A glass cabinet inside of principal …

A glass cabinet inside of principal Patrick Hardy’s office at Proviso East High School preserves a ton of school history, most notably yearbooks from 1963 to 1966. Those pages feature young revolutionary Fred Hampton, who would go on to become an Illinois Black Panther Party leader, who died at the age of 21 after his assassination in 1969. Hampton’s history is an important subject at Proviso East and in the community of Maywood. Hardy teaches about him to connect the past to the present. A pool less than a mile away from the school is named the Fred Hampton Aquatic Center. And Hampton’s family is working to turn his childhood home into a museum. Milwaukee Bucks guard and fellow Proviso East alum Sterling Brown remembers hearing about Hampton when he was growing up.