Fred Hampton was a revolutionary organizer and leader of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. In just a few years he built one of the most powerful and multiracial movements of the poor in American history. Born in 1948 and raised in Maywood, outside Chicago, he was a natural organizer from an early age. As a teenager he led the local NAACP youth council, growing it into hundreds of members and fighting for recreational facilities and better schools for Black youth. In 1968 he joined the Black Panther Party, and at twenty he became chairman of its Illinois chapter.

Under Hampton's leadership, the Chicago Panthers fed thousands of children through the Free Breakfast for Children program and opened a free medical clinic that served the community. They held political education classes that taught Marxism-Leninism and the history of the oppressed. Hampton was a brilliant speaker whose call-and-response chant, "I am a revolutionary," rang out at rallies across the city. He believed the enemy was capitalism, not white people, and that the poor could win only through unity. He built the original Rainbow Coalition, bringing together the Panthers, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, and the poor white Young Patriots in a common class struggle, and he worked to broker peace among Chicago's street organizations.

The FBI's COINTELPRO program saw Hampton as a threat because of his ability to unite people across racial lines. Using information from an informant planted inside the Party, Chicago police raided his apartment before dawn on December 4, 1969. They fired dozens of shots, killing Hampton as he lay in bed beside his pregnant partner, along with fellow Panther Mark Clark. Hampton was twenty-one. Years later the families and survivors won a settlement from the city, county, and federal governments. His words, "you can kill a revolutionary, but you can't kill the revolution," remain a rallying cry for organizers everywhere.