Marion Nzinga Stamps (28 May 1945-28 August 1996) was an African-American community activist and Black Panther Party leader who was based in Chicago, Illinois from the 1960s to 1990s.
Biography
Marion Adams was born in Jackson, Mississippi on 28 May 1945, and her former neighbor Medgar Evers convinced her to become active in the Civil Rights movement at the age of 13. She moved to Chicago, Illinois in 1963 and settled in the Cabrini-Green housing project, where she fought for better living conditions for the project's residents. Stamps developed radical views and joined the Black Panther Party; she claimed that the African-American community had to become responsible for its own safety and self-defense, and that the police were merely there to "enslave" them. She volunteered for Cardiss Collins' 1978 campaign for the US House of Representatives, and she led several strike actions against successive mayors of Chicago before befriending Mayor Harold Washington. During the 1990s, she no longer opposed the redevelopment of the housing projects, and she launched a failed bid for the Board of Aldermen in 1995 and returned to Jackson to care for her ailing father. She died in 1996 at the age of 51.