A `69

Raid That Quieted The Skeptics

December 03, 1989|By Clarence Page.

``As soon as I heard what time it happened, I knew it was murder.``

So says a black Chicago woman who was in high school 20 years ago on the night Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed by police bullets.

She is not alone in believing it was murder. In fact, the popularity of that view has helped change history in a way Hampton and Clark could only have hoped to do when they were alive.

Numerous ``black militant`` groups, as the media called them, operated in black communities. But none gained the notoriety of the Panthers, thanks to the high profile given its Oakland, Calif., leaders Bobby Seale, Huey P. Newton and Eldridge Cleaver by the media, particularly the ``alternative media`` of what was then called the New Left, a movement that adored the Panthers` up-yours earthiness.

It was a Panther fundraiser in Leonard Bernstein`s New York apartment that inspired Tom Wolfe to coin the term ``radical chic,`` which pretty well described the spirit of the times. No lapel seemed complete without a ``Free Huey`` button when Newton was jailed. No campus knapsack seemed complete without Cleaver`s book ``Soul on Ice.`` No one doubted that Seale had been jerked around in the ``Chicago 7`` trial.

Still, the great untold story of the Panthers is the skepticism many black Americans had about them, at least until government excesses made them martyrs.

Many of us were skeptical of the way the Panthers praised guns,

``Marxist-Leninist theory`` and a political platform plank that called for the freeing of all black convicts as ``political prisoners.``

As real as the issue of police brutality was at the time, many of us were skeptical of Panthers who chanted ``Off the pig!`` (Translation: Kill the police) and sometimes raised ``donations`` from black shopkeepers in a way that bordered on extortion.

But much of that changed on the morning of Dec. 4, 1969, when 14 Chicago police officers working under Cook County State`s Atty. Edward V. Hanrahan and tipped off, as it turned out, by an FBI informant who had burrowed his way to the office of Panther security chief, burst into Fred Hampton`s apartment at 4:45 a.m. and shot him while he lay in bed.

Suddenly the term ``black community`` took on special meaning. If the government could do this to Fred and get away with it, the reasoning went, any of us could get the same treatment. A lot of black Americans turned militant that morning.

As it turned out, disclosures of J. Edgar Hoover`s COINTELPRO

(Counterintelligence Program) indicate that the Chicago police and the Panthers may have been pawns in the FBI director`s game and that both suffered as a result.

Earlier that summer, Hoover publicly had called the Panthers the ``most dangerous`` organization in America. Never mind the crime syndicate. In Hoover`s mind, a ragtag bunch of youths who fancied angry talk and black berets was more dangerous than all the drug dealers in the world.

An internal FBI memo made public after Hampton`s death directed agents to prevent ``the rise of a `messiah` who could unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement.``

Such a leader might well have been Fred Hampton. Those of us who saw him speak will never forget how moving and persuasive he was. He showed a deeper intellect, it seems in retrospect, than Seale, now famous for cookbooks;

Cleaver, who, curiously enough, turned into a hardshell political conservative; or Newton, gunned down earlier this year, allegedly in a drug dispute, his Panther glory long gone.

A special grand jury brought charges against Hanrahan and some of the raiders for conspiracy to obstruct justice, saying they had concealed and falsified evidence to cover up the true nature of the raid. A special prosecutor established in court that only one shot could have been fired by the Panthers during the raid-the third shot. Yet the judge freed the raiders for lack of evidence.

But the story didn`t end there. Hanrahan was defeated in his re-election bid when angry black voters turned solidly against a machine-endorsed candidate for the first time in the long reign of Mayor Richard J. Daley. The victory helped energize an independent black political movement against

``plantation politics`` that resulted in the 1979 election of Mayor Jane Byrne, who ran as an antimachine independent, and the 1983 election of Harold Washington, the city`s first black mayor-a victory that helped energize other black political victories across the nation.

Time brings ironic twists. Cook County now has a black state`s attorney, who recently was criticized for being too aggressive in his pursuit of a police brutality complaint. Bobby Rush, who replaced Hampton as Illinois`

Panther leader, is an alderman and ward committeeman, a stalwart in Washington`s movement.

But questions about what went on in that apartment that night still trouble us. So does the thought that troubled skeptics two decades ago: If the government could do this to Fred and get away with it, it could do it to any of us.