Early in the hours before dawn on December 6, 1969, a Peoples Gas truck pulled up in front of an apartment building at 2337 W. Monroe St. on the West Side of Chicago. Fourteen plainclothes Chicago police officers quietly exit the undercover truck, armed with pistols, a shotgun, a machine gun and a detailed map of their target, an apartment occupied by leaders of the Chicago section of the Black Panther Party.
The card clearly identified the bedroom of Fred Hampton, the 21-year-old “president” of the Chicago Black Panthers, who slept next to his eight-month-pregnant fiancee. At 4:30 a.m., the police broke down the front door and started shooting. Ballistic reports later showed they fired more than 90 times, including machine gun bullets through exterior walls and windows.
When the volley of bullets finally stopped, four of the young Black Panthers inside the apartment were shot and seriously injured, and two were killed. The first was Mark Clark, who grabbed his own shotgun before taking a bullet in the heart. The second was Fred Hampton, slumped in his bed.
Police were acting under the orders of Edward Hanrahan, the Cook County attorney, who held a press conference claiming his officers were attacked by surprise by the Black Panthers as police attempted to execute a warrant. search for illegal weapons in the apartment.
“The immediate, violent and criminal reaction of the occupiers in shooting at police officers announced underlines the extreme wickedness of the Black Panther Party,” Hanrahan said.
While it didn’t take long for the Hanrahan narrative to collapse, it took over a decade for the full disturbing truth to be revealed.
Not only was the murder of Hampton and Clark a cold-blooded assassination of two militant black activists, documents later revealed that it was coordinated by the FBI as part of a secret program to neutralize and destroy the Black Panther Party, which FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover privately called “the greatest threat to the country’s internal security.”
Hampton, a rising star in Chicago, has become a target
Black Panther Fred Hampton testifies at a meeting on the deaths of West Side men in 1969.
Chicago Tribune / Tribune Press Service via Getty Images
The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was formed in 1966 by two black students in Oakland, California. With their military-style berets and raised fist salutes, the Black Panthers preached black empowerment and armed resistance to racist violence, including at the hands of the police. The Black Panther Party has also launched a host of social initiatives, including a free breakfast program that has helped feed thousands of hungry children before school.
Hampton was an honored suburban Chicago student who, as the young leader of the NAACP, successfully campaigned to have an uninsulated swimming pool built in his hometown. When he joined the Illinois Black Panther Party in 1968, he quickly gained a reputation as a powerful speaker and coalition builder across racial boundaries to tackle police brutality and tackle poverty in the most neglected neighborhoods. from Chicago.
“Hampton was this incredibly charismatic, young and dynamic leader who formed this ‘rainbow coalition’ with Puerto Ricans and the poor white people of Appalachia,” said Jeffrey Haas, one of the founders of the People’s Law Office of Chicago and member of the legal team. who sued the Chicago police and the FBI for the Hampton murder. “He opened a health clinic and a free breakfast program.”
READ MORE: How the Black Panthers’ breakfast program both inspired and threatened the government
That’s not to say that the Chicago Black Panthers have avoided confrontation and armed provocation.
“They had an activist, anti-police stance of community policing control,” says Haas, who is also the author of The Fred Hampton Assassination: How the FBI and Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther. “’Off the pig!’ was one of their very provocative slogans, which for the Panthers meant taking abusive policing out of the community, but I’m not sure the police necessarily saw it that way.
Chicago was at the time a hotbed of political protests and violent clashes with the police. When crowds took to the streets after the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the mayor of Chicago ordered police to shoot the suspected arsonists. Later that year, police and National Guard troops hit anti-war protesters outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
If the FBI wanted to quell the Black Panther “extremists” operating in Chicago, it saw a clear threat in Fred Hampton’s meteoric rise.
The secret COINTELPRO program behind the murders
View of protesters, many with reading signs ‘Avenge Fred Hampton’, a reference to the Black Panther member murdered five days earlier by Chicago police officers, during an anti-Nixon demonstration in New York on December 9, 1969.
David Fenton / Getty Images
When Haas and his legal partner Flint Taylor of the People’s Law Office first tackled the Hampton and Clark case, it quickly became clear that the state attorney’s side of the story was redundant. Ballistics experts found that all but one of the bullets fired into the apartment were from police weapons, contradicting a false report from the Chicago Police Department’s crime lab.
It was obvious that Hanrahan, the state attorney, was hiding the real reason for the violent raid, but no one at the time could have imagined how much the plot would target Hampton and cover up his murder.
Then, in 1971, a group of anti-war activists broke into an FBI office in suburban Philadelphia looking for evidence that the FBI was spying on leaders of the anti-war movement. What they accidentally discovered was documented evidence for the existence of a secret FBI plan called COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) with orders to “disrupt, misdirect and neutralize” black power movements.
It was under the auspices of COINTELPRO that the FBI spied on and harassed civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcom X. It was all part of Hoover’s efforts to prevent, in his own words, the “rise. of a messiah who unify and electrify the militant nationalist movement.
For the FBI, Hampton was another potential “messiah” who rose through the ranks of the Black Panther Party and was prepared for national leadership.
READ MORE: How the Black Power movement influenced the civil rights movement
A little justice for Fred Hampton
Mourners walk past Fred Hampton’s casket during his memorial service at the First Baptist Church in Melrose Park, Illinois, December 9, 1969.
Ray Foster / Chicago Tribune / Tribune News Service via Getty Images
During years of litigation on behalf of the Hampton and Clark families and raid survivors, Haas and Taylor got their hands on more incriminating FBI documents linking the Hampton murder to COINTELPRO. One of the most damning was an FBI note authorizing the payment of a “bounty” to an informant named William O’Neal, a Black Panthers security guard who provided the FBI with the plan of the apartment.
By connecting the dots, Haas and his colleagues were able to show that a Chicago FBI agent, Roy Martin Mitchell, was the one who provided Hanrahan with the map.
“Hanrahan was this very ambitious heir to [Chicago Mayor] Daley at the time, ”says Haas. “His people were more than willing to raid the Panthers, believing it would strengthen their careers.”
FBI agent Mr. Wesley Swearingen became a whistleblower in the case in 1977, telling government attorneys that the FBI had set up Chicago police to kill the Panthers by warning them before the raid that they would meet armed resistance. Swearingen later wrote a book about the shooting and other incidents.
The first judge who heard the case dismissed it after a grueling 18-month trial. But Haas and Taylor continued, writing a 200-page memoir to the US 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, linking the FBI to a plot “to subvert and eliminate the Black Panther Party and its members, thereby suppressing … a black political organization. radical and vital. . “
The government finally agreed to a settlement in 1982, paying $ 1.85 million to the families of Hampton and Clark, and other survivors of the 1969 raid, some of whom never fully recovered from their injuries. A lawyer for the Department of Justice said the regulations did not recognize wrongdoing. However, G. Flint Taylor, an attorney for the plaintiffs, told reporters: “The settlement is an admission of the conspiracy that existed between the FBI and the Hanrahan men to assassinate Fred Hampton.
More evidence emerges – decades later
In January 2021, more than 50 years after the Hampton Police assassination, hundreds of deleted FBI documents related to the COINTELPRO program were released as part of a Freedom of Information Act request.
Among these documents was yet another “bonus” letter, that from Hoover’s office itself. In the letter, dated six days after the Hampton murder, the FBI director thanked Roy Martin Mitchell, the Chicago FBI agent who orchestrated the raid, for his “exemplary efforts.”
“I am certainly happy to congratulate you and to inform you that I have approved an incentive bonus in the amount of $ 200 for your outstanding service in a matter of considerable interest to the FBI in the racial field”, Hoover wrote.
