프레드 햄튼 저격당한 날. Dec.4. 1969. Today in History: Remembering Fred Hampton on the Anniversary of His Assassination

 

미국 현대 정치사를 잠시 공부하다가, 알게된 프레드 햄튼 사망. 미국 정치 현실의 한 단면임. 

 

프레드 햄튼 Fred Hamton  블랙 팬서 파티 (black panther party) 지도자, 당시 21세. 

프레드 집과 방에 100여 발 총기 난사. 사망.

 

프레드 저격범들. 미국 FIB COINTELPRO - 방첩 프로그램)

COINTELPRO = 'Counter Intelligence Program'( 카운터 인텔리전스 프로그램) 

 

프레드 활동. 1969년 무지개 연대 창립.블랙 팬서당과 청년 조직의 연대체임.

프레드 햄튼 연설 "당신들이 혁명가를 살해할 수 있지만, 혁명을 살해할 수 없다"

 

프레드 햄튼 집을 습격, 100발의 총기 난사가 가능했던 이유는?

 

윌리엄 오닐(William O’Neal)이라는 FBI 정보요원이 프레드 햄튼과 친해져, 그의 신뢰를 얻은 후, 프레드의 경호를 맡기도 했다.

(윌리엄 오닐은 1968년에 블랙 팬서당에 잠입했다.)

 

오닐이 프레드 햄튼의 집 내부 정보를 FBI 로이 미첼 (Roy Mitchell)

침입자들에게 다 알려줌.

 

 

, Hampton’s trusted security chief, was an FBI informant.

 

Today in History: Remembering Fred Hampton on the Anniversary of His Assassination

 

On the 4th of December 1969, before dawn, officers of the Chicago Police Department conducted a violent raid on an apartment in Chicago in the United States. In a coordinated operation with the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Counterintelligence Programme (COINTELPRO), they fired over 90 rounds into the dwelling. The raid resulted in the killing of Fred Hampton, the Chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, and fellow Panther Mark Clark as they lay in their beds.

 

Four other members of the party were injured. Hampton, who was just 21 years old, had been sedated by an FBI informant earlier in the evening, ensuring he would not awaken during the assault. This event was not a spontaneous confrontation but a deliberate, state sanctioned assassination designed to decapitate a growing and influential revolutionary movement.

 

The context of Hampton's murder was the peak of COINTELPRO, the FBI's extensive and illegal initiative to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and otherwise neutralise domestic political organisations it deemed subversive.

 

The Black Panther Party, with its foundational Ten-Point Programme calling for economic justice, an end to police brutality, and community control, was identified as a primary threat. The Party's practice of armed self defence against state violence, and more significantly its development of community survival programmes, presented a direct challenge to the capitalist state's systemic neglect of poor and Black communities.

 

Hampton's work is seen as a critical advancement in building multiracial, class-conscious unity against the intertwined systems of capitalism and imperialism. His analysis moved beyond isolated identity politics, focusing instead on a materialist understanding of power and exploitation.

 

Hampton's most profound contribution was the formation of the original Rainbow Coalition in 1969.

 

This was a strategic alliance between the Black Panther Party, the Young Patriots Organisation a group of poor, southern descended white activists, and the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican revolutionary group. He later incorporated other organisations like the Brown Berets.

 

Hampton articulated that racism was a tool used to fracture the working class, and he fought it with a doctrine of solidarity. He famously told the Young Patriots that they would fight racism not with more racism, but with unity. This coalition directly confronted the ruling class by uniting oppressed peoples across racial lines, modelling a practical form of revolutionary class struggle.

 

Under his leadership, the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party implemented what they termed Survival Programmes Pending Revolution.

 

These initiatives were not conceived as mere charity but as embryonic structures of people's power, demonstrating socialist principles in action while meeting immediate human needs. They included the Free Breakfast for Children Programme, which fed thousands and highlighted the state's failures; free medical clinics and sickle cell anaemia testing to address dire healthcare disparities; and comprehensive political education programmes. These projects showed that communities could organise their own social welfare and education, thereby building the foundations for alternative institutions outside the control of the capitalist state.

 

Hampton's vision was also explicitly internationalist. He linked the struggle against police brutality and poverty in Chicago to global anti-imperialist movements, from Vietnam to liberation struggles in Africa and Latin America. He framed the United States government as a common oppressor of people of colour worldwide.

 

 

His powerful oratory, featuring phrases like "you can kill a revolutionary, but you cannot kill the revolution," and his rigorous political education sessions, which blended Marxist-Leninist thought with Black radical tradition, were central to his organising. He taught the nature of the capitalist state, the mechanics of exploitation, and the imperative of collective action.

 

The assassination was the culmination of a prolonged campaign of surveillance, infiltration, and psychological warfare. The FBI informant William O'Neal provided the apartment's floor plan, drugged Hampton, and confirmed his presence to the authorities. While a subsequent civil lawsuit exposed the conspiracy and led to a financial settlement for the survivors and families, no police officer or federal agent ever faced criminal conviction for the murders. Hampton's killing served as a brutal lesson in the extent to which the capitalist state would go to protect its power by eliminating charismatic leaders who successfully built broad-based, radical movements. Its intent was to terrorise the Left and shatter the promising unity of the Rainbow Coalition.

 

Fred Hampton's legacy remains acutely relevant for contemporary movements. His framework of intersectional class struggle, which understands the fights against racism, capitalism, and imperialism as inseparable, provides a foundational model. Modern mutual aid networks, campaigns for police abolition, and efforts to build broad front coalitions all resonate with his political strategy.

 

Remembering Hampton is therefore not solely an act of memorial; it is a call to study his methods, to rebuild cross-racial solidarity, and to continue the work of creating a society where power is held by the people, not by the police or the profiteers. His murder stands as a permanent indictment of state violence against liberation movements, yet his conclusion lives on: you can murder a liberator, but you cannot murder liberation itself.