“We had a Rainbow Coalition, and the beauty about that is… Chairman Hampton recognized the fact that we could not talk about class struggle without talking about racism.”

Jose “Cha Cha” Jimenez recalled the late Black Panther, community organizer, and anti-racist activist, Fred Hampton, in a 2019 Teen Vogue interview.

Jimenez was involved in one of several ethnic organizations joined under the banner of Hampton’s multiracial alliance, the Rainbow Coalition, which sought to resist police brutality and systemic abuses against poor and racialized Chicagoans in the 1960s.

On December 3, 1969, Hampton was slain by Chicago police as part of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, which targeted Black Panther members and other leftist organizers. He was 21 years old.