The 1969 Raid That Killed Black Panther Leader Fred Hampton

Early in the predawn hours of December 4, 1969, a Peoples Gas truck pulled up in front of an apartment building at 2337 W. Monroe St. in the West Side of Chicago. Fourteen plainclothes Chicago Police officers quietly filed out of the undercover truck, armed with pistols, a shotgun, a machine gun, and a detailed map of their target, an apartment occupied by leaders of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party.

The map clearly identified the bedroom of Fred Hampton, the 21-year-old “chairman” of the Chicago Black Panthers, who was asleep beside his eight-month-pregnant fiancée. At 4:30 a.m., the police kicked down the front door and started shooting. Ballistics reports later showed that they fired more than 90 times, including machine gun rounds through exterior walls and windows.

When the volley of bullets finally stopped, four of the young Black Panthers inside the apartment lay shot and critically wounded, and two had been killed. The first was Mark Clark, who reached for his own shotgun before taking a bullet through the heart. The second was Fred Hampton, gunned down in his bed.

The police were acting under the orders of Edward Hanrahan, the Cook County state’s attorney, who held a press conference claiming that his officers were surprise-attacked by the Black Panthers as the police tried to execute a search warrant for illegal weapons in the apartment.

“The immediate, violent, criminal reaction of the occupants in shooting at announced police officers emphasizes the extreme viciousness of the Black Panther Party,” said Hanrahan.

While it didn’t take long for Hanrahan’s account to fall apart, it took more than a decade for the whole disturbing truth to come to light.

Not only was the killing of Hampton and Clark a cold-blooded assassination of two militant Black activists, but documents later revealed it was coordinated by the FBI as part of a secret program to neutralize and destroy the Black Panther Party, which FBI Director J. Edgar Hooverprivately called “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”