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came there for, who was now busy taking care of some other business in a small cubicle of a side room.

Emmett had money in his pocket. Money that film editor Al Gable arranged, during his negotiations with an Illinois movie company about making a film to show why the hard-poor and heavy people of America stayed away from all the protests of the '68 Democratic National Convention. Emmett insisted the money was necessary to insure the cooperation of the southwest black neighborhood that was the Panthers' turf in the making of the film. The money wasn't really necessary for that purpose, but it was badly needed by the Panthers to function, now that they were above ground and out in the open, and Emmett thought they would be able to put it to good use. The film that was eventually going to come from this initial meeting would be American Revolution II, and Fred Hampton would use the making of it as a medium for forming the Rainbow Coalition, a political alliance among the Black Panthers, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, the group of Appalachian whites known as the Young Patriots, and the unaffiliated, young, white street radicals who considered the singular newspaper, RISING UP ANGRY, their speaking organ. Fred's ability to overcome each of these groups' prejudices towards the others and his successful formation of the enormously strong Rainbow Coalition would prove how very powerful and, finally, dangerous a man he really was to the Illinois status quo. And they would kill him.

A muscular young blood who introduced himself as Odignga, chief of security, escorted Emmett into the tiny side office and left him, closing the door from the outside. Emmett then found himself being offered a chair by the solid, two-hundred-pound, bulk-muscled black man sitting on the opposite side of an old, battered, flat-top desk piled high with papers. He sat down and immediately felt at ease in the presence of this totally joyful and obviously fearless man.

Fred Hampton had the large, big-boned face of a plain, young, hard worker who only used one simple tool to do what it was he needed to do. The clarity in his bright eyes and the sharp definition of the muscular dimples in his thick-skinned cheeks told you right away that the tool he used was his brain. Emmett liked Fred because he had none of that East-Coast-West-Coast, mau-mau, noble savage, nickle-dime, nigger-flip jive about him. He was straight goods all the way, and he had just turned twenty years old around the time Em [end page 480]