Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was assassinated by police 56 years ago today. I found my life’s purpose during the search for his killers.

On this date 56 years ago, I awoke in my tiny apartment on the South Side of Chicago and heard the news that changed the course of my life: Fred Hampton was dead.

Hampton, chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, had been killed that morning in what the Chicago police described as a “shootout” between them and members of the party at the group’s West Side headquarters.

Hampton was 21, a year younger than I was then. But he already was a magnetic, charismatic figure on the left, clearly destined for leadership beyond the Panthers and Illinois.

Precisely for that reason, Hampton had become a target of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI in its effort to control and wipe out the Panthers, a group that he labeled “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”

I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, looking for a purpose in life that academia was not providing. Suddenly, the death of Hampton — actually, the assassination of Hampton — gave me that purpose.

Just as many young Americans watched the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and felt compelled to join the military, I watched the aftermath of Hampton’s death and was moved to become a journalist.

I had been habituated to the importance of news since I was a child in rural East Texas, listening with my maternal grandfather to Gabriel Heatter’s quavering delivery of the news each evening on the radio.

In high school, I read and watched in terror as the Cuban missile crisis unfolded. And the year before my high school graduation, I watched faithfully as CBS’s Roger Mudd delivered daily reports on the progress through Congress of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

But even as I progressed through college at the University of Notre Dame, it never occurred to me that a Black kid like me could become a journalist. And then came Dec. 4, 1969.

The Chicago media were all over the Hampton story, and I was into every news story and broadcast about the case.

One station broadcast a police reenactment of the raid and shootout.

Five daily newspapers — including the legendary Black publication the Chicago Daily Defender (which, a few years prior, had been led by an editor named Chuck Stone) — published editions virtually around the clock, constantly trying to advance the story.

Eventually, it became clear that there had been no “shootout” at all, but a shoot-in by the police. The clincher was a front-page photo in the Dec. 12 editions of the Chicago Sun-Times under a headline that read, “Those ‘bullet holes’ aren’t.”

The police had put out a similar photo earlier, claiming to show holes in a door caused by bullets fired from within the Panther apartment. The Sun-Times photo showed they were actually rusted nail heads.

What all of this demonstrated to me was the power of journalism to expose truth, to lay bare hidden facts for examination by citizens of a democracy. And after seeing it done, I knew I wanted to do it, too.

The Hampton case was the catalyst for my desire to do journalism, but there have been others.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein inspired a whole generation of journalists with their coverage of Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal.

And in cities and towns and hamlets all across the country, journalists have unearthed inconvenient truths that people in power would have preferred remained buried — and that undoubtedly inspired others who wanted to do the same.

Our current politics provide what some might call a “target-rich environment” for aggressive, probing journalism. The undeclared war against alleged Venezuelan drug runners on the high seas of the Caribbean is but the most obvious example.

But there are plenty of abuses short of lethal ones that cry out for investigation and exposure. In a world where those in power see disagreement as disloyalty, protest as terrorism, and constitutional mandates like due process as dispensable annoyances, the need for passionate, implacable, even clamorous, journalism endures. And will, I suspect, for at least another 56 years.

Don Wycliff, a former editorial page editor at the Chicago Tribune, is the author of “Black Domers: African-American Students at Notre Dame in Their Own Words” and the recently released memoir, “Before the Byline: A Journalist’s Roots.”