5

Fred and the Rise of the Panthers

When Fred Hampton turned eighteen in 1966, he refused to register for the draft. The year before, the United States had started bombing North Vietnam. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) led the campaign to register Southern blacks to vote and set up Freedom Schools in Mississippi. They opposed fighting and dying for democracy in Vietnam when registering to vote in Mississippi could be a capital offense for blacks. In 1966, Muhammad Ali refused to register for the draft, declaring, “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?” He also was well known for the more succinct version: “I ain’t got no quarrel with the Vietcong. No Vietcong ever called me Nigger.”

Fred decided with many others, “Hell, no, we won’t go.” He was reading Mao Tse-Tung, Che Guevara, and Ho Chi Minh and identified with the socialist struggles of the Third World. Soon he declared he was not just for “peace in Vietnam,” but “victory in Vietnam” for the Vietnamese. In 1966, Fred’s opposition to the U.S. war effort was contrary to the views expressed by Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the NAACP, the two civil rights organizations with whom he was working.

Fred’s evolution cannot be separated from the political events and movements around him. In 1964 riots broke out in Harlem. The following year a riot erupted in the Watts neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles in response to an incident of police harassment. In the five days of looting and setting fires that followed, thirty-six black people were killed, one thousand were injured, and four thousand were arrested. The Public Accommodations Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 did nothing to change the conditions of blacks in ghettos outside the South. There was a consensus among civil rights groups: they had to confront the poverty and discrimination facing urban blacks—problems caused more by institutional practices and economic inequality than Jim Crow laws.

In 1966, James Meredith, the first black to integrate the University of Mississippi, organized a march from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi. SNCC organizer Cleveland Sellers described what happened:

Meredith is shot walking down the highway in Mississippi. Meredith was marching against fear in Mississippi. No better place for us to then … introduce Black Power. We had talked about “Freedom Now”; we had talked about anti-Vietnam; we had different issues along the way. So when we talked about Black Power it was in a political context of building political institutions and social institutions in the black community, where we worked. I had no idea, and I’m being honest, that Black Power was going to take off the way it did. The only other incident that I can think of that took off like Black Power was the emergence of Malcolm X.

The response of the media and most whites to the term Black Power was swift, negative, and hysterical. Many saw Black Power as an attack on all white people. Blacks saw it differently. SNCC organizer Courtland Cox explained: “It delivered a positive message to them (the black community). It said ‘You are beautiful, you must be strong, you have a proud history, and there’s strength in unity.’” The message of Black Power resonated with Fred Hampton. He saw Black Power not as a tool to attack whites but as a concept to bring blacks together and build their confidence. Fred said that “blackness was what was in your heart, not the color of your skin.” But any symbol of black unity, including the modest Afro that Fred wore, threatened many whites.

In 1966 high school senior Fred Hampton was working on his own version of black empowerment. He set up a black cultural center in Maywood with a black history section and continued his campaign to hire more black teachers and administrators at Proviso East. During this period two young Californians were similarly engaged. They demanded more black administrators and black history courses at Merritt College in Oakland, California. One was twenty-four-year-old Huey Newton; the other, thirty-year-old Bobby Seale.

Newton and Seale worked at the North Oakland Poverty Center. They went door to door asking residents what they needed and wanted. The information gleaned became the basis of the Ten Point Program when they formed the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense later that year. The program called for 1) freedom to determine the destiny of the black community, 2) full employment for blacks, 3) an end to capitalist exploitation of the black community, 4) decent housing, 5) informed education, 6) exemption for black men from military service, 7) an end to police brutality and murder, 8) freedom for black prisoners, 9) black juries for black criminal defendants, and 10) “Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice and Peace.”

The Black Panthers derived their name from the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, organized by SNCC in Alabama, which formed the Black Panther Party as an alternative to the all-white Democratic Party. The Black Panthers in Oakland adopted Malcolm X’s later position that while black culture and black history were beautiful and significant, not all whites were bad, and that whites could be allies as long as blacks controlled the main policies and the agenda for action.

One of the first actions of the newly formed Black Panther Party in Oakland was for members to arm themselves, which was legal in California as long as the weapons were not concealed. They followed Oakland police cars around the ghetto to monitor their treatment of black citizens. This outraged the Oakland Police Department and gave the Panthers immediate visibility. Incidents of police brutality decreased substantially during their patrols, increasing acceptance of the Panthers by the black community.

In Chicago Fred Hampton also spoke out against police brutality. As the leader of the NAACP Youth Chapter, he originally marched for raises of police salaries to get more professional police in Maywood. Later he pushed for changes to make the police more accountable and to give Maywood citizens the power to fire brutal cops.

Dr. King and his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, accepted the need to confront the issues facing urban blacks. Like other civil rights leaders, Dr. King attempted to address the poverty and discrimination highlighted by the urban riots that by 1966 had spread to Detroit, Michigan; Newark, New Jersey; and many other cities. That year he moved to Chicago to mount a campaign against racial discrimination in jobs, housing, and schools.

Dr. King rented an apartment on the West Side and led marches protesting the exclusion of blacks from many white neighborhoods of the city and its southwestern suburbs. Marchers were met by rock-throwing mobs with people dressed as Nazis. Dr. King was struck by a rock thrown in Marquette Park and later commented, “Swastikas blossomed in Chicago’s parks like misbegotten weeds.” As Bill Hampton saw it, “In the South the motto is ‘you can live near me but don’t get too big.’ In the North it is ‘you can get big but don’t live near me’.”

In 1966, the summer Dr. King was marching and living in Chicago, Fred graduated high school and worked at Corn Products in a job program designed for high school seniors and college students, earning money to go to college the next year. At seventeen he was supporting himself. One of the people Fred impressed most was Bill Taylor, the president of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union at the Corn Products plant. He describes Fred as “very dynamic, quick witted, and much less focused on himself than on the world around him. He was always trying to bring black people together.” He remembers Fred saying, “If you walk through life and don’t help anybody, you haven’t had much of a life.”

Bill Taylor walked with Fred in several of Dr. King’s marches. “Fred was enthusiastic for awhile,” Taylor said, “but in Jefferson Park, a heckler spit in the face of a woman with us. After that Fred told Reverend King he couldn’t keep marching for nonviolence in the face of the violent mobs around them.” Fred was not alone. At one rally young blacks booed Dr. King for his nonviolent response to the rock-throwing whites. When Dr. King threatened to march through Cicero, then considered the most racist neighborhood in Chicago, Mayor Richard J. Daley intervened. Dr. King called off the march in exchange for an agreement by the mayor and the Chicago Association of Realtors to promote fair housing practices. Some people in SNCC, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and local organizations saw the agreement as a sellout. They continued with the march.

Dr. King did not achieve the success in Chicago that he had in Alabama. His nonviolent tactics and religious outlook did not attract young blacks in urban areas. Meanwhile, his marches stirred up the whites. I watched on TV as news cameras showed the angry faces and Nazi signs of the white mobs who came out to jeer and attack Dr. King’s marchers. Mayor Daley and the Democratic Party were beholden to those Irish, Italian, and Eastern European whites to maintain control of city hall.

After Dr. King failed to make major changes in Chicago, Fred tended more toward Malcolm X’s message of self-defense. Still Fred continued to speak highly of Dr. King: “Every time I speak in church, I always try to say something, you know, about Martin Luther King. I have a lot of respect for Martin Luther King. I think he was one of the greatest orators that the country ever produced.”

Fred’s attention, like many other young blacks, was drawn to an event on the West Coast. In May 1967, thirty Oakland Panthers, twenty-four men and six women, went to the California legislature in Sacramento carrying rifles to dramatize their right of self-defense, as well as to protest pending legislation that would overturn the law allowing them to legally carry unconcealed weapons.

Even though Bobby Seale and many of the other Panthers ended up with six-month sentences for “conspiracy to disturb the peace,” and the legislation passed, the photos and TV images of the armed Panthers in leather jackets and black berets at the capitol steps was a shot heard ‘round the world. The media responded with horror at blacks with guns invading the legislature. Most whites felt threatened by the images they saw. Many young blacks had a different response and supported the action. Panther chapters started up in Los Angeles, Atlanta, New York, and Detroit.

Black militancy was on the rise in Chicago as well. In the fall of 1967, Fred and Jim Ivory, a respected dentist and NAACP member, addressed a Maywood rally of over a hundred young people. Fred urged his listeners to come to the Maywood Village Board meeting the next night to press their demands for a public swimming pool and recreational center.

The following evening a large crowd, mostly young blacks, went to the Maywood Village Board meeting. Not all were allowed inside. Fred urged the board to find a larger space or let those outside come in, even if they had to stand. The Maywood police panicked, tear-gassing the people who had not been let in. Angered by the police reaction, the young people left the village hall, and ran down Fifth Avenue, Maywood’s main street. They broke store windows and threatened residents, including Methodist minister Ron Graham and his wife. A guest at their home was punched by one of the teenagers running from the police.

Seeking a scapegoat, the Maywood police arrested and charged Fred and Jim Ivory with “mob action” because of their speeches the night before, even though they were inside the village hall when the violence took place. Fred stayed in jail for three days before he could post the five hundred dollar bail.

There was disagreement over the tactics of the marches and rallies led by Fred Hampton and the NAACP Youth Chapter. Some NAACP members thought they were too confrontational. The police felt particularly threatened by the sight of large numbers of black youth coming to the village board meetings making demands. While the adult NAACP chapter did not withdraw its support for the youth chapter’s activities, neither did it publicly endorse their tactics. As Fred’s friend and fellow activist Marvin Carter put it, “They were sort of behind us but not exactly with us.”

Following the village board meeting, Fred was targeted by the Maywood police and arrested on several occasions for technical traffic violations. The harassment became so great that Fred stopped driving. The local police were not the only law enforcement agency watching Fred Hampton. After his arrest for mob action, he was put on the FBI’s Key Agitator Index, a list of activists that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover ordered FBI agents to monitor closely.