Monroe home event, Black Panther Party members will meet and tour an expansive exhibit at Chicago’s DuSable Museum dedicated to Chairman Fred Hampton, which the museum unveiled in February 2023.

After the event at the museum concludes, the slate of events will wrap up with a concert at the childhood home of Chairman Fred Hampton at 8 pm.

According to the outlet, the Hampton House was saved, in part, through the efforts of a filmmaker, the Los Angeles-based Malakai, whose film, A Revolutionary Act, was used to help fund efforts to save the home in 2021.

According to Dr. Kim Dulaney from the DuSable Museum of Black History, Hampton’s fiancé at the time of his murder, Akua Njeri, heard the officers who killed Hampton celebrate what they had done.

“She (Njeri) boldly heard the shots, the extra shots, and then she heard the officer say something to the effect of ‘he’s good and dead now,” Dulaney told Fox 32.

Hampton’s son, Fred Hampton Jr., told the outlet that the museum’s exhibit is important to him because it contextualizes the life of his father and is not just a marker of his death.

“A lot of people ask me, How do you feel with seeing, hearing, about your father being assassinated at 21 years of age. If that was the first image I was to see, it probably would have a different impact. I think it’s imperative that people see the life of Chairman Fred,” Hampton Jr. said.

He continued, briefly describing his father’s work with the original Rainbow Coalition, a politically minded group composed of Black, white, and Latinx individuals who had a socialist understanding of class struggle and racial capitalism.

“Chairman Fred was able to go out there as a realist and again grapple and deal with the race and class contradiction,” Hampton Jr. noted.

According to Jakobi Williams, a professor and historian as well as the author of From The Bullet to The Ballot, it was this work with the Rainbow Coalition that led to his assassination in 1969.

“Think about this. Not even Martin Luther King or Malcolm X — two of the pillars we think of in this period — can get Confederate flag, Southern whites to form a coalition and work in solidarity. Not even they were able to accomplish that. But that’s what Fred Hampton and his Black Panther Party was able to do. And you can’t divorce the Rainbow Coalition from why he’s killed,” Williams told NPR host Gene Demby on a 2023 episode of Code Switch.

In the years following Hampton’s murder, it was revealed that the FBI and the Chicago Police Department orchestrated his death.

However, the legacy of Fred Hampton lives on in free breakfast programs, health clinics, and legal aid programs.

Some, like Williams, argue that Harold Washington’s election, which unseated incumbent mayor Richard Daley and made him Chicago’s first Black mayor, has its roots in Chairman Fred Hampton and the Rainbow Coalition.

According to Jeffery Hass, a founder of the People’s Law Office in Chicago and a member of the legal team that sued the Chicago Police Department and the FBI regarding Hampton’s murder, the police raid and subsequent murder of Hampton was seen as a way to build political careers.

“Hanrahan (Edward Hanrahan, the Cook County state’s attorney at the time of Hampton’s murder) was this very ambitious heir to [Chicago Mayor] Daley at the time. His people were more than willing to do this raid on the Panthers, thinking that it would build their careers,” Hass told History.com.

In 1982, after the federal government settled for $1.82 million with the families of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, who was also killed in the raid, the Justice Department said it was not an admission of guilt.

Flint G. Taylor, one of the attorneys representing the Hampton and Clark families, however, informed reporters that despite the claim of the Justice Department, “The settlement is an admission of the conspiracy that existed between the F.B.I. and Hanrahan’s men to murder Fred Hampton.”