Former Illinois Black Panthers celebrate a new heritage trail commemorating their legacy

In the late 1960s, the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party distributed free breakfast to schoolchildren at a youth services center in North Lawndale.

On Sunday, several former chapter members gathered at the center over collard greens, chicken thighs and macaroni to celebrate the organization being permanently written into the history books.

In the coming months, commemorative plaques will be placed outside the center, along with 11 other sites in Chicago and one in Peoria associated with the Black Panthers.

Thanks to three years of rigorous documentation by local activists, locations significant to the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party have been added to the National Register of Historic Places. It’s the first listing on the register for the Black political organization, according to a statement by the Historical Preservation Society of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Society.

Together, the 13 sites will make up a heritage trail.

“Each place that we’re going to have one of these little markers is a reminder for young people. They don’t know the power that they have,” said Billy “Che” Brooks. Now 76 years old, he began the North Lawndale breakfast program and was named the deputy education minister of Illinois’ chapter in his early 20s.

The Black Panther Party was composed of Black Americans across the nation who were dissatisfied with the pace of the nonviolent Civil Rights Movement. Rather than integration, it advocated for independence and self-sufficiency, asserting that Blacks needed their own institutions to serve their own interests.

Many credit the free breakfast programs across the nation with creating a blueprint for today’s free school meal programs run by the federal government. However, the Black Panthers’ extensive social service networks were often overshadowed by the party’s militant behavior.

But many don’t know about the party’s influential presence in Chicago’s South, West and Near North sides.

“The Black Panthers have been totally erased from Chicago’s landscape. You wouldn’t know they existed at all,” Leila Wills told the Tribune. The daughter of two party members went to a day care run by the Black Panthers in the early 1970s but didn’t realize its importance until she began working on the historical designation project in 2020. The chapter was disbanded by 1974 and many significant sites were demolished. The site of the Illinois headquarters, for example, is now a Walgreens. The plaques are intended to help keep their memory alive.

Fred Hampton, a young man from Chicago’s Maywood suburb, emerged as the public face of Illinois’ short-lived but influential chapter. Understanding poverty as the catalyst of social ills like crime and lack of education, he led the party in creating numerous programs to alleviate hunger and health care disparities faced by Black residents. He also formed Chicago’s first Rainbow Coalition, a multicultural alliance of street gangs, to end infighting and spur social change.

He was barely in party leadership for a year before being killed in a raid by Chicago police. The site of the shooting, which is widely believed to have been an assassination plot coordinated with the FBI, is also one of the sites receiving a historical marker.

Wills, the executive director of the preservation society, originally had ambitions to secure just three historical markers. However, an outpouring of grassroots fundraising support to the tune of over $40,000 enabled the preservation society to place markers at 13 significant sites.

Now, her team is developing online resources for those who would like to do a self-guided tour of the inaugural sites. Once that’s complete, Wills said the society will turn its eyes to recognizing more locations that hold a piece of the Illinois Black Panthers’ history. It already has its sights on over 100 locations across the state.

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