Fred Hampton

EPISODE 6.10: FRED HAMPTON

By the end of the 1960s, the Black Panther Party had been almost completely infiltrated and taken over by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The target of J Edgar Hoover’s illegal COINTELPRO operations, leading Panthers had been killed or imprisoned, while paid agents controlled by FBI field offices ran much of the party’s activities and inner workings. Fred Hampton was, perhaps, the last leading figure within the party who stood in the way of its complete political decapitation. Just as it seemed certain that he would assume the national leadership of the Panthers, Hampton was shot and killed during an early morning raid on his Chicago apartment. Though this was initially ruled to have been a justified action by the raiding party of police officers and FBI agents, subsequent information and a prolonged legal battle indicated that this might have been a deliberate assassination.