Fred Hampton, a leader of Chicago’s Black Panther Party who was killed during an FBI-sponsored police raid.
You can jail a revolutionary, but you can’t jail the revolution.
On Dec. 4, 1969, Black Panther Party members Fred Hampton, 21, and Mark Clark, 22, were shot to death by 14 police officers as they lay sleeping in their Chicago apartment.
While authorities claimed the Panthers had opened fire on the police who were there to serve a search warrant, evidence later emerged that the FBI (as part of COINTELPRO), the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, and the Chicago police conspired to assassinate Fred Hampton.
As political organizer Laura Whitehorn writes in the introduction to The War Before: The True Life Story of Safiya Bukhari,
Way before we knew what it was, COINTELPRO exerted a tremendous influence on the consciousness and politics of all of us who belonged to or worked with the Panthers and other radical groups. We didn’t know that it was a specific government program, but we did know that we were under surveillance and attack. Many of us were subjected to random bullets and rocks that broke our office windows; strange break-ins where only our notes and address books were taken; and odd, provocative phone calls to our homes, offices, and families. Any ambiguity about the source of these attacks ended for many of us on the night of December 4, 1969, with the assassination of Fred Hampton and fellow Panther Mark Clark in Chicago.
Learn more from “The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther,” an interview with lawyer Jeffery Haas on Democracy Now!
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