Killing of Fred Hampton

At about 4:45 in the morning of December 4, 1969, a team of Chicago police assigned to Cook County State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan raided an apartment on West Monroe Street where Fred Hampton, the 21 year old chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, was asleep beside his pregnant fiancee. Police fired about ninety shots; investigators later concluded the Panthers fired at most one. Hampton was shot in his bed, and Panther Mark Clark was killed near the front door. Hanrahan's office described a fierce gun battle, an account that collapsed within weeks when reporters and a federal grand jury examined the bullet holes.¹²³

The raid came out of the FBI's COINTELPRO campaign against Black nationalist groups, which aimed to prevent the rise of a Black messiah. The Panthers' head of security, William O'Neal, was a paid FBI informant who gave his handler a floor plan of the apartment marking where Hampton slept, and after the raid he received a bonus. No officer was convicted. The survivors and families sued, and in 1982 the federal, county and city governments agreed to pay $1.85 million to settle the case.¹²