Fred Hampton Streetz Party on the march

The Fred Hampton Streetz Party Aug. 30 march started on California Avenue and went east on Madison before ending up at a rally and block party in front of the former Panther house at 2337 W. Monroe. Fred Hampton, Jr., chairperson of the Prisoners of Conscience Committee (POCC) and son of the martyred Chicago Black Panther Party (BPP) leader, organized this march of West Side youth to celebrate the birthday of his father and keep the memory of the BPP’s revolutionary legacy alive.

Supporters of the liberation struggle from as far away as Ohio made the trip to Chicago to attend this event. Most of the marchers were African-American youth between the ages of 12 and 17. The organizer even rented a limousine for the children younger than 12 so they wouldn’t have to walk so far.

Chants of “Black Power!” and against police brutality filled the air at the rally. As was expected, the cops showed up, ostensibly to check permits and warn people about parking violations. It was obvious the cops were looking for a way to shut the Streetz Party down, but they failed.

Fred Hampton Sr. was a 21-year-old leader of the Black Panther Party in 1969. Even at that young age he was responsible for some of the most successful organizing and coalition-building in the young liberation organization. He was targeted by the FBI and the brutal Chicago police and assassinated in a heavily armed police assault on the BPP offices in the middle of the night on Dec. 4, 1969.

Fred Hampton Sr. was born Aug. 30, 1948, in Chicago. He grew up in Maywood, Ill., a working class African-American suburb, and was involved with political organizing from an early age. In his teens, he was the NAACP west suburban branch’s Youth Council leader.

Later, Hampton successfully organized 500 teens into the NAACP’s youth group in River Grove while enrolled at Triton Junior College in pre-law. Attracted by the BPP’s revolutionary synthesis of the thought of Malcolm X and Chairman Mao, he moved to Chicago’s West Side to join the party. Hampton rose quickly in the BPP.

While he was deeply involved in running the day-to-day programs of the party, such as the Free Breakfast for Children program and the People’s Medical Clinics, and was teaching early-morning political education classes, his greatest achievement was devising and implementing a real “rainbow coalition”—a term Hampton actually coined.

The original rainbow coalition was an alliance of street organizations and revolutionaries drawn from other oppressed communities as well as working class white youth and revolutionary students. The coalition included the Young Lords, the Blackstone Rangers, the Young Patriots and members of Students for a Democratic Society.

As a result of his outstanding work in the Party, Hampton was in line to be promoted to the Central Committee’s chief of staff. His talent brought him to the attention of the political police. His FBI file started in 1967 and grew to 12 volumes numbering more than 4,000 pages. He was correctly characterized by the FBI as a “key militant leader.”

The secret COINTELPRO counter-insurgency program against Hampton and the BPP included bugging his mother’s phone, attempting to instigate conflicts between the Blackstone Rangers and the BPP where none had previously existed, and planting an informant in the BPP who eventually became Hampton’s bodyguard.

J. Edgar Hoover’s personal directives to the secret police in Chicago instructed them to “destroy what the BPP stands for” and to “eradicate” its “serve the people” programs. To justify its own criminal tactics, the FBI tried to portray the BPP as an extensive criminal organization. An extremely rapid escalation in the FBI’s criminal war against the BPP began on April 2, 1969, when a group of FBI agents posing as Panthers attempted to instigate an armed conflict with members of the Blackstone Rangers.

On July 16, the Chicago Police Department (CPD) started an unprovoked armed confrontation with a group of Panthers, leaving one mortally wounded and six under arrest, charged with felonies.

On July 31 and again on Oct. 31 that year, the CPD went on a violent rampage at the 2330 W. Madison BPP office. The cops smashed office equipment, seized food and destroyed medical supplies earmarked for community Serve the People programs. After severely beating and arresting several Panthers, the cops set the office on fire.

With the BPP’s national leadership under relentless attack by the capitalist state’s repressive agencies, and with Hampton’s promotion to the Central Committee’s chief of staff pending in early 1970, the cops felt that the timing for their planned Gestapo-style raid on the Panther house at 2337 W. Monroe was perfect.

Thanks to their informant, the cops had detailed information on the layout of the Monroe apartment. The cops were so afraid of Hampton, they had their stooge drug his Kool-Aid with secobarbitol. Talking to his mom on the phone, Hampton fell asleep in the middle of a sentence at around 1:30 a.m. on Dec. 4 as the cops prepared for their planned bloodbath.

Armed with automatic weapons, the cops arrived in the middle of the night to set up the assault, which was to begin at 4:45 a.m. This CPD assassination squad was sent by State’s Attorney Ed Hanrahan with Mayor-for-Life Richard J. Daley’s blessing and the full backing of the FBI. (That Daley was the father of the current mayor of Chicago.)

The cops split into two teams, eight for the front and six for the back of the apartment. Party member Mark Clark was assigned to guard duty in the front with a shotgun. He was the first to be murdered by the cops in the stormtrooper assault after being able to discharge his weapon only once in self-defense. The ferocity of the police attack was such that this was the only shot fired by the Panthers during the whole ordeal.

The cops then sprayed Hampton’s room with automatic weapons fire. Panther Harold Bell reported hearing the cops say after the first salvo, “That’s Fred Hampton!”

“Is he dead? Bring him out!”

“He’s barely alive, he’ll make it.”

After hearing the two shots that were fired point blank into Fred Hampton’s head, Akua Njeri—then known as Deborah Johnson, she was pregnant with Fred Hampton Jr. at the time—heard a cop say, “He’s good and dead now.” A second volley of shots was fired into the bedroom where the other Panthers were holed up.

They were then dragged out into the street at 5 a.m. trailing blood, and were savagely beaten by the cops. One cop even drew his gun and pressed it to Njeri’s pregnant belly and threatened to shoot. After the cops were through brutalizing them, the surviving Panthers were arrested and charged with aggravated assault and attempted murder.

A triumphalist CPD press conference the next day described an imaginary assault by the “extremely vicious” and “violent” BPP on police officers who were simply trying to serve a search warrant for illegal weapons. The press conference lauded the cops’ “bravery” and “professional discipline.”

Police later returned to the scene to destroy the ballistic evidence of their cowardly criminal attack, which came to be known as the “Massacre on Monroe.” As BPP National Chair Bobby Seale pointed out, “They couldn’t wipe the blood off their hands quick enough. They had done similar things in the past. A lot of brothers had been shot and killed. Before, the press would print the police reports and no one would be able to know what really happened.

“But in this case it was different. An estimated 80,000 people went through the house where Hampton was shot dead and actually saw the bullet holes in the wall.” Hampton’s funeral was attended by more than 5,000 people.

Why did the Daley dictatorship, the States Attorney’s office and the CPD decide to use police-state Gestapo methods in an attempt to resolve their contradictions with Hampton and the BPP at that time?

Party leader Kathleen Cleaver explained:, “The level on which the national government of the mother country is forced to deal with the political developments in the colony, on the level of assassination and imprisonment, no longer on the level of phony negotiations and pacification, indicates our struggle has developed an even more powerful threat to the established patterns of exploitation and racism.”

The Fred Hampton Streetz Party march and rally was a powerful blow against the CPD’s efforts to bury the legacy of the BPP and the memory of its martyred chairperson, Fred Hampton. The POCC can be reached at P.O. Box 368255, Chicago, IL 60636.