Nothing but a Northern Lynching: The Assassination of Fred Hampton, Dec 4, 1969

 

By G. Flint Taylor
Progressive America Rising via People's Law Office

At 4:30 in the morning of December 4, 1969, 14 heavily armed Chicago police officers, acting at the direction of Cook County State’s Attorney Edward V. Hanrahan, raided a tiny apartment on the west side of Chicago where local Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton and eight Party members were sleeping. Minutes later, Hampton and Peoria, Illinois BPP leader Mark Clark lay dead, several of the other Panthers were seriously wounded, and the survivors were hauled off to jail on attempted murder charges. http://peopleslawoffice.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/1970.Hampton-.Search-And-Destroy..pdf

I was a second year Northwestern law student working at the fledgling People’s Law Office when I received a call that “the Chairman had been murdered” and was directed to come to the apartment. The crime scene was shocking - - - the plasterboard walls looked like swiss cheese, ripped by scores of bullets from police weapons that included a machine gun, a semi automatic rifle, and several shotguns. A large pool of blood stained the floor at the doorway where Hampton’s body had been dragged after he was shot in the head, and there were fresh blood stains on all the beds in the apartment. I had met Chairman Fred only months before when I escorted him to the Law School to speak to the student body in venerable Lincoln Hall. He was only 21 years old, but he captivated the audience, as he always did, with his dynamic and analytical speaking skill, a mixture of Malcolm X, Dr. King, and Lupe Fiasco. http://peopleslawoffice.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Hampton.-20th-Anniversary-Booklet-1989.pdf

It was his unique leadership, together with the revolutionary politics he so convincingly espoused, http://www.blackpanther.org/TenPoint.htm that made him a primary target of law enforcement. Directly after the raid, State’s Attorney Hanrahan and his police loudly proclaimed that the “vicious Black Panthers” had instigated a “shootout” during which they fired a fuselage of shots at the raiders. http://mike-gray.org/multimedia/hampton.htm The cold and bloody crime scene made lie of this official story, and Panther members led thousands of people on tours of the apartment for the next ten days while People’s Law Office lawyers and staff documented the evidence that would later establish that the police fired 99 bullets while the Panthers fired but one. http://peopleslawoffice.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Hampton.-1970-FGJ-Report.pdf

A elderly African American lady best captured this reality when she said, while sadly shaking her head during the tour, that the raid was “nothing but a Northern lynching.” Confronted with the ballistics evidence, Hanrahan was forced to drop the attempted murder charges against the surviving Panthers. The Richard Nixon Justice Department investigated, but refused to indict. In response to community outrage, a specially appointed Cook County Prosecutor subsequently indicted Hanrahan, his first assistant, and a number of the raiding officers, not for murder or attempted murder, but rather only for obstruction of justice. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/chi-chicagodays-pantherraid-story,0,3414208.

A Democratic machine judge acquitted Hanrahan and his co-conspirators on the eve of the 1972 election, but an inflamed African American electorate voted Hanrahan out of office, a story spawning a movement that paved the way for the election of Mayor Harold Washington a decade later. All the while, the People’s Law Office continued to litigate a civil rights lawsuit in federal court on behalf of the Hampton and Clark families and the survivors of the raid. Through the discovery process, we unearthed FBI documents showing that the FBI’s secret COINTELPRO program was behind the raid. http://watchamericangangster.com/american-gangster-season-3-episode-5-j-edgar-hoover/

The documents, which were suppressed by the FBI for years, together with independent toxicological tests, further revealed that an FBI COINTELPRO agent supplied a floor plan of the Panther apartment, complete with markings where Hampton slept, to Hanrahan’s raiders; that William O’Neal, the COINTELPRO informant who drew the floor plan, most likely drugged Hampton so that he could not defend himself; and that after the raid FBI director J. Edgar Hoover rewarded O’Neal with a $300 bonus for making the raid a “success.” http://peopleslawoffice.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Hampton.7th-Cir-Brief.pdf

In 1983, after an 18 month trial http://openjurist.org/600/f2d/600/hampton-v-hanrahan and 13 years of litigation, the City of Chicago, Cook County and the Federal Government all finally settled with the Hampton and Clark families and the survivors of the raid. http://peopleslawoffice.com/issues-and-cases/panthers/ While this financial settlement brought some modicum of justice, no one, except the Panther survivors, ever spent a day in jail. But the murderous raid, once falsely depicted as a shootout, is now rightly considered not only to be a northern lynching, but also an official assassination that was instigated by the FBI. http://www.hamptonbook.com/Hampton_Book/Home.html

And while we will never know what heights Fred Hampton would have reached as a leader had he lived, we do know, in the words first spoken in eulogy by People’s Law Office attorney Francis Andrew nearly forty three years ago, that the spirit of Fred Hampton continues to live on.

Flint Taylor is one of the lawyers for the family of slain Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.. For more information on the Hampton/Clark case, the history of Black Panther Party, and the FBI’s Program to destroy it, visit peopleslawoffice.com

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Obama: The Man and The Machine

Photo: Obama with Mayor Daley

Obama's Complex
Relationship with the
'Chicago Machine'

By Don Rose
Chicago Daily Observer

Read the newest trash-Obama book, check Tribune columnist John Kass, hear some of my Hyde Park buddies and you get a picture of Barack Obama as a traitorous cog in this incarnation of the Daley machine.

Others still revere him as a pure and cleansing light, lasering through the old politics, beaming us up to Democratic Nirvana.

Both portraits are pure bulljive, depending on which surface of this complex, multifaceted politician glints in your eye. There is something of the "Being There" quality to Obama: He is so new and exotic and appealing that everyone has a personal interpretation of who and what he really is--a blank slate we inscribe with our own dreams.


This is largely because Obama never fully plants himself in anyone's garden. The columnist David Brooks had an interesting riff on this, pointing out, for example, that while he was on the University of Chicago Law School faculty, he never was of the faculty--never fully engaged.
He was involved in independent Democratic politics but never fully immersed--and as a state senator never wedded to the legislature.

Brooks cites other instances, then insightfully points out that this peripheral stance, only one foot planted anywhere ideologically or emotionally, is what sharpens his critical intelligence and exceptional analytic powers.

There is no doubt he is a progressive, reform-minded politician, although not every position he holds reflects that image. He is a liberal who believes to a limited extent in the death penalty--and while some call it a flip-flop, it is a long-held position.

He is a civil libertarian who voted for the recent Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), including immunity for miscreant telecom companies. It was as destructive to the Constitution as anything G. W. Bush ever proposed. It also was an actual flip-flop. Earlier, Obama pledged to filibuster against telecom immunity.

And so it is with the Machine.

Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate as an independent Democrat--as one must in Hyde Park--by winning the primary with no help from the regular organization. But, like all but a tiny handful of earlier independents, he never ran an "anti-Machine" or "anti-Daley" campaign.
He was welcomed into the Dem caucus, which needed his vote, and in return got help for his own progressive legislation. There's a long tradition of this trade-off, going back to Abner Mikva and Dick Newhouse, his progressive predecessors. A fellow Hyde Park "independent," Barbara Flynn Currie, not only joined the House caucus, but became surgically attached to Speaker Michael Madigan.

Obama also was mentored by one of the hackiest hacks, Senate Majority leader Emil Jones, in a relationship that eventually helped him win the U.S. Senate primary.

That race, too, was independent of the Machine--except for some black ward committeemen Jones lined up--but not "anti" the Machine, whose white minions were backing Dan Hynes, son of Daley's pal Tom.

Minimally, Obama had to reach détente with the regulars to win the general election--as Carol Moseley Braun and Paul Simon did before him. (Later Daley leaped at the chance to endorse Obama for president, just to keep him out of Chicago and any thoughts of the 5th Floor.)
Virtually all the independent progressives elected to Springfield or Washington paid little attention to corruption in Chicago.

When was the last time Currie mentioned it--or U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky?

Only Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. keeps at it--and that's because he still has his eye on the 5th Floor.

Obama endorsed several fellow independents, but never framed them as warriors against the Machine, as in the Harold Washington era.

When he endorsed a couple of the worst Machine hacks, including Cook County Board President Todd Stroger, it was less an act of obeisance to Daley than to the African American political base. But many read it as homage to the Machine.

Once again, though he has a cooperative relationship with the Machine, he keeps another foot planted with independents and reformers such as Mikva, Leon Despres and former Washington Corporation Counsel Judd Miner.

Yes, he is a politician with a good whiff of the old but still much of the new. His interrelationships are as complex as the man himself.

He is an extraordinary figure negotiating a dangerous political minefield on his way to the prize. He knows he will never make everyone happy in the course of that zigzag journey. He sometimes goes astray, as with FISA, but he has kept most of his personal integrity and progressive values reasonably intact.

Franklin D. Roosevelt's coalition included the nation's most corrupt urban political machines as well as the racist bourbons of the segregated old south. Yet he also managed to beam us up to Democratic Nirvana.

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