Conspiracies, Rages and the Assassination of Fred Hampton
Twenty years ago this month the Berlin Wall fell, while 20 years earlier in Chicago, the autumn of 1969 saw three defining moments not only in our local history, but the national consciousness as well.
Look back 40 years at a series of bizarre to murderous political events during that nightmare period whose images keep returning and whose lessons remain only half learned.
In late September the trial of the Conspiracy 8—soon to become the Conspiracy 7—began. The defendants were a loosely connected band of activists with various relationships to the wild demonstrations and police riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The government could not have done better than to name Julius Hoffman as the federal judge overseeing what turned out to be totally zany proceedings—so zany that their transcripts in later years provided text for theatrical and film productions.
Remember the wild-haired Abbie Hoffman bantering with the deadly comic-strip villain of a judge? The image of the bound and gagged Bobby Seale? The ultimate conclusion through the years where all the defendants and their lawyers wound up free men?
Just the other Sunday someone on one of the talk shows invoked the name of Judge Hoffman.
While the Conspiracy Trial was under way, from October 8-11, came what we know as The Days of Rage. A radical sect that split off from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) during its Chicago convention, called for revolution in the streets.
These were the Weathermen—later to become the Weather Underground—who led a couple of dozen antiwar radicals through the Loop and Near North Side, smashing store windows and behaving like a bunch of drunken British soccer losers. Their leaders expected hundreds—maybe thousands—but somehow the clarion call for a new society went unheard.
Older radicals called it, in Lenin’s words, “left Infantilism.” Others had harsher words—but that loony rampage and subsequent acts by the Underground were reinvoked time and again during the 2008 presidential campaign.
That’s because a leader of the Weathermen was Bill Ayers—now a highly respected education theorist—who had some interaction with Barack Obama 26 years later. This was enough for the Sarah Palins of the world to make Obama the pal of a terrorist. (They were as successful in beating Obama with this association as Ayers was in creating a revolution.)
But the most horrific action was yet to come.
In the predawn hours of December 4, 1969 a heavily armed contingent of State’s Attorney’s police using automatic weapons blazed their way into the West Side headquarters of the local Black Panther Party. Several people were wounded and two were killed—BPP Chairman Fred Hampton and an associate, Mark Clark, in what was first billed by then State’s Attorney Edward V. Hanrahan as a “shootout.”
The lawyers of the People’s Law Office—including Hampton’s attorneys Jeffery Haas and Flint Taylor—immediately sprung into action. They secured the premises and began collecting evidence, brought in the media and started to expose the true facts:
There was no shootout. Police fired nearly 100 rounds into the apartment, while the wounded Clark made one wild shot in return. What Hanrahan billed as returned bulletholes turned out to be nailheads.
Worse, yet, Hampton was killed by four pistol shots at close range while in a drugged sleep. This was a clear-cut political assassination carried out by local authorities in what was later learned to be part of an FBI program called Cointelpro, aimed at ridding the country of black radicals by any means. Including murder.
The FBI rewarded paid informants for providing details such as the exact location of Hampton’s bed.
I have summarized briefly the salient, horrifying facts, many of which took years to learn as relentless lawsuits by Haas, Taylor and their associates worked their way through the courts. Fortunately, Haas just published a book detailing and documenting every aspect of the case. It includes a lengthy section on the life of Hampton himself, literally a kid when he was killed, but showing great promise.
“The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther” should be required political reading, especially for conservatives who are genuinely concerned about the damage secret government can do.
I recollect most of its revelations as they emerged through the years, but even with that knowledge I found shock after shock in its pages. This is not radical rhetoric. It’s an unending reality.
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Don Rose is a regular columnist for the Chicago Daily Observer
image Edward V. Hanrahan, 1970 news conference
I guess Don Rose never disappoints — he is one dogged liberal who keeps slugging away.
I have a distinctly different recollection of Fred Hampton and the Black Panther movement. Hampton was an angry radical, the local leader of a movement that promoted radical and “revolutionary” action against “the Man”, meaning all white people. That radical action included the full range of criminal activity, including murder, or genocide if you will, expressed in only slightly veiled language in their propaganda tracts. What else is “Revolution” other than the violent overthrow of the “establishment”? Hampton stood for all of that.
The Black Panthers in Chicago were reaching out to street hoodlums for recruits. At that time, Chicago had a plethora of murderous street gangs, like the Vice Lords, the Disciples, and other. The Chicago law enforcement community had every reason to fear the augmentation of a “revolutionary” movement based in the same neighborhoods as the gangs who could provide it violent recruits. By the time of Hamptons death, the Panthers had a nationwide record of criminal activity and murder.
Rose’s report on the “exposure” of the “assassination” of Hampton seems to be a common talking point of the hard left. Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn, now recently energized by their Obama exposure, have been publicly touting the “assassination of Hampton” story. However, the conventional media has never endorsed that theory. The raid on Hamptons hideout was covered as a conventional, albeit a sensational, police raid story at the time. The news was rife with the dangers posed by the Black Panthers. Although States Attorney Hanrahan was publicly embarrassed by the incident in which he referred to nail holes as bullet holes, no one has ever conclusively debunked the police report that the Panthers fired first. The fact that they were armed to the teeth seems to be a fact Rose wishes to soft pedal.
The Panthers were an armed revolutionary movement loudly proclaiming a violent black reaction to “white supremacy” in this country. And this was at a time (Charles Manson, Weathermen) when other hard left groups were engaged in headline grabbing crime, violence, and murder. The police raid on Hampton’s Black Panther arsenal was generally seen as a rational response to a known threat which ended in tragedy. The left has been attempting to milk sympathy from Hampton’s death for decades, and the “assassination” theory is only one undying strategy in the left’s desire to rewrite history. No moral person yearns for anyone’s death, but Hampton’s demise, in my opinion, ended his plan of future mayhem and crime in Chicago to the benefit of the general community.
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