# The Chairman *Fred Hampton, the Rainbow Coalition, and the Raid That Killed Him at Twenty-One* — Legendary Biographies No. 024 - **Subject:** Frederick Allen Hampton Sr. - **Written by:** Solomon Treadway - **Shelf:** Movements / Civil Rights - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 209 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 209 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-060-7) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Edmund Hartley (ISBN 979-8-90623-205-2) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/024-the-chairman.html ## About this book December 4, 1969. At 4:45 a.m., fourteen Chicago police officers fire ninety-nine rounds into Apartment 2337 on West Monroe Street. Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, is shot twice in the head in his bed. He is twenty-one years old. Mark Clark, the Peoria Panthers' defense captain, is killed beside him. Hampton's fiancée, Akua Njeri, eight months pregnant with their son, is in the bed when the raid begins. Solomon Treadway's biography opens earlier — in Maywood, Illinois, where Frederick Allen Hampton was born in 1948 — and follows the arc through the Proviso East NAACP youth chapter, the Chicago Black Panthers, the Rainbow Coalition with the Young Lords and the Young Patriots, the FBI informant William O'Neal, the COINTELPRO documents that surfaced in 1971, and the 1982 civil settlement that distributed $1.85 million among nine plaintiffs. What emerges is a portrait of a twenty-one-year-old organiser whose Chicago multi-ethnic working-class coalition was the most threatening political project the FBI's domestic-counterintelligence program encountered in its full decade of operations — a coalition the state killed him in his sleep to prevent. ## Contents 1. Maywood 2. The Youth Council 3. The Black Panther Party 4. The Chicago Chapter 5. Chairman Fred 6. Free Breakfast, Free Clinic 7. The Rainbow Coalition 8. Political Education 9. COINTELPRO 10. Hoover's Directives 11. William O'Neal 12. The Intelligence 13. December Fourth 14. Eighty-Two Shots 15. Mark Clark 16. The Cover-Up 17. Thirteen Years 18. The Legacy 19. The Son ## Questions **Who is The Chairman about?** Frederick Allen Hampton Sr.. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Chairman — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,184 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 63,500 words, 19 chapters, 209 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Solomon Treadway is a Chicago-born culture critic whose biographies focus on Black American writers, intellectuals, and the post-war public sphere. His research utilizes deep archival investigations to reconstruct the social circles, political struggles, and literary debates that shaped mid-century American thought. In works like The Chairman, Passing the Torch, and The Papers, Treadway traces how ideas move from private correspondence into the broader cultural consciousness. His writing emphasizes the everyday realities and collaborative networks behind major intellectual shifts, avoiding dry academic jargon in favor of clear, character-driven narrative history. He lives in Chicago, Illinois, where he works as an independent researcher and spends his weekends volunteering at local community archives and bookshops.