At about 4:30 AM on the bitter cold morning of Thursday, December 4, 1969, three unmarked police cars and a panel truck pulled away from the 26th Street office of the Cook County state’s attorney and moved like a small funeral procession through the deserted streets of Chicago’s west side. The brief journey of no more than ten minutes brought them to an old yellow-brick two-flat at 2337 W. Monroe. The vehicles parked 50 yards up the street, and 14 officers, clad in civilian leather jackets and fur hats, emerged from the cars.
Sergeant Daniel Groth, the man in charge, rapped on the front door. “Who’s there?” came a voice from inside the first-floor apartment. Groth demanded that the occupants open the door, and there were more voices and shuffling inside. Then a pause.
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Outside in his squad car, a policeman from the local district who had just arrived on the scene reported, “The premises are under control.” Within minutes ambulances and more police cars arrived. Soon the apartment was alive with lights and crowded with policemen, evidence technicians, and medics. Two men and a pregnant woman, each in handcuffs, were hustled out the front door, put in a squadrol, and taken to the Wood Street police station, eight blocks away. They were Harold Bell, 23, Louis Trulock, 39, and Deborah Johnson, 19. Four other occupants of the apartment who had sustained serious wounds were carried out on stretchers: Blair Anderson, 22, shot twice; Ronald Satchel, 20, shot four times; Verlina Brewer, 17, shot twice; and Brenda Harris, 18, also shot twice. Then came two bodies, which were placed in a squadrol for transportation to the Cook County morgue. They were Mark Clark, 22, shot once in the heart, and Fred Hampton, 21, who had been hit once in the chest, once in the shoulder, and twice in the forehead. As this news was relayed over the police two-way radio, the downtown dispatcher reported hearing cheers from police cars scattered over the city. A faceless policeman said into his radio, “That’s when to get them–when they’re in their beds!”
The apartment was a shambles. Literally every drawer had been pulled out and the contents scattered on the floor. Clothing, cans of food, magazines, and newspapers lay amid the broken glass, pieces of plaster, and pools of blood. No weapons remained in the place. Some bullet casings and spent shotgun shells had also been retrieved by the police. Yet strangely–and in total contradiction of normal police procedure–the premises were not sealed off. The apartment stood open, almost inviting public inspection.
Hilliard is particularly distressed that Fred Hampton has been forgotten by so many. As a 20-year-old, middle-class kid from Maywood, Hampton was recruited for the infant Illinois Black Panther Party by Bobby Rush, two years his senior. Sitting in his office at City Hall, Rush, now 43 and alderman of the Second Ward, shakes his head sadly as he remembers the kid “who had such courage and charisma, it’s hard to believe he was so young. And he was such a public speaker. There was a kind of quiet competition between him and Jesse Jackson back in 1969. Fred even tried to train me in public speaking.” Rush has never been known for his oratorical skills.
But Hampton had also been noticed by federal law enforcement officials who feared black militants in general and the Panthers in particular as proponents of mindless anarchy. In 1967 FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had instructed his agents to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership and supporters, and to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder.” The recommended methods of this counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) were infiltration (planting a spy or an agent provocateur in the organization), psychological warfare (producing false media stories, bogus letters, and phony leaflets), harassment through the legal system (arrests and convictions), and extralegal force or violence (break-ins, beatings, frame-ups). All four recommended procedures were implemented against the Illinois Panther organization.
So what’s to celebrate on the anniversary of that bloody December 4? There are at least two positive by-products. In the judgment of G. Flint Taylor–an attorney with the People’s Law Office, which was associated with the case from the day of the raid itself–the Hampton case provided the smoking gun that had been missing in so many other instances of federal disruption and discrediting activity. “Here at last,” he says, “we see the highest law enforcement agency in the country involved in the most heinous acts of brutality and assassination. It would be hard to find a more crass example.”
