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Fred Hampton, the third child of Francis and Iberia, was born August 30, 1948, in Argo, a suburb on the southwestern side of Chicago. His parents grew up outside the small town of Haynesville in northern Louisiana. Their families farmed the land their great-grandparents had worked as slaves. Fred’s father, like many blacks from the rural South, moved to Chicago in the 1930s seeking employment. He found work at the Corn Products Company in Argo.
Among the Hamptons’ neighbors in Argo were Mamie Till and her son, Emmett. Mamie Till had come to Chicago from Mississippi a few years earlier. Emmett’s father also had found a job at Corn Products. One of Iberia’s first Chicago acquaintances was Fannie Wesley, Emmett Till’s regular babysitter. Because Iberia stayed home with her three kids until Fred, the youngest, was eight, she helped Fannie by sometimes watching Emmett, whom everyone called Bobo. Iberia told me young Emmett was “curious and quite rambunctious, a handful.”
It was difficult for a black family with three kids to find housing in the Chicago area. Black neighborhoods were crowded and expensive. In 1951 the Hamptons moved from Argo to a small house near a lake in Blue Island, a suburb of Chicago.
“I liked the place because it was more like where I grew up,” Iberia said. “But there were some rednecks there who gave our kids a tough time.”
Dee Dee, Fred’s sister, said she and Fred were frequently called into the principal’s office for fighting with the white kids after school. “Fred and me never started nuthin’,” she said, “but we didn’t let them call us names either. We got in a lot of trouble trying to set them straight after school. Together we did all right, but seems like we were always having to explain what happened on the playground to the principal.”
Iberia also got a job with Corn Products in 1956, doing quality control on the bottles and caps as they came down the assembly line. “They made me the union steward,” she told me. “I loved it. Once we cooked meals at the Union Hall for over seven hundred people, every day during a two-month strike.” Talking to Iberia, I got a glimpse of the source of Fred’s strength.
In 1958, when Fred was ten, his family moved to Maywood, a working-class suburb, at that time about one-quarter black, west of Chicago. Fred attended Irving Elementary School, across the street from their house. “All the kids loved Fred,” Iberia said, smiling. “And the teachers, too. Seems like he was never alone.”
Fred, like his mother, had a large head, although I could see from photos that by his teens he had also developed a solid, powerful body. But when Fred was younger, kids teased him, Iberia said. “They called him peanut head and watermelon head. He was upset for a while, but he learned to defend himself with words. He earned the reputation of ‘king of signifying.’”
I knew what she meant: called the nines in Chicago or the dozens in New York, signifying meant talking bad to people in an insulting but joking way, like “Your mama …” Fred’s friends from Louisiana told me, “Nobody wanted to take on his mouth,” but they also said a big grin usually followed his put-downs. He’d step back and apologize if he feared he had gone too far.
“When he was very young he fell and landed on his face,” Francis told me. This loosened some of his front teeth, and he developed a temporary lisp or whistle sound when he spoke. Francis said he overcame this problem by practicing speaking as clearly as possible. “Even in elementary school everyone recognized he was a sharp talker. He always had a mouth on him. Later he was a genius about speaking.”
“On Saturday mornings Fred would round up the neighborhood kids,” Iberia said in describing her son. “They would buy food and come back to the house, where they would cook breakfast together for themselves and all of us.” Fred knew some of the children didn’t get much to eat at home. “Francis and I didn’t have to do anything on Saturday mornings but eat,” Iberia said pointing to the same table in the dining room where Fred had laid out the food for the kids.
“Fred liked school, especially the social part of it. He was a good, but not great, student,” Iberia went on. “But he loved to read, especially history.”
One of Fred’s friends told me, “He was smart as the dickens, but his grades didn’t reflect his smartness.”
During the summers, Fred, his older brother, Bill, and Dee Dee visited Iberia’s parents at their farm outside Haynesville, Louisiana.
“Yeah, I was a little nervous letting them go back south,” Iberia said. “Particularly because Fred had such a big mouth.”
She remembered how Bobo Till was killed during a visit to the South. In 1955, when Fred was six, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till left Chicago to visit his mother’s family in Mississippi. He was kidnapped from his uncle’s home, brutally beaten, and shot because he had supposedly whistled at a white woman outside a local store in the town of Money. His body was found floating in the Tallahatchie River several days after his abduction. His face was so badly beaten he was recognizable only to his mother.
“I couldn’t stand going to his funeral and seeing him like that,” Iberia said. “I wanted to remember him as the active and saucy kid I babysat for.”
When she learned of Emmett’s murder, Mamie Till demanded that her son’s body be returned to Chicago. She defied the explicit orders of the Mississippi authorities, who had sealed his casket, and ordered that it be opened. Her son’s mutilated face displayed to the entire world what Southern racism had done. Thousands of Chicagoans walked by the open casket in 1955 at the Rayner Funeral Home, aghast at what they saw. Years later, Rosa Parks told Mamie Till that the photograph of Emmett’s disfigured face in the casket was set in her mind when she refused to give up her seat on the Montgomery bus.
Fourteen years after Emmett’s murder, thousands of Chicagoans would walk through the same Rayner Funeral Home to see Fred’s body displayed. Many thousands more would take the tour through the bullet-riddled apartment where Fred and Mark Clark were slain by the Chicago police. One of the neighborhood residents described the police raid as “nuthin but a northern lynching.”
“Fred, Dee Dee, and I used to talk about Emmett, particularly when we went south,” Fred’s brother Bill told me. “My mother had told us Emmett had a funny lisp like Fred had when he was younger. We heard that it was his lisp, which sometimes came out like a whistle, that had cost Emmett his life.
“We pretty much stayed out of trouble down South,” Bill said. “We couldn’t help but notice the FOR COLOREDS signs in town over the nastiest drinking fountains and bathroom doors. But generally we kept away from public places.”
Fred attended Proviso East High School in Maywood, a huge urban facility with twenty-four hundred students, about one fourth of whom were black. He loved sports and played on the football, basketball, and wrestling teams. On the basketball court Fred was known for being aggressive, and in pick-up games for his “mouth,” his trash talking.
In his sophomore and junior years, Fred was reading black political authors, including Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and W. E. B. DuBois. Doris Strieter, a Maywood Village Board member, who was taking a course in African American history, asked Fred for advice for a bibliography for her term paper. “In spite of Fred’s hectic schedule and his constant harassment by the police, he took the time to come over to our house with a huge stack of books and materials,” she said. “Fred was an immensely well-read young man who rose early and read at least two hours before he faced the day.”
Fred tape-recorded and memorized the speeches of both Dr. King and Malcolm X. He visited Reverend Clay Evans’s church on Drexel Avenue, where Jesse Jackson and Operation Breadbasket and later Operation PUSH were headquartered, and practiced these preachers’ techniques.
Iberia and Francis had been churchgoing Baptists in Louisiana, and they joined the Mount Calvary Baptist Church in Morgan Park shortly after they arrived in Chicago. They also attended Reverend McNelty’s Second Baptist Church in Melrose Park. Fred liked going to both churches but particularly admired Reverend McNelty’s appeals to his congregation to fight racial injustice and inequality. As Fred became more politically active, Reverend McNelty was “right there with him,” according to Francis. He frequently asked Fred to address his congregation about issues in the black community.
“Fred was not bashful and did not back down from anything,” Francis continued. “He could not tolerate injustice to anyone. Reverend McNelty admired my son.”
At Proviso East, Fred encountered inequalities that infuriated him. He recognized that the mostly white faculty and entirely white administration did not adequately prepare the black students for the technological world around them. Black students doing poorly were either counseled out of school or flunked out. They had no remedial programs. He felt that many of the white teachers were tired of teaching and had stopped caring. Some used racial slurs when talking about black students. Fred spoke out, demanding more black teachers and black administrators at the school.
Charles Anderson, a former Proviso East dean, credited Fred’s campaign to bring in more black teachers and administrators with his getting a job. “Fred was the reason I was hired at Proviso East High School as dean in charge of attendance,” he said. “Until that time, I had been applying for six years and never had been given an interview.”
Fred also believed it was unfair that only white girls were nominated for homecoming queen. He organized a student walkout and led a boycott to protest this policy. This resulted in Proviso East students electing their first black homecoming queen. “Some people in Maywood said a black homecoming queen was not worth missing school for,” Francis told me. “For Fred it was simply a matter of fairness.”
The black and white students at Proviso East seldom mixed socially outside of classes. Because of his popularity and stature with both, Fred was selected to be head of the Inter-racial Council, which met whenever there was racial friction. “Fred’s powerful and resonating voice called for calm and discussion,” Anderson told me.
The year after Hampton graduated, the principal called Fred back to ease growing racial tensions. White, black, and Latino students participated in a three-day workshop, along with school officials and community members. Fred listened to all the grievances and put together a joint plan to empower each of the student groups and give them a voice in how the school was run.
While in high school, Fred also worked regularly. During the school year, he was a stock boy at the Jewel grocery store in Maywood. When he was older but still in high school, he washed dishes at Dino’s restaurant in Elmhurst. In the summers he found factory jobs at the American Can Company and twice at Corn Products. He saved and eventually used his earnings to pay his college tuition.
Fred found jobs for some of the many unemployed black teenagers in his neighborhood as well and successfully pushed the Village of Maywood to fund a summer job program. Of specific concern to Fred was the absence of a municipal swimming pool. Too far from Lake Michigan for trips to the beach, Maywood had no amenities to provide blacks with relief from Chicago’s very hot and sticky summers. The white kids went to the pool at the private Veteran Industrial Park in neighboring Bellwood, but black kids weren’t allowed. Though Fred couldn’t swim, he and his friends carpooled black kids from Maywood to a Chicago Park District pool in the suburb of Lyons, several miles away. He began to talk to the kids and their parents about organizing for a public pool in Maywood.
Fred’s outspokenness earned the attention of Don Williams, the head of the West Suburban NAACP chapter. Williams was doing a study of civil rights grievances and identified the same issues Fred had: youth education, recreation, and jobs. There was no active unit of the youth branch of the NAACP in the western suburbs, so Williams asked Fred if he would organize one. He told Fred he could invite his friends to join the NAACP as well. Fred accepted. In 1965 he started the West Suburban Youth Chapter of the NAACP, which drew up a list of grievances. Williams presented the grievances to the NAACP Board, which vowed to support the youth chapter. With Fred as the chair, it grew to more than two hundred members in less than a year.
Under Fred’s leadership, young black people in Maywood accelerated the campaign for a public pool and ultimately a recreational center. They were met with a mixed reaction by the Village Board. Some members didn’t want an integrated facility, which they feared would result in racial strife. Others didn’t want to spend the money. But two members, Reverend Tom and Doris Strieter, were extremely impressed with Fred’s presentations and joined him in advocating for the pool. Reverend Strieter had Fred speak at the religious college where he taught; he later wrote, “Fred was a master orator. His rhetoric was stunning as he confronted his white audience with a picture of America’s unjust society that most had never imagined before.”