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The Assassination of Fred Hampton

The assassination of Fred Hampton took place on the early morning of December 4, 1969 when a large and heavily armed Chicago Police Department SWAT team entered an apartment shared by members of the Black Panther Party, shooting and killing National Spokesperson Fred Hampton and party member Mark Clark.

The incident was intially reported as a police raid to search for illegal weapons in the apartment which devolved into a shootout between both parties, however forensic evidence showed that gunfire was intiated by the police and overwhelmed the Panthers.

After an FBI office in Media, Pennslyvania was burglarized by the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI in 1971 the assassination was exposed as a conspiracy orchastrated by Illinois State Prosecutor Edward Hanrahan and part of the FBI's illegal anti-dissident program COINTELPRO.

The murders sparked anger amongst the American New Left and the Weather Underground declared war on the United States Federal Government shortly after.

Background
Fred Hampton joined the Black Panther Party in 1967 and became a big name amongst the Black Power Movement, Radical left and Federal Government alike. Quickly moving up the ranks, his talent as a political organizer receieved him descriptions as remarkable.

In 1968, he was on the verge of creating a merger between the BPP and a southside street gang with thousands of members, which would have doubled the size of the national BPP.

In November 1969, Hampton traveled to California and met with the National BPP leadership at UCLA. It was there that they offered him a position on the Central Committee as the chief of staff and asked him to serve as the national spokesman for the BPP. While Hampton was out of town, two Chicago police officers, John J. Gilhooly and Frank G. Rappaport, were killed in a gun battle with Panthers on the night of November 13. A total of nine police officers were shot; a 19-year-old Panther named Spurgeon Winter, Jr. was killed by police and another Panther, Lawrence S. Bell, was charged with murder. In an editorial headlined "No Quarter for Wild Beasts", the Chicago Tribune urged that Chicago police be given the order to approach all Panther suspects prepared to shoot.

The FBI, determined to prevent any enhancement of the BPP leadership's effectiveness, decided to set up an arms raid on Hampton's Chicago apartment. An FBI informant William O'Neal, who infiltrated the Chicago branch of the BBP, provided them with detailed information about Hampton's apartment, including the layout of furniture and the bed in which Hampton and his girlfriend slept. An augmented, 14-man team of the SAO &mdash; Special Prosecutions Unit &mdash; was organized for a pre-dawn raid armed with a warrant for illegal weapons.

Assassination and motives
""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

At 4:00 a.m., the heavily armed police team arrived at the site, divided into two teams, eight for the front of the building and six for the rear. At 4:45 a.m., they stormed into the apartment.

Mark Clark, sitting in the front room of the apartment with a shotgun in his lap, was on security duty. He was shot in the heart and died instantly. His gun fired a single round which was later determined to be caused by a reflexive death convulsion after the raiding team shot him; this was the only shot the Panthers fired.

Automatic gunfire then converged at the head of the south bedroom where Hampton slept, unable to awaken as a result of the barbiturates the FBI infiltrator had slipped into his drink. He was lying on a mattress in the bedroom with his pregnant fiancée, who was eight-and-a-half months pregnant with their child. Two officers found him wounded in the shoulder, and fellow Black Panther Harold Bell reported that he heard the following exchange:


 * "That's Fred Hampton."
 * "Is he dead?... Bring him out."
 * "He's barely alive.
 * "He'll make it."

Two shots were heard, which were later discovered were fired point blank in Hampton's head. According to Johnson, one officer then said:


 * "He's good and dead now."

Hampton's body was dragged into the doorway of the bedroom and left in a pool of blood. The officers then directed their gunfire towards the remaining Panthers, who had been sleeping in the north bedroom (Satchel, Anderson, and Brewer). Verlina Brewer, Ronald "Doc" Satchel, Blair Anderson, and Brenda Harris were seriously wounded, then beaten and dragged into the street, where they were arrested on charges of aggravated assault and the attempted murder of the officers. They were each held on US$100,000 bail.

Hampton's fiancée, Deborah Johnson, was sleeping next to him when the police raid began. She was forcibly removed from the room by the police officers while Hampton lay unconscious in bed. The seven Panthers who survived the raid were indicted by a grand jury on charges of attempted murder, armed violence, and various other weapons charges. These charges were subsequently dropped. During the trial, the Chicago police department claimed that the Panthers were the first to fire shots; however, a later investigation found that the Chicago police fired between ninety and ninety-nine shots while the Panthers had only shot twice. After the raid, the apartment was left unguarded, which allowed the Panthers to send some members to investigate. They were accompanied by a videographer and the footage was later released in the 1971 documentary The Murder of Fred Hampton.

Despite evidence to the contrary, Hampton's death was ruled as a justifiable homicide. Because of public pressure in favor of the Black Panthers, the county re-opened and re-examined the case. The county held a trial in July 1972 to determine whether or not law officials participated in a conspiracy to obstruct justice. Four months later, the defendants were found not guilty of all charges.

After a break-in at an FBI office in Pennsylvania, the existence of COINTELPRO, an illegal counter-intelligence program, was brought to light. The purpose of this program was to target and neutralize "Black Nationalist-Hate Groups". The awareness of this program caused many to suspect that the police raid and the shooting of Fred Hampton were parts of the program's initiative. One of the documents that were released after the break-in was a floor plan of Hampton's apartment. Another document outlined a deal the FBI brokered with the deputy attorney general to conceal the FBI's role in the assassination of Hampton and the existence of COINTELPRO.

Edward Hanrahan
Edward Vincent Hanrahan (March 11, 1921 – June 9, 2009) was a Cook County, Illinois State's Attorney and chief orchastrator in the assassination of Hampton. Hanrahan, a Democrat, had been the focus of many Hampton speeches including a dissertation given in front of a jury during a trial on weapons charges.

Acting on the basis of a tip from an FBI informant, 14 police officers assigned to Hanrahan's office staged a pre-dawn raid on December 4, 1969 to search for illegal weapons in the West Side apartment of Fred Hampton, a leader of the Black Panther Party. Dozens of shots were fired and Hampton and Black Panther Mark Clark were both killed. Despite guns found on the premises and police assertions that the Panthers had fired first, bullet hole markings presented by police in support of their claim turned out to be nail heads. An investigation found that the police had fired between 82 and 99 shots during the raid, and the Panthers had fired at least one shot. Hanrahan was indicted by a grand jury for obstructing justice and conspiracy to present false evidence, but was later acquitted. A civil suit concluded in 1982 ruled that there was a government conspiracy to deprive the Black Panthers of their civil rights and awarded nearly $2 million to the survivors of the raid and the families of those killed. The events leading up to the incident and the deaths of Hampton and Clark were the subject of the 1971 documentary The Murder of Fred Hampton, and the material filmed by director Howard Alk in the immediate aftermath of the incident was used as evidence in the civil suit.

The Cook County Democratic Party declined to endorse Hanrahan in his bid for reelection as State's Attorney in 1972, but Democratic voters renominated him anyway. The combined votes of Republicans and African American Democrats sufficed to elect his Republican opponent in the general election. He ran for Mayor of Chicago in two Democratic Primaries, losing to Daley in 1975 and to Michael Bilandic in 1977; Hanrahan placed fourth each time. He lost a race in the 1980s for alderman on the Chicago City Council. Hanrahan returned to his law practice, which he continued until his death, at which time he still had two active cases.

Hanrahan died at age 88 on June 9, 2009 at his home in River Forest, Illinois due to complications from leukemia and old age. He was survived by his wife of 55 years, their two sons and two daughters, and ten grandchildren.

Reactions
Reactions to the assassination was mainly amongst the left and black movements. Despite Hampton's harsh opinion on the Weather Underground it's response to his murder was by far the most eventful as it declared war on the United States and went on a seven year bombing spree.