Forty-five years ago this month, Fred Hampton, the rising star of a declining Black Panther Party, was killed in a police raid at a West Side apartment that brought him immortality as an improbable hero of the civil rights movement.
The cacophony of gunshots on West Monroe Street in the early morning of Dec. 4, 1969, reverberated politically to the Loop office of Cook County State’s Attorney Edward Hanrahan. Aftershocks traveled all the way to the Washington headquarters of the FBI. The incident also led to one of the biggest embarrassments in the history of the Chicago Tribune.
Hampton was an unlikely candidate for that notoriety. At 21, he was just a little more than two years removed from his role as a teen activist in Maywood demanding a community swimming pool. Over the next year, he was associated with a school disturbance, the beating of an ice cream truck driver and a demonstration at Maywood Village Hall that ended with the mayor and other officials fleeing the building, tear gas being fired and plenty of glass broken.
By December 1969, he was the Illinois chief of the Black Panther Party, which preached violence as the means to African-Americans’ liberation. Yet black leaders and white liberals who were wary of the Panthers appeared at his funeral, outraged at the way Hampton died. The Rev. Ralph Abernathy, heir to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent crusade, said during his eulogy, “The nation that conquered Nazi Germany is following the same course as brutal Nazi Germany.” The Tribune noted that Dr. Benjamin Spock, the famous baby doctor and anti-war advocate, was among the 5,000 who filed passed Hampton’s coffin.
Founded in Oakland, Calif., in 1966, the Panthers had just opened a Chicago office on West Madison Street. Theirs was a short but stormy history marked by infighting — some of it covertly orchestrated by an FBI whose chief, J. Edgar Hoover, had become obsessed with the group. One founder, Bobby Seale, a defendant in the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial, was about to go to prison. Other leaders were facing criminal charges, leaving room for rapid advancement. Hampton was in line for a top post nationally, even as he was appealing a conviction for that ice-cream truck incident.
In the months leading up to the raid, Black Panther members were involved in two fiery gunbattles with Chicago police. The causes of the incidents were disputed, but in a July shootout, five police officers and three Black Panther members were wounded at the party’s headquarters a block north of Hampton’s apartment. Then in November, two police officers were killed and six were wounded in a South Side fight with Black Panther members, who themselves suffered one death and one injury.
It was war, and a spy had infiltrated the Panthers’ ranks. William O’Neal, a petty thief from the West Side, had driven a stolen car across state lines, a federal offense, and was offered a deal: Become an FBI informant and the case would go away. “I was beginning to feel clean again, just by helping the FBI,” he afterward told the Tribune. Ordered to infiltrate the Panthers, he quickly rose from handyman to security chief, and in November, he was given an assignment by his FBI handler: a sketch of Hampton’s apartment. “He wanted to know the locations of weapons caches, he wanted to know if we had explosives … who spent the night where,” O’Neal said in a videotaped interview at Washington University.
The FBI passed that information on to Hanrahan, and a few minutes before 5 a.m. on Dec. 4, police detailed to his office raided the apartment at 2337 W. Monroe St. According to police, they were met by a barrage of gunfire in what the Tribune described as a “wild gun battle” that lasted 20 minutes. The surviving Panthers said the cops, guns blazing, stormed into an apartment filled mostly with sleeping people. The aftermath was gruesome: Hampton was dead. Mark Clark, on guard duty that night, was killed. Among the wounded were two men, a woman, and a 17-year-old girl. One police officer was injured.
Hanrahan was forced to defend the raiders against charges of “murder” and “modern-day lynchings,” and activists called for a federal investigation. On Dec. 10, the Chicago Daily News described what had happened from the Panthers’ point of view. Not to be outdone, the Tribune rallied with its own big story, a graphic, and a firsthand, account from an officer on the raid.
The Tribune account — which the newspaper ballyhooed with the one-word banner headline “EXCLUSIVE” — was supplied by Hanrahan and included photos supposedly showing bullet holes that supported cops’ claims they came under fire. The Tribune didn’t check that assertion before running with the official explanation of the photos. The next day, Sun-Times reporters went to the apartment and found that the alleged bullet holes were in fact nail heads. The Tribune’s take on the photos, a Sun-Times headline crowed, “is nailed as mistake.”
When a federal grand jury issued its report May 15, 1970, it blasted all parties — including the press — in harsh terms. The grand jury found the raid “ill-conceived,” the post-raid investigation and reconstruction of events riddled with errors, and the news media responsible for “grossly exaggerated” accounts. The grand jury also took to task the surviving Black Panthers, whose refusal to cooperate they said hampered the probe.
Instead of chronicling a gunfight, the grand jury “found evidence that 76 expended shells were recovered at the scene, and that only one could be traced to a Panther.” Despite its severe criticism, the grand jury returned no indictments.
FBI agents had supplied the intelligence upon which the police raiders depended, and their boss didn’t go unscathed. Also revealed by the various investigations and lawsuits was a hush-hush FBI operation, COINTELPRO, that not only kept track of the Panthers and other radicals but also worked to undermine them with dirty tricks. News of the scheming tarnished Hoover’s reputation.
Faced with mounting criticism, including damning testimony in the federal grand jury report about the botched police investigation, the chief judge of Cook County criminal court, Joseph Power, appointed a Chicago lawyer, Barnabas Sears, as a special state’s attorney. Sears got a grand jury to indict Hanrahan and the police raiders. Presented with the indictment, Power refused to open it until the Illinois Supreme Court ordered him to. In the end, the defendants were acquitted in the trial that followed. Hampton’s and Clark’s families filed a civil suit that resulted in a $1.8 million settlement. For Hanrahan, who had ordered the raid, his promising political career was buried in an avalanche of protest votes at the next election.
After losing re-election, Hanrahan made quixotic runs for mayor and alderman and practiced law until his death in 2009. His funeral almost witnessed another clash between cops, there to mourn him, and black protesters, there to decry him.
Hampton’s son, Fred Hampton Jr., born two weeks after the raid, followed in his father’s footsteps. A militant activist, he went to prison for firebombing a grocery store during the protests of the acquittal of the Los Angeles cops who beat Rodney King.
Bobby Rush, Hampton’s Black Panther associate who took over as the group’s Illinois president, was the subject of a police manhunt after the original raid and went on to lead the protest over it. In 1972, he spent six months in prison for having an unregistered weapon, a charge that pre-dated the raid on the Panthers’ headquarters.
He then embarked on a conventional political career, serving in the Chicago City Council and the U.S. House — at one point beating back an up-and-comer named Barack Obama who was angling for his seat.
After the raid, O’Neal moved around the country under assumed names, fearing reprisals for his role in Hampton’s death, though he denied having guilty feelings. In 1990, having returned to the Chicago area, O’Neal ran onto the Eisenhower Expressway and was fatally stuck by a car. The medical examiner ruled it a suicide.
Editor’s note: Thanks to Richard Dreger, of Batavia, for suggesting this Flashback.
Twitter @quondamprof
