[ Early morning, December 4, 1969, fourteen police officers
executed a search warrant on a Chicago flat rented by the Black
Panther Party. Supposedly looking for illegal weapons, instead, they
shot and killed two people, leaving four others wounded.]
[[link removed]]

FRED HAMPTON MURDERED BY CHICAGO POLICE 50 YEARS AGO  
[[link removed]]

 

Ted Pearson; Norman Stockwell, Frances Madeson interviewing Jeffrey
Haas
December 4, 2019

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_ Early morning, December 4, 1969, fourteen police officers executed
a search warrant on a Chicago flat rented by the Black Panther Party.
Supposedly looking for illegal weapons, instead, they shot and killed
two people, leaving four others wounded. _

Fred Hampton speaking at Chicago rally, summer 1969.,

 

The Short Story of Fred Hampton, Assassinated Black Panther Leader -
Ted Pearson (People's World)
Fifty Years After the Police Murders of Black Panthers Fred Hampton
and Mark Clark - Norman Stockwell and Frances Madeson interviewing
Jeffrey Haas (The Progressive)
Fred Hampton - On The Importance Of Education Prior To Action -
Chicago Teachers Union

 

THE SHORT STORY OF FRED HAMPTON, ASSASSINATED BLACK PANTHER LEADER

By Ted Pearson

December 4, 2019
People's World
[[link removed]]

_This is an excerpted version of an article that originally appeared
in People’s World’s predecessor publication, Daily World, on
January 17, 1970. The short political biography appeared just weeks
after the assassination of Fred Hampton, a leader of the Black Panther
Party. It is reprinted now on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of
his murder._

CHICAGO—The police of Cook County took the life of 21-year-old Fred
Hampton and 20-year-old Mark Clark in one of the most sadistic of all
the genocidal attacks on the Black Panther Party. That was Dec. 4,
1969. Sine then, thousands have visited the apartment where the two
youths were gunned down in their sleep. The incident loosed the united
fury of the black community against the national governmental
conspiracy to exterminate the Panthers.

But it was not the horror and barbarism of these murders alone that
united the community. Fred Hampton is one of 28 Panthers who have died
across the country, killed by police. Many had felt a growing anger as
the extermination drive against Panthers became more obvious, but it
was the incredible death of Fred Hampton that galvanized the community
and crystallized its fears and outrage.

 

The rear bedroom in which Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton was
killed at 2337 W. Monroe St. on Dec. 4, 1969, during a raid by
authorities. This photo, taken Dec. 12, 1969, is looking east with the
right wall facing the backyard. 
James OLeary  /  Chicago Tribune
…

Fred Hampton touched the lives of many people, white and black, both
those with whom he agreed and those with whom he disagreed.

This young man started as a leader of the Youth Council of the NAACP
in suburban Maywood, Ill., and rose to a position of national
leadership in the Black Panther Party. Always, in his brief life,
people observed his eloquent hate for exploitation and racism but he
never hated working people, black or white. In the eyes of thousands
who knew him, he was a young Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, of their
stature. It was this that led him inexorably towards Marxism-Leninism
and a class analysis of the capitalist system. Though he had his share
of contradictions and seemingly anti-white frustrations, his thrust
was towards the unity of black and white. It was this aspect of his
practice and viewpoint, among others, that shocked the nation into an
awareness of the genocidal significance of the assault upon the Black
Panther Party.

Fred Hampton was born Aug. 30, 1948, to Francis and Iberia Hampton,
two factory workers among the millions of black people who are
mislabeled “middle class’ by bourgeois sociologists. Hampton’s
father, Francis, today works at the same job he did when Fred was
born—a painter at the sprawling Argo, Ill., refinery of the Corn
Products Company. His mother has also worked at that refinery on an
assembly line for 14 years….

Both active members of Local 7-507 of the Oil and Chemical Workers
Union, Mr. and Mrs. Hampton have devoted their lives, since coming to
Chicago from Haynesville, La., almost 25 years ago, to forging a
decent life for their family. Although not agreeing with everything
Fred did, they always supported him. They understood that he was
dedicated to the liberation of black people. There is no doubt that
Mrs. Hampton, her warm concern for people, played an important role in
shaping the future of her youngest child, Fred.

Fred Hampton attended school across the street from his family home in
Maywood…. He went on to Proviso East High School, graduating with
high grades in 1966…. During his last two years Proviso East,
“racial trouble” broke out sporadically at the school. As the
suburb’s black population gradually increased, certain students from
nearby lily-white Broadview and Melrose Park increasingly attacked and
insulted the black students from Maywood with encouragement and help
from some of the teachers. Hampton joined the Inter-racial Cross
Section Committee at Proviso East, and soon became respected among
both black and white for his attempts to “cool” the situation.
Already at that time, his brother Bill could say, “He was a leader
to whites as much as to the blacks at the school.” On one occasion,
friends recall, Fred met with a group of long-haired, leather-jacketed
white toughs who had been mainly involved in the troubles. After a
long and heated discussion, Hampton, or “Hamp” as his friends knew
him, convinced them it was “the system” that was oppressing them.
“You are as oppressed as we are,” Hampton told them, “ ‘cause
you aren’t even together.”

The result was a united demand from the students for a greater voice
in school affairs and an end to racist practices there.

However, the powers that be had other ideas. After this first meeting,
where these demands were presented, there were no more. The school
administrators turned a deaf ear to proposed solutions and brought in
the police. Not even the Maywood police, but the Cook Country police,
under the command of the notorious racist Sheriff Joe Woods, whose
plan for arming a vigilante “posse” to deal with “riots”
brought him national attention in 1969.

Evidently, the administrators…preferred to have “racial trouble”
rather than face the united demands of the working-class black and
white students at the school, led by Fred Hampton. One of Hamp’s
first arrests came during an early “disturbance” in November 1967
when he tried to stop a fight between black and white youth outside
the school. “Fred got between the two and held up his hands to stop
them,” Bill Hampton recalled, “and the police arrested him and
beat him.”

It was a result of his obvious leadership abilities that the NAACP
Maywood branch approached him then to work with their Youth Council.
Hamp threw himself into the council’s work. He built it virtually
from scratch, from a tiny organization to one of 700 young people,
including every single black youth in the town between the ages of 15
and 21.

During the summer of 1967, Hampton sensed that the need for
recreational facilities for Maywood’s black youth was a key to
uniting the community. The municipal swimming pool in adjoining
Melrose Park was the only one in the area. Lake Michigan’s famous
beaches were 20 miles away. Restricted to residents of Melrose Park,
the “non-discriminatory policy” of pool officials somehow allowed
white Maywood youth to use the pool while black youth were invariable
turned away.

Rather than insisting on integrating the pool, the NAACP Youth Council
demanded that Maywood officials build another one for Maywood youth,
white and black. After many meetings and much stalling of the village
administration under former Mayor Edgar Elbert, the youths turned to
the streets. Their first demonstration turned out only about a
hundred. But Elbert’s swift action in calling in Sheriff Joe
Woods’ stormtroopers led to the first in a series of violent
uprisings in Maywood. Subsequent demonstrations swelled to many
hundreds. The people became incensed when Woods’ men arrested
Hampton and brutally beat him before the yes of the demonstrators and
onlookers for peacefully petitioning the village board.

This, Hampton’s very first arrest, played an important role in
forming his conviction that black people must defend themselves in the
face of police brutality. It was the first of many arrests, beatings,
and frame-ups at the hands of police, invariable committed while
Hampton was playing the role of unifier and peacemaker between
working-class whites and blacks. The swimming pool for which he fought
will open next spring (1970)….

…

Hampton began to drift away from the NAACP Youth Council as his
understanding of the repressive capitalist system and his militancy
grew. In late summer 1968, he formed a Maywood chapter of the Student
Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. He continued the fight for full
equality in Maywood, but now following the ideological orientation of
Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, who evidently recognized the
unusual potential of this brilliant young man. He led many struggles,
most of them centering around the high school.

The police had singled Hampton out for a campaign of terror long
before he had anything to do with the Black Panther Party. Joan
Elbert, a white middle-class Maywood leader in the Lutheran Church,
tells how police would follow young Hampton, parking outside any place
where he was to speak. On one such occasion, the young leader was to
address a group of Lutherans, many from the conservative Missouri
Synod, at the St. James Lutheran Church in Western Springs, an
all-white suburb far south of Maywood. The pastor of the church
pleaded with the police to leave, but they insisted they had been
“tipped off” that Hampton was going to be there, and that he was a
“dangerous man.” The “tip-off” came from the Chicago Police
Department, who had never even met Hampton. “If anyone needed
protection, it was Fred,” Mrs. Elbert noted.

In February 1968, Hampton met “Brother Lenny,” who was in Chicago
to speak about the Black Panther Party. Hampton helped Mrs. Elbert
play host to Brother Lenny, who came from the Panthers’ national
headquarters in Oakland, Calif., to speak to church groups there.

This appears to be one of the first contacts Hampton evidently made
with the Panthers and the basic idea of Marxism-Leninism. The two
militant youths had long and heated arguments concerning the nature of
the struggle, with Brother Lenny insisting the struggle was a class
struggle, and Hampton expressing all the disillusionment he had
experienced in the recent months with liberal and working class
whites.

But the influence of the idea of class struggle left a deep mark on
him, for even though he expressed strong non-class, anti-white
feelings at the time, his efforts seemed to unify black and white.
“Even when he thought it was a waste of time, he always had time to
meet with people,” Mrs. Elbert observed.

Hampton’s contact with the Communist Party USA also played a role.
In spite of some harsh clashes with Communist leaders, the direction
of his changing approach is reflected in remarks of Eugene Charles,
the Panthers’ Lieutenant of Information. Charles, on a platform with
Henry Winston, Chairman of the Communist Party, three days after
Hampton’s assassination said, “The Black Panther Party has more
respect for the Communist and Workers’ Parties of the world than any
other except our own.”

In November 1968, Fred Hampton, Bobby Rush, and about ten others
formed the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party. Almost
immediately, they began, under Hampton’s leadership, to build the
free breakfast program for children and to fight for unity between
black and white youth organizations. Hampton personally went out to
build relations with the “gangs” that had grown in the community.
It was he who was largely responsible for helping to convince these
mass organizations that their enemy was the system, not each other.
Personally he met with the Puerto Rican Young Lords Organization and
the Southern white Young Patriots and helped them forge a unity that
has since become national in scope in the fledgling “Rainbow
Coalition.”

 

Fred Hampton, left, chairman of the Black Panthers, speaks during a
news conference with the Young Lords on Oct. 10, 1969, at Holy
Covenant United Methodist Church. With Hampton are, from left, Pablo
"Yoruba" Guzman, a Young Lord from New York, Jose "Cha-Cha" Jimenez,
founder of the Young Lords of Chicago, and Mike Klonsky, a Students
for a Democratic Society spokesman.
Dave Nystrom/Chicago Tribune
Under his leadership and through his own personal efforts, he brought
basic classes in Marxism-Leninism to these groups, emphasizing the
need to overthrow capitalism and the necessity for class unity. He did
this while simultaneously building the Black Panther Party from a
small group of a dozen to one of hundreds, with a base of thousands,
particularly among the young black high school students in Chicago.
Constantly, he stressed the need to bring new cadres forward as they
built, for he often expressed the thought that his own life was in
danger….

Hampton did all this while fighting for the regularity and expansion
of the free breakfast program and for the new free people’s health
center, dedicated this past Christmas Day (1969) to Jake Winters.
Winters was one of his comrades who fell in battle with the
fascist-minded police only weeks before Hampton’s own death.

Fred Hampton was just beginning to make his contribution to
revolutionary struggle when he was killed. In his 21 years, he had
already done more for the people, white and black, than most people in
their lifetime. He will long be remembered for many things, his humor,
his rapid but poetic speech, his warmth and kindness.

But mostly he will be remembered as a man of deeds—deeds performed
for his people every moment of his short life….

The horror of his death and the lies of the district attorney are not
the only cause of the outpouring of concern and outrage by the people.
Equal to that is the nagging thought on the mind of everyone who knew
anything about him: “It wasn’t the guy next door, but it was the
power structure, Mayor Daley, and the industrialists. This, and his
ability to work with everybody is why I guess they had to kill him,”
as Karen Nye, a white nurse put it. Or as Joan Elbert observed,
“Fred said that if there’s problems with blacks, they (the ruling
class) can isolate it; but when you get white and black together, they
have to deal with it. I think that’s why he was so dangerous to them
and had to be killed.”

…

The Rev. Ralph Abernathy, president of the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, noted at Fred Hampton’s funeral that he had
united the black community and important sections of whites through
his death. “If you achieved this, you have not died in vain,”
Abernathy said.

_[Ted Pearson has been the Co-chairperson at Chicago Alliance Against
Racist and Political Repression for 30 years.]_

FIFTY YEARS AFTER THE POLICE MURDERS OF BLACK PANTHERS FRED HAMPTON
AND MARK CLARK

by Norman Stockwell, Frances Madeson interviewing Jeffrey Haas

December 3, 2019
The Progressive
[[link removed]]

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover oversaw COINTELPRO, a campaign to surveil
and target black political organizers in the United States.
Yoichi R. Okamoto  //  The Progressive
Early in the morning of December 4, 1969, fourteen police officers
executed a search warrant on a Chicago flat rented by the Black
Panther Party. They were supposedly looking for illegal weapons.
Instead, they shot and killed two people, and left four others
wounded.

Fred Hampton, chair of the Black Panther Party of Illinois, died of
two gunshots to the head. His murder, along with that of fellow
Panther Mark Clark, sent waves of shock and outrage through their
community. Hampton was a well-liked and charismatic leader at the age
of only twenty-one. His death came in the last month of a decade that
saw the murders of other prominent civil rights leaders including
Medgar Evers in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, and Reverend Martin Luther
King Jr. in 1968.  

In 1982, a civil rights suit brought by the families of the two slain
men was settled
[[link removed]] for
$1.85 million, with the money coming city, county, and federal
authorities. The attorneys in that case were Jeffrey Haas and Flint
Taylor.

This week, in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the raid,
Haas is reissuing his 2009 book, _The Assassination of Fred Hampton:
How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther_
[[link removed]].
In the book’s introduction, Haas writes, “The need to protest,
expose, and hold accountable those in power who violate our laws and
personal liberties continues and remains a fundamental struggle of our
society and any society.”

The Assassination of Fred Hampton
[[link removed]]
How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther
By Jeffrey Haas
Chicago Review Press; 400 pages
Trade Paper:  $17.99
ISBN 9781641603218

 

Haas, along with fellow attorney Flint Taylor and a team from
the People’s Law Office
[[link removed]],
helped tie the Chicago murders to the FBI’s secret COINTELPRO
project, in which director J. Edgar Hoover sought
[[link removed]] to
“destroy, discredit, disrupt the activities of the Black Panther
Party by any means necessary and prevent the rise of a Black
Messiah.” 

Haas has continued to fight for the rights of political protestors and
advocates for change. Among other projects he has volunteered
[[link removed]] his
legal skills on behalf of the water protectors opposing the Dakota
Access Pipeline project in South Dakota. 

Now a resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico, Haas travelled to Chicago this
week for the book launch and other events on the fiftieth anniversary
of the killings. Just before he left, Frances Madeson caught up with
him in Santa Fe for a short conversation about the significance of the
Hampton case today.

Q: FRED HAMPTON WAS NOT A WELL-KNOWN NATIONAL LEADER. WHY WAS HE
ASSASSINATED?

JEFFREY HAAS: In the course of our thirteen-year lawsuit, including
an eighteen-month trial, to expose what happened to Fred and the other
Panthers that night, we learned that the government had a plan in
place to deal with any black leaders emerging “who could unify and
electrify the masses,” in the words of the FBI documents. 

Fred was doing that. He had brought together a coalition of Puerto
Ricans, Appalachians, and left people in Chicago to demand new things,
including an end to police brutality and mass incarceration, community
control of police, free breakfast programs, health clinics, and so
forth.

In 1968 and 1969, he’d met with the Blackstone Rangers and the Black
Gangster Disciples, two armed street gangs that had control of big
areas of Chicago. Fred said to them, “Why are you preying on your
own people? Why can’t we form a coalition?” And they did. In
addition, Fred had already been in the prisons in Illinois and he was
organizing the prisoners. 

Fred’s assassination had a huge impact on the south and west sides
of Chicago. Without young leaders like Fred to bring young black
people together, including militant people but who also had a base in
the community and felt like the Panthers had served the community,
they were overrun by the crack epidemic, the drug epidemic and the
control of gangs that followed. 

 

Black Panther and civil rights leader Fred Hampton.
stf / AP  //  truthdig
Q: IN 1982, YOU WON A $1.85 MILLION SETTLEMENT FOR THE HAMPTON AND
CLARK FAMILIES AND THE RAID SURVIVORS. IN 2018, CHICAGO PAID OUT MORE
THAN $113 MILLION ON POLICE MISCONDUCT LAWSUITS, AND MORE THAN A HALF
A BILLION DOLLARS OVER THE PAST EIGHT YEARS. WHAT IS THE SIGNIFICANCE
OF MONETARY DAMAGES?

HAAS: As a deterrent, it’s really questionable as to how much money
a city can afford to lose before they change police practices and
training. That’s really an open question, I think. 

Nevertheless, it’s important that victims of civil rights abuses
have a forum, and that they collect compensatory damages for what they
suffered. In the civil system, the victims are the plaintiffs and we
can try to really expose, confront and change police practices, and
get the information that hopefully will help the public decide that
there needs to be regulation of the police.

But money damages are not enough. Our lawsuit was a long crusade, with
many appeals, and it was ultimately successful. But no one ever did a
day of time, even though we proved the conspiracy—no indictments,
after all that. Fred’s mother Iberia told me, “They got away with
murder,” and I couldn’t deny that. 

Q: IN YOUR NEW PREFACE, YOU REFERENCE THE 2014 POLICE MURDER OF
TWENTY-YEAR-OLD LAQUAN MCDONALD AND THE INDICTMENT AND CONVICTION OF
THE OFFICER WHO KILLED HIM. WHY DO YOU THINK IT TOOK FORTY-FIVE YEARS
FOR A CHICAGO POLICE OFFICER TO BE CONVICTED IN ONE OF THESE KILLINGS?

HAAS: When Laquan’s body was prepared for his funeral, the
mortician alerted people that he’d been shot sixteen times in the
back and the side, indicating he may have been fleeing the police, not
attacking the police. Investigative reporters began to get suspicious
and it emerged there was a police video that had been hidden for two
years. The video showing the murder by officer Jason Van Dyke was
going to come out. 

A real coalition came together and they demanded that Van Dyke be
charged with murder, which had never happened before. So the
prosecutor quickly indicted him because it came to light that she and
then mayor Rahm Emanuel knew about this video, had seen it, but had
kept it hidden. 

Due to the pressure of the people who went to the police station, the
courts and city hall over three years, the police chief was fired, the
state’s attorney was defeated in a subsequent election and the mayor
didn’t run again because it was clear that it would be the main
campaign issue—why did he sit on this tape for so long? 

The jury came back with a guilty verdict for second-degree murder and
sixteen counts of aggravated battery, one for each shot. So, in a way,
it was a political victory for the community, because the movement was
so tenacious. And the fact that an officer can be charged and
sentenced to substantial time will certainly have an impact on the
officers willing to pull the trigger, so we see some things
changing. 

That Fred Hampton’s murder was exposed as an assassination and that
the police covered it up also made it easier in the general public’s
awareness that cops do this and they do cover for each other and the
politicians cover for the police.

Q: WHY, OF ALL OF THE CASES YOU HAVE BEEN INVOLVED IN, DID YOU DECIDE
TO WRITE A BOOK ON THE ASSASSINATION OF FRED HAMPTON? 

HAAS: I feel it’s important for people to know who Fred Hampton is
beyond the fact of his murder. He was an amazing charismatic young
man, with a tremendous energy and vibrancy who said many unforgettable
things that are inspiring to this day. For instance Fred said
[[link removed]]: “Peace to
you . . . if you’re willing to fight for it.” 

The Panthers had an analysis that said capitalism was the enemy of the
people, and that until the people took that power away, they would be
exploited. Fred said: “All power to the people because that’s
where it belongs, in the hands of the people.” If that wasn’t
clear in 1969, it’s even clearer today, when we see corporate greed
destroying people of color’s communities, setting the world on
fire—and it seems unstoppable. 

I think that in 1969, Fred and many of us felt we were part of a
worldwide resistance movement that was actually going to change that
power. Now we’re in a counter-revolution, yet we see that people are
arising everywhere. Fred and the Panthers didn’t say they were going
to make the revolution, they said “we’re going to educate the
people and the people are going to make the change.”

_[Norman Stockwell is publisher of The Progressive._

_Frances Madeson has written about liberation struggles in the United
States and abroad, and is the author of the comic novel Cooperative
Village.]_

 

FRED HAMPTON - ON THE IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATION PRIOR TO ACTION

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Play here [[link removed]]

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