Today in our History – December 4, 1969 - Two Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark - killed in Chicago police raid.
GM – LIF – Today’s American Hero’s that for a generation of Chicagoans, their opinion of what happened in 1969 when Chicago police raided the West Side apartment of members depended greatly on what neighborhood they called home.
For the public at large, it was as police officials described: a dramatic gunfight launched against police by violent black nationalists that left two dead and four wounded.
But for others, particularly socially-conscious African Americans, the Dec. 4 raid on the two-flat at 2337 W. Monroe St. was a cold-blooded execution of two black men, ordered by federal authorities eager to snuff out burgeoning black leadership.
Officially, the Cook County state’s attorney’s 4:30 a.m. raid by 14 Chicago police officers began as the execution of a search warrant to turn up weapons and explosives that the feared black power group was supposedly hoarding inside. WAKE UP AND LEARN!
Remember - “The Black Panther Party had dynamic leadership that drew people to it, and Fred Hampton was a wonderful example of that. He would have made a wonderful leader.” - Historian Clayborne Carson
Today in our History – December 4, 1969 - Two Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark - killed in Chicago police raid. Civil rights leaders said the two men were murdered in their beds.
Mark Clark (June 28, 1947 – December 4, 1969) was an American activist and member of the Black Panther Party. He was killed with Fred Hampton during a Chicago police predawn raid on December 4, 1969.
In January 1970, a coroner's jury held an inquest and ruled the deaths of Clark and Hampton to be justifiable homicide. A lawsuit filed on behalf of the survivors and the relatives of Clark and Hampton was eventually settled in 1982 with the City of Chicago, Cook County, and the federal government each paying $616,333 to a group of nine plaintiffs. The allegation that Hampton was assassinated has been debated since the day he and Clark were killed in the police raid.
Fred Hampton (August 30, 1948 – December 4, 1969) was an American activist and revolutionary socialist. He came to prominence in Chicago as chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP), and deputy chairman of the national BPP. In this capacity, he founded a prominent multicultural political organization, known as the "Rainbow Coalition," creating an alliance among major street gangs to end their fighting among themselves and work for social change.
Because of his strong leadership, the FBI identified Hampton in 1967 as a radical threat and began to try to subvert his activities in Chicago, sowing disinformation among these groups and placing a counterintelligence operative in the local Panthers. In December 1969 Hampton was shot and killed in his bed during a pre-dawn raid at his Chicago apartment by a tactical unit of the Cook County State's Attorney's Office, in conjunction with the Chicago Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation; during this raid, another Panther was killed and several were seriously wounded. In January 1970, a coroner's jury held an inquest and ruled the deaths of Hampton and Mark Clark to be justifiable homicide.
A civil lawsuit was later filed on behalf of the survivors and the relatives of Hampton and fellow Panther Mark Clark. It was eventually resolved in 1982 for a settlement of $1.85 million; the City of Chicago, Cook County, and the federal government each paid one-third to a group of nine plaintiffs. Given revelations about the illegal COINTELPRO program and documents associated with the killings, scholars now widely consider Hampton's death to have been an assassination under the FBI's initiative.
Hampton founded the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party in November 1968. He immediately established a community service program. This included the provision of free breakfasts for schoolchildren and a medical clinic that did not charge patients for treatment. Hampton also taught political education classes and instigated a community control of police project.
One of Hampton's greatest achievements was to persuade Chicago's most powerful street gangs to stop fighting against each other. In May 1969 Hampton held a press conference where he announced a nonaggression pact between the gangs and the formation of what he called a "rainbow coalition" (a multiracial alliance of black, Puerto Rican, and poor youths).
Later that year Hampton was arrested and charged with stealing $71 worth of sweets, which he then allegedly gave away to local children. Hampton was initially convicted of the crime but the decision was eventually overturned.
The activities of the Black Panthers in Chicago came to the attention of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Hoover described the Panthers as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country" and urged the Chicago police to launch an all-out assault on the organization. In 1969 the Panther party headquarters on West Monroe Street was raided three times and over 100 members were arrested.
In the early hours of the 4th December 1969, the Panther headquarters was raided by the police for the fourth time. The police later claimed that the Panthers opened fire and a shoot-out took place. During the next ten minutes Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed. Witnesses claimed that Hampton was wounded in the shoulder and then executed by a shot to the head.
The panthers left alive, including Deborah Johnson, Hampton's girlfriend, who was eight months pregnant at the time, was arrested and charged with attempting to murder the police. Afterward, ballistic evidence revealed that only one bullet had been fired by the Panthers whereas nearly a hundred came from police guns.
After the resignation of President Richard Nixon, the Senate Intelligence Committee conducted a wide-ranging investigation of America's intelligence services. Frank Church of Idaho, the chairman of the committee, revealed in April, 1976 that William O'Neal, Hampton's bodyguard, was an FBI agent-provocateur who, days before the raid, had delivered an apartment floor-plan to the Bureau with an "X" marking Hampton's bed. Ballistic evidence showed that most bullets during the raid were aimed at Hampton's bedroom.
But it didn’t take long for the police’s version of events — that Black Panther members opened fire first on officers knocking on the door — to be challenged.
Survivors described a far more frightening scene: Officers armed with shotguns and rifles opening fire on sleeping Black Panther members inside, among them Hampton’s pregnant fiancee. A special federal grand jury determined that police sprayed 82 to 99 gunshots through doors, walls, and windows while just one shot appeared to have been fired by someone inside.
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)
Clark was killed in early gunfire, but survivors Harold Bell and Hampton’s fiancee, Akua Njeri, then known as Debra Johnson, testified at the 1972 criminal trial against the state’s attorney and officers in the raid that Hampton was pulled alive from his bed and shot dead after the group had surrendered. Later, an FBI whistleblower said the agency coaxed local law enforcement across the country, including Chicago police, into deadly clashes with heavily armed Black Panthers.
In 1983, a federal judge approved a settlement that awarded $1.85 million to survivors of the raid and families of the two men who were killed, to be paid by the federal government, the city of Chicago and Cook County.
Historian Clayborne Carson, director of Stanford University’s Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, said the Black Panthers’ fast rise during 1960s was due to their leadership’s ability to speak to young black disenfranchisement.
“What the Black Panthers did was take that generation of young people who were disturbed by what was happening in the black community and developed a political answer," said Carson, who has written extensively on the Black Panthers, King, and Malcolm X.
Carson and G. Flint Taylor, a longtime Chicago attorney who has worked on cases involving the use of excessive force by police, said modern movements like Black Lives Matter that address police brutality have taken up the mantle of the Black Panthers. Taylor also represented the Hampton and Clark families in the 13-year civil lawsuit.
If the 1969 deaths were meant to stall black leadership in Chicago, Taylor said the outrage by activists across racial lines over Hampton and Clark’s deaths helped lay the political groundwork that “led in a straight line to the voting out of (State’s Attorney Edward) Hanrahan in 1972 ... and of course, that political movement became the underpinnings of the movement" to elect Harold Washington as the city’s first black leader and later Barack Obama, as the nation’s first black president.
Decades later, the West Side killings could still divide the city and cause tempers to flare. In 2006, a West Side alderman proposed naming a section of Monroe Street as Chairman Fred Hampton Way. The proposal, which initially flew under the public radar, soon raised the ire of the local police union and the relatives of fallen police officers. They claimed police were merely pushing back against violent militants who encouraged armed resistance.
“It’s a dark day when we honor someone who would advocate killing policemen and who took great advantage of the communities he claimed to have been serving,” the Fraternal Order of Police president said at the time. Weeks before the 1969 raid, a gunbattle had left two Chicago officers and one Black Panther member dead.
The attempt to rename the street failed, aggravating past scars and showing that the “echoes of that turbulent era still reverberate in a city still divided by race and class,” writer and commentator Salim Muwakkil wrote in 2006. Research more about this great tragedy and share it with your babies. Make it a champion day!