Fred Hampton leads the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party at twenty-one, organizing the Rainbow Coalition across racial lines and running breakfast programs and free medical clinics for children in Chicago's poorest neighborhoods. The film traces his rise as a speaker, using footage and photographs to show the crowds he could draw, and then turns to December 4, 1969, when a tactical unit from the Cook County State's Attorney's Office, working with the Chicago Police Department and the FBI, raids his apartment before dawn and shoots him dead in his bed. It lays out the evidence of a coordinated operation rather than a shootout, including the informant inside Hampton's own security detail and the ballistics that later became central to the case. A 1970 civil lawsuit brought by his family and survivors of the raid drags on for twelve years before ending in 1982 with a $1.85 million settlement, a resolution the film treats as vindication that arrived far too late to matter to Hampton himself.