Assasination of Fred Hampton - Jeff Haas CA Book
Tour 11-18 to 12-1
"
Wednesday November 18
Los Angeles, CA
Ese Won Books, 4331 Degnan Avenue
Thursday November 19
West Hollywood, CAook
k Soup 7 pm
8818 Sunset Blvd.
Friday November 20
The Black Repertory Theater
3201 Adeline St, Berkeley
510-652-2120
Monday November 30
Berkeley, CA
Books, Inc
1760 Fourth Street
7:00 PM
Tuesday December 1
San Francisco, CA
City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Avenue at Broadway 7pm
An excerpt of a new book on the Black Panther
leader?s death and its aftermath by People?s Law Office cofounder Jeffrey Haas
By
<http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/ArticleArchives?author=1227454>Jeffrey
<http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/ArticleArchives?author=1227454>Haas
Maybe we all have points at which our
consciousness changes and we cannot return to our
former path. For many political activists, that
dividing line occurred in the late 1960s. We were
fed up with a system that thrived on war, racism,
and patriarchy. We were young people who at first
hadn't understood why the United States was
waging war in Vietnam but who by 1969 believed
that it was endemic to an unjust system we felt compelled to stop or overthrow.
I was part of a small group of lawyers who wanted
to get involved. Fred Hampton was the young
chairman of the Chicago chapter of the Black
Panther Party. In the spring of 1969, after
Hampton recruited some of our members to help
with the party's legal problems, we made the
decision to form the People's Law Office, an
independent practice that would represent Hampton and the movement as a whole.
In the early morning hours of December 4, 1969,
Hampton and Mark Clark were assassinated in a
raid conducted by the Cook County State's
Attorney's Office in conjunction with the Chicago
police and the FBI. Our fledgling practice sued
the government on behalf of the victims' families
and the survivors of the raid. It was 13 years
before the case was settled, for $1.85 million,
coming in equal parts from the city, county, and
federal governments. I've now left the PLO, but
for the last 40 years it has continued to
represent victims of abuse and misconduct by
police and other government officials.
The Hampton and Clark families and the survivors
of the raid are being honored at an event on
November 5 at the law school at Northwestern
University, where Fred spoke to the students and
faculty exactly 40 years ago. It includes a
reading, a discussion by a panel of scholars and
writers moderated by Bernardine Dohrn, and a public reception.
What follows is an edited excerpt of my new book,
The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI
and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther,
about the murder, the government's cover-up, and
the survivors' pursuit of justice. ?Jeffrey Haas
In 1966 Fred Hampton was a high school senior
working on his own version of black empowerment.
He was campaigning for more black teachers and
administrators at his school, Proviso East, and
he set up a black cultural center in Maywood with
a black history section. During this period two
young Californians were similarly engaged. They
demanded more black administrators and black
history courses at Merritt College in Oakland,
California. One was 24-year-old Huey Newton; the
other was 30-year-old Bobby Seale.
Newton and Seale worked at the North Oakland
Poverty Center. They went door-to-door asking
residents what they needed and wanted. The
information gleaned became the basis of the "Ten
Point Program" when they formed the Black Panther
Party for Self-Defense later that year. . . .
The party urged members to arm themselves, which
was legal in California as long as the weapons
were not concealed. Panthers followed Oakland
police cars around the ghetto to monitor their
treatment of black citizens. This outraged the
Oakland Police Department and gave the Panthers
immediate visibility. Incidents of police
brutality decreased substantially during their
patrols, increasing acceptance of the Panthers by the black community.
In Chicago Fred Hampton also spoke out against
police brutality. As the leader of the NAACP
Youth Chapter, he originally marched for raises
of police salaries to get more professional
police in Maywood. Later he pushed to make the
police more accountable and to give Maywood
citizens the power to fire brutal cops. . . .
In May 1967, 30 Oakland Panthers, 24 men and six
women, went to the California legislature in
Sacramento carrying rifles to dramatize their
right of self-defense and to protest pending
legislation that would overturn the law allowing
people to carry unconcealed weapons. The photos
and TV images of the armed Panthers in leather
jackets and black berets at the capitol steps was
a shot heard round the world. Seale and many of
the other Panthers ended up with six-month
sentences for "conspiracy to disturb the peace,"
and Panther chapters started up in Los Angeles, Atlanta, New York, and Detroit.
Black militancy was on the rise in Chicago as
well. In the fall of 1967, Hampton and Bill
Ivory, a respected dentist and NAACP member,
addressed a Maywood rally of more than a hundred
young people. Fred urged his listeners to come to
the Maywood Village Board meeting the next night
to press their demands for a public swimming pool and recreational center.
A large crowd, mostly young blacks, went to the
meeting, but not all were allowed inside. Fred
urged the board to find a larger space or let
those outside come in, even if they had to stand.
The Maywood police panicked, tear-gassing those
outside. Angered by the police reaction, the
young people left the village hall and ran down
Fifth Avenue, Maywood's main street, breaking
store windows and threatening passersby.
Though they were inside the village hall when the
violence took place, Hampton and Bill Ivory were
arrested and charged with mob action because of
their speeches the night before. Fred was in jail
for three days before he could post the $500 bail. . . .
After the board meeting, Fred was targeted by the
Maywood police and arrested on several occasions
for technical traffic violations. He eventually
stopped driving to avoid the harassment. The
local police weren't the only ones watching Fred
Hampton. After his arrest for mob action, he was
put on the FBI's Key Agitator Index, a list of
activists that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover
ordered agents to monitor closely. . . .
[Documents I've obtained since I finished the
book show that Hoover reported to the White
House, the CIA, the secretary of state, and the
U.S. Army that Fred had led the Maywood
protesters through the streets breaking windows and attacking bystanders.]
Later that year Bobby Rush, then a leader in the
Chicago chapter of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee and now an Illinois
congressman, went to Oakland, where he met with
the Panther Central Committee. Rush returned with
a mandate to form a Panther chapter in Chicago.
The first person he recruited was Hampton, and
they opened the Chicago office in November 1968.
In four years Fred had evolved from organizing
for black homecoming queens to becoming chairman
of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers.
Following the Oakland Panthers' lead, Fred set up
a local Breakfast for Children Program, providing
free hot breakfasts for kids before school, and
then expanded it beyond its first site, the
Better Boys Foundation, to several other
locations. Securing the food from merchants,
getting it prepared and delivered to the
kitchens, supervising the kids eating before
school, and cleaning up afterward was major work
for many of the Panther cadre. The rest of the
day was often spent selling Panther newspapers,
interviewing people and filling out
questionnaires on their needs and priorities,
getting petitions for community control of police
signed, attending political education classes,
and maintaining the office. . . .
Fred went from site to site working at the
breakfast programs and talking to the kids and
their parents about what the Black Panther Party
was trying to do for the community. Kids were
taught revolutionary songs. Parents were asked to
participate in the programs, although it was not
a requirement for their kids to get fed. In one
of his later speeches, Fred said:
"The pigs say, 'Well the Breakfast for Children
Program is a socialistic program, it's a
communistic program.' And the women say, 'I don't
know if I like communism. I don't know if I like
socialism. But I know that the Breakfast for
Children Program feeds my kids.' A lot of people
think the Breakfast for Children Program is
charity. But what does it do? It takes the people
from a stage to another stage. Any program that's
revolutionary is an advancing program. Revolution
is change. Honey, if you just keep on changing,
before you know it?in fact, you don't have to
know what it is?they're endorsing it, they're
participating in it, and supporting socialism."
Doc Satchel, who started Chicago's Panther health clinic, put it another way:
"The Panthers were an armed propaganda unit that
raised the contradictions, set the example, and
provided the vehicle that the people could ride
to revolution. We do not say the Black Panther
Party will be overthrowing the government; we
heighten the contradictions so the people can
decide if they want to change the government."
Fred frequently spoke about how nationalism could
not replace education: "You can't build a
revolution with no education. Jomo Kenyatta did
this in Africa and because the people were not
educated he became as much an oppressor as the
people he overthrew. Look at Papa Doc Duvalier in
Haiti. He got everyone to hate whites and he
turned into the dictator himself. How will people
end up without education?" . . .
While the Panthers' vision of how the
revolutionary struggle would actually come about
was not always clearly articulated or understood,
at least by me, the work of the programs and
organizing was always present. They provided a
reality check and a complement to the revolutionary rhetoric. . . .
Panther members in Chicago went door-to-door in
many black communities to find out what peoples'
complaints and priorities were and to get
signatures on petitions for community control of
the police. These neighborhood activities
sometimes put them in conflict with Chicago
street gangs, who considered many areas their
exclusive territories. The gangs were armed and
organized. Sometimes they exercised their power
to benefit the community. The Black P. Stone
Nation, successor to the Blackstone Rangers,
carried out a "no-vote" campaign on the south
side to take votes away from the Democratic
machine in favor of more progressive and
community-oriented candidates. In 1969 members of
the Black Disciples, the city's second-largest
street gang, made up the majority of
demonstrators who picketed and actually halted
Chicago construction projects in the Loop until
they won positions for African-Americans in the
building trades unions, which had been a bastion
of discrimination. Fred met and worked out a
treaty with Black Disciples leader David
Barksdale that allowed the Panthers to organize
and recruit in areas controlled by the gang.
Fred had been less successful when he'd met with
the leadership of the Blackstone Rangers. One
face-to-face meeting took place at the Rangers'
headquarters in Woodlawn. Fred and several other
armed Panthers went to the meeting but were
quickly surrounded by many better-armed Rangers,
including Jeff Fort, their leader, and other
representatives of the Main 21, the Rangers'
governing body. Fort told Fred he could be rich
if he and the Panthers joined the Rangers' drug
operation. Fred refused: he didn't use drugs and
he and Panther policy did not allow other Panthers to use them.
The meeting ended with Fort acknowledging that
the Panthers were not a rival gang but still
refusing to permit them to operate in Ranger
territory. The meeting lessened tensions only
slightly. Nevertheless, Fred's efforts to work
with and organize gang members caused fear
throughout the police and FBI. After the meeting
at the Rangers' headquarters, Chicago police,
following an FBI tip, arrested a carload of armed
Panthers driving away. This resulted in criminal
charges against the Panthers and set off
speculation that the Rangers had snitched on
them. Years later we would learn that an FBI
informant in the Panthers had tipped off his FBI
control, who then notified the police. . . .
In October 1969, Fred was still spending some
nights at his parents' home in Maywood and some
in other Panther apartments. Deborah Johnson was
seven months pregnant with Fred's baby; she and
Fred wanted to live together. Despite warnings
from their friends to stay in the suburbs,
farther from the Chicago police, Fred and Deborah
rented a small five-room apartment on the first
floor of a two-flat at 2337 W. Monroe, one street
over from the Panther office. It quickly became a Panther hangout. . . .
Fred and the Panthers knew that J. Edgar Hoover
and the FBI as well as the local police were out
to get them. Fred understood he was a marked man,
but the security at the new Panther crib was irregular and haphazard. . . .
I'd worked an all-nighter and had just fallen
asleep on the morning of December 4 when I heard
a loud knock at the front door. Dazed, I got up
and opened it. My partner Skip Andrew was
standing there dressed in suit and tie. "Chairman
Fred is dead," he said. "I just got a call from
Rush. The pigs vamped on the chairman's crib this morning."
I remained stuck on the words Chairman Fred is dead.
"Someone else was killed and a lot of people were
shot. Deborah Johnson and some others are at the
Wood Street police station; the people wounded are at Cook County Hospital."
"What should I do?" I asked.
"I'm meeting Rush at the morgue, and then we're
going to the chairman's crib," Skip replied. "Why
don't you go to Wood Street and try to talk to some of the survivors?"
Fred Hampton dead. I had just seen him at the
Panther office looking larger than life. I
couldn't imagine him motionless. On my way to the
police station, I heard the news flash: "Fred
Hampton and another Panther member were killed
this morning in a predawn raid by police officers
assigned to state's attorney Edward Hanrahan.
Hanrahan's office indicated the officers were
serving a search warrant for weapons when they
were fired upon by the occupants and returned the fire."
Why was Hanrahan the prosecutor in charge of a police raid? . . .
At Wood Street a patrolman came out from behind
the counter and led me to the back of the
station. He unlocked the door to a tiny,
windowless interview room with a small wooden
table and two wooden chairs on either side. There
was a knock at the door. The patrolman unlocked
it and Deborah Johnson was brought into the
cramped room. This was our first meeting. She
leaned over, crying and shaking, supporting
herself with one hand on the table. Slowly she
sat down. She looked at me guardedly, not quite
fathoming who I was or why I was there.
"I'm Jeff Haas with the People's Law Office. How
are you and your baby?" I asked.
There was a pause as if she didn't hear me, then
she responded, "I wasn't shot like a lot of the
others. The pigs pushed me around, but I think my
baby is OK." She paused again. "Fred never really
woke up. We were sleeping. I woke up hearing
shots from the front and back. I shook Fred but he didn't open his eyes."
Deborah demonstrated how she had pushed against
Fred several times trying to wake him. "At one
point he sort of raised up and then lay back down
again." She repeated that he never opened his
eyes. "I got on top of him to try to protect him
from the gunshots. The bed was shaking from the bullets."
She said the shooting stopped only after someone
in the bedroom with her yelled, "We got a
pregnant sister in here." She told me two "pigs"
came into the bedroom. One of them pulled up her
nightgown and called out, "Look, we got a broad
here." Then they pulled her out into the kitchen.
Deborah stopped talking as she wiped her eyes on
the sleeve of her nightgown. "Fred never really
woke up," she repeated. "He was lying there when
they pulled me out of the bedroom." She paused.
Then she described two police officers going into
their bedroom and hearing one of them fire two
shots, followed by, "He's good and dead now."
Deborah put her head down. A moment later she
raised it suddenly and looked at me. "What can you do?" she asked.
What could I do about the horrible murder she had
just described? Not knowing what to say, I asked
her, "Did it look like Fred had been shot already
when you were pulled out of the bedroom?"
"He didn't have any blood on him that I could
see," she replied. "I crawled on top of him
during the shooting to try to protect him." She
showed me her patterned blue- and-white
nightgown. There was no blood. Deborah's
description of Fred rising up but not opening his
eyes, then lying back down, seemed strange. I
couldn't understand why he appeared dazed and
semiconscious when he had not been shot. "Were
the men who raided the apartment in uniform?"
"No," she said, "but they were definitely the pigs."
?2009 Jeffrey Haas
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