Exactly 50 years ago, Black Panther Party of Illinois Chairman Fred Hampton was killed. A white gang raided his West Side Chicago apartment and fired approximately 99 bullets, killing not only 21-year-old Hampton but fellow Panther, 22-year-old Mark Clark, according to a nonprofit research and education initiative dubbed the Zinn Education Project. Clark fired one shot in return, likely after he had been “fatally shot in the heart and was falling to the ground,” researchers said.
If any majority-minority gang had launched the shootout, the offenders would likely have ended up in prison—well, assuming authorities felt like caring two black men were killed—but the gang that killed Hampton and Clark was none other than Chicago police, accompanied by officers of then-State’s Attorney Edward Hanrahan’s office.
Billy “Che” Brooks, deputy minister of education of the Panther Party of Illinois, said police had harassed the Panthers and raided their offices repeatedly in an interview last year with the University of Illinois at Chicago. He told the school when Martin Luther King Jr. died April 4, 1968, black youth took to the streets, although he wasn't one of them. "I've never, never ever did anything illegal other than be black," he said. "The police came down pretty f--king hard, you know." Chicago Mayor Richard Daley Sr. reportedly issued a "shoot to kill order" on the protestors.
"That woke a lot of people up," Brooks said. The National Guard was deployed. "They had tanks rolling down the street, a f--king tank man sitting on Roosevelt Road and Pulaski, rolling down the street," Brooks said. By the August 1968 Democratic National Convention, Brooks said he had long witnessed police brutality. When a child was run over by a fire truck, people rioted, and the National Guard was again deployed. “It was a normal thing that we experienced and it made you want to resist,” Brooks said.
When white hippies began to encounter police brutality too, it shocked them. "I don't think that they believed that the police were the police that we said the police were," Brooks said. "I don't think that they believed that the police was gon’ beat the f--king s--- out of them. It was a lesson learned. It organized them." He described the beginning of coalition politics. Under Hampton’s leadership, Brooks said they organized the Rainbow Coalition of Revolutionary Solidarity and officially formed the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther party in 1968.
He said it was one thing to hear about a government sending its military to occupy foreign nations, but it was another thing when black people saw U.S. government authorities occupying their own communities of black citizens. "You got two options it could traumatize you into inaction and give you psychotic moments of anxiety or it could put you in a state of mind where you want to organize and educate people to resist at all costs," Brooks said.
Hampton was the latter.
“Fred was considered a threat in the eyes of law enforcement because he could galvanize all types of people,” Brooks told the Chicago Sun-Times. “We wanted to end police brutality. We created programs to point out the contradictions that existed in society. Children were going to school hungry and we started a free breakfast program. Shortly thereafter, the government started breakfast programs, and lunch programs in schools,” he said.
“The government wasn’t thinking about sickle cell anemia so we opened up our medical centers and started testing Black people for sickle cell,” Brooks added. “Shortly thereafter, it became an issue and the government took it over. We had a way of creating consciousness amongst the people, forcing the government to do what it was supposed to do.” When Spurgeon “Jake” Winters, another Panther, died in a shootout with police in November 1969, the Panthers could sense "something was imminent," Brooks told the Sun-Times. Hampton's apartment was raided the next month with his pregnant fiancée, Deborah Johnson, sleeping next to him, the Zinn Education Project reported.
Johnson, who now goes by Akua Njeri, survived. “I saw bullets coming from… the front of the apartment… Sparks of light. I had slid over on top of Chairman Fred,” she told ABC News. “I don’t know what I was thinking, or what I was doing, I just moved over and covered his body. He didn’t move. Just lifted his head up. It was like he was going in slow motion.” An independent autopsy ABC obtained later found Hampton had been drugged with secobarbital.
Njeri said she begged police to stop shooting and told them she was 8 months pregnant. When they finally did, she got out of bed, slid on Hampton’s house shoes and thought: “Keep your hands up. Don’t stumble. Don’t fall. They will kill you and your baby,” Njeri told ABC News. She added that she saw, “two lines of police, they were laughing. (They) grabbed me by the top of my head, slung me to the kitchen area.”
“Somebody said, ‘He’s barely alive, he’ll barely make it. I assume he was talking about Chairman Fred,” Njeri told the news outlet. “The shooting started back again. The pigs said ‘he’s good and dead now.’”