The Assassination Of Fred Hampton

On December 4^th, 1969, Fred Hampton, an African American activist, deputy chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party was murdered while sleeping in his apartment during a raid by a tactical unit of the Cook County, Illinois State’s Attorney’s Office, in conjunction with the Chicago Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). This activity was in concert by the infamous seditious FBI program known as COINTELPRO designed to eliminate activist deemed by its director as “subversive”.   

"We expected about twenty Panthers to be in the apartment when the police raided the place. Only two of those black niggers were killed, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark." FBI Special Agent Gregg York

Chairman Fred, as he was known, was successful and revered for organizing young African Americans for the NAACP. He was quickly attracted to the Black Panthers' approach, which was based on a ten-point program of a mix of black designed for the survival of the black community. Chairman Fred joined the Party's nascent Illinois chapter SNCC’s organizer Bob Brown in late 1967. Over the next year, Hampton and his associates made a number of significant achievements in Chicago. Perhaps his most important accomplishment was his brokering of a nonaggression pact between Chicago's most powerful street gangs.

Emphasizing that racial and ethnic conflict between gangs would only keep its members entrenched in poverty, he strove to forge a class-conscious, multi-racial alliance between the Panther Party, the Young Patriots and the National Young Lords. Soon after the pact was formed they were joined by the Students for a Democratic Society, the Blackstone Rangers, the Brown Berets, and the Red Guard. In May 1969, Hampton called a press conference to announce that a truce had been declared among this "rainbow coalition," a phrase coined by Hampton and made popular later by Jesse Jackson, who eventually appropriated the name in forming his own unrelated coalition, Rainbow/Push.

This achievement marked him as a major threat in the eyes of the FBI, signaled his death. Subsequent investigations have shown that FBI chief Hoover was determined to prevent the formation of a cohesive Black movement in the United States “by any means necessary. Hoover saw the Panthers, and similar radical coalitions forged by Hampton in Chicago, as a frightening stepping stone toward the creation of just such a revolutionary body that could cause a radical change in the U.S. government.

They opened a file on Hampton in 1967 that over the next two years expanded to twelve volumes and over four thousand pages. By May of that year, Chairman Fred’s name was placed on the "Agitator Index" and he would be designated a "key militant leader for Bureau reporting purposes.

In late 1968, the Racial Matters squad of the FBI's Chicago field office brought in an individual named William O'Neal, who had recently been arrested twice, for interstate car theft and impersonating a federal officer. In exchange for dropping the felony charges and a monthly stipend, O'Neal apparently agreed to infiltrate the Black Panther Party as a counterintelligence operative. He joined the Party and quickly rose in the organization, becoming Director of Chapter security and Hampton's bodyguard.

In 1969, the FBI Special Agent in San Francisco wrote Hoover that his investigation of the Black Panther Party revealed that in his city, at least, the Panthers were primarily feeding breakfast to children. Hoover fired back a memo implying the career ambitions of the agent were directly related to his supplying evidence to support Hoover's view that the Panthers were "a violence-prone organization seeking to overthrow the Government by revolutionary means". Hoover was willing to use false claims to attack his political enemies. In one memo, he wrote: "Purpose of counterintelligence action is to disrupt the BPP, and it is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate the charge."

By means of anonymous letters, the FBI sowed distrust and eventually instigated a split between the Panthers and the Rangers, with O'Neal himself instigating an armed clash between the two on April 2, 1969. The Panthers became effectively isolated from their power base, so the FBI went to work to undermine its ties with other radical organizations.

O'Neal was instructed to "create a rift" between the Party and Students for a Democratic Society, whose Chicago headquarters was only blocks from that of the Panthers. The Bureau released a batch of racist cartoons in the Panthers' name, aimed at alienating white activists, and launched a disinformation program to forestall the realization of the "Rainbow Coalition." In repeated directives, J. Edgar Hoover demanded that the COINTELPRO personnel "destroy what the Black Panther Party stands for" and "eradicate its 'serve the people' programs".

In early October, Hampton and his girlfriend, Deborah Johnson, pregnant with their first child Fred Hampton, Jr., rented a four-and-a-half room apartment on 2337 West Monroe Street to be closer to Black Panther Party headquarters. O'Neal reported to his superiors that much of the Panthers' "provocative" stockpile of arms was being stored there. None of which was true but the paid government informant played the role of Judas bring the powers of the state to kill him.

To see how far great powers will go is shocking and a moral shame. Yet, it continues, to some degree, today. And that's my thought provoking perspective...