I’d just fallen asleep when I heard a loud knock at the front door. Dazed, I got up and opened it. My partner Skip Andrew was standing there dressed in suit and tie.
“Chairman Fred is dead. I just got a call from Rush. The pigs vamped on the chairman’s crib this morning.”
I remained stuck on the words “Chairman Fred is dead.”
“Someone else was killed and a lot of people were shot. Deborah Johnson and some others are at the Wood Street police station; the people wounded are at Cook County Hospital.”
“What should I do?” I asked.
“I’m meeting Rush at the morgue and then we are going to the chairman’s crib. Why don’t you go to Wood Street and try to talk to some of the survivors?”
“Sure,” I stammered. He turned abruptly and was gone down the steps.
Fred Hampton dead? I had just seen him at the Panther office, looking bigger than life. I couldn’t imagine him motionless. I went to the bedroom and shook Mary.
“Fred Hampton’s been killed.”
Mary stirred, coming out of sleep. “Huh, what?”
I repeated the news. She bolted upright. “Noooo!” she cried, shaking her head back and forth.
“I don’t want to believe it either, but I think it’s true. I’m going to interview some of the survivors at the lock-up.”
“How can I help? What can I do?” Mary pleaded.
“I have to go,” I urged. “I’ll call you later if you can help.”
I went back to the living room and put on the same suit I had just thrown off. I grabbed my briefcase, the housing proposal inside, and walked out the door before seven o’clock.
I replayed Skip’s words in my mind. “The chairman is dead.” It was Fred who made us believe we were strong and unstoppable. Now he was dead.
It was well below freezing and the snow was piled up on the edges of the streets. Francis and Iberia Hampton approached the entrance gate to the Corn Products plant in their 1966 green Ford. They’d been expecting Fred to come home when they went to bed the previous evening, but Fred’s bed was still made and the chitterlings they’d left on the stove for him were untouched when they got up in the morning of December 4. Francis dropped Iberia off at the front gate and parked. Iberia’s shift started at seven o’clock, a half-hour before his.
Francis worked as a painter, glazier, and repairman in the maintenance section. After dropping Iberia off at the entrance gate, he usually parked the car and went to the paint shop where he made coffee for everyone and put the place in order before his shift started. As Francis walked toward the entrance gate, the gate did not open as it usually did. Tilman Malrey, the middle-aged security guard whom Francis had known for years, came out of his booth and walked up to him.
“I think you and your wife need to go home. We heard on the radio there was a police raid and I think your son was shot.”
Francis looked at Malrey. “What happened to him?”
“I think you need to go home,” Malrey repeated. “Maybe you can find out more on the radio.” Although Francis sensed Malrey was trying to help him, he also thought Malrey was withholding information. Francis knew his son had become the target of police raids. He had told Fred when he joined the Panthers that he did not want him to be violent. Fred responded, “I will defend myself if I have to.”
He remembered his son’s speech at Reverend McNelty’s Baptist Church four weeks earlier. Fred had told the large and enthusiastic crowd, “The next time you see me I may be in a collar and tie.” Fred seldom wore a dress shirt or tie, and Francis assumed his son was talking about being dressed for burial. Indeed, since Fred’s release from prison in August, and even more recently he had said things that made Francis believe he knew he might not live much longer.
Francis asked Malrey if he would put in a call to Iberia’s workstation and tell her that she should come outside to meet him. As he waited in the car, he heard on the radio that his son was dead. The reporter from WBBM “All News Radio” said that Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and another unknown Panther were killed at four thirty that morning in a shootout at 2337 West Monroe. Francis recognized the address. The radio announcer went on to say that the police entered the Panther apartment with a search warrant looking for guns, that the Panthers had opened fire on the police after the officers announced their presence, and the police had responded with gunfire of their own. Two police officers were injured, along with four Black Panthers who were taken to Cook County Hospital.
The report continued, indicating that the raiding police officers were assigned to State’s Attorney Hanrahan’s office. Francis knew Hanrahan was the prosecutor who had campaigned on the platform “war on gangs.” He also knew Fred had repeatedly criticized Hanrahan in his speeches for using antigang rhetoric to carry out what Fred called “a war on black youth.”
Before Iberia could punch the clock on the way to her assembly line post, she saw a slip of paper with a message for her to call her daughter Dee Dee at home and the other message from Malrey. She called her daughter. “The police killed Fred. You gotta come home,” Dee Dee told her.
Francis saw Iberia walk slowly past the entrance gate looking down at the ground. He knew from her slow pace that she had heard about their son. They didn’t have to say anything. Francis opened the car door for her and they drove home in silence. She had wanted Fred to come home to Maywood the night before. Although he was spending the night with his parents less and less, Iberia still considered him to be living at home and kept his bedroom intact. Even when he had introduced Deborah to her a month earlier and said “This is my baby” pointing to Deborah’s pregnant belly, Iberia did not envision Fred moving out completely.
Iberia was upset when Fred became a Black Panther. She felt uncomfortable with their talk about guns. She was afraid he would become a police target. Why was he was always the one to be out front, the spokesperson? But she also was proud of Fred. He was doing what he believed in, standing up for black people. Iberia herself was a seasoned union steward. She had cooked for seventeen hundred striking workers at the union hall during a five-month strike several years before. She knew where Fred got his courage and determination, and she had shown her support by cooking for the Panthers’ Breakfast for Children Program.
By the time Francis and Iberia arrived home, the radio had identified the other Panther killed in the raid as eighteen-year-old Mark Clark from Peoria, Illinois. A spokesperson from Hanrahan’s office was on TV saying the police had been fired at from the back bedroom where Fred was found dead.
When a close friend of the Hamptons came over to their home, she saw Iberia sweeping the floor looking stone-faced. She hardly spoke. Francis was trying hard to hold back tears. Later on, Iberia would tell the friend that Francis wasn’t tough enough to handle their son’s murder. His face would get sad and tear up when Fred’s death was brought up.
On my way to the police station, I heard the news flash: “Fred Hampton and another Panther member were killed this morning in a predawn raid by police officers assigned to state’s attorney Edward Hanrahan. Hanrahan’s office indicated the officers were serving a search warrant for weapons when they were fired upon by the occupants and returned the fire.” Why was Hanrahan the prosecutor in charge of a police raid?
I arrived at the Wood Street police station at 7:30 A.M. I parked on the street and walked a block to the dilapidated building. I entered through the glass door on the side and approached the counter that separated me from several uniformed officers. It looked like business as usual, with the cops behind the counter filling out forms and talking on desk phones. A middle-aged sergeant approached and asked what I wanted.
I showed him my attorney identification card. “I want to see Deborah Johnson, and anyone else arrested after the police raid on Monroe Street.” The sergeant looked as though he was expecting me. “State’s Attorney Hanrahan has given orders that the prisoners arrested after the raid are not to be seen by anyone, including attorneys.”
I wasn’t surprised that Hanrahan would give such an order, but it was illegal. “Hanrahan’s order violates an Illinois criminal statute specifically forbidding anyone to interfere with the right of a person in custody to see their attorney,” I said as authoritatively as possible. As a practicing criminal law attorney, I carried a paperback copy of the Illinois Criminal Code in my briefcase. I pulled it out and read the sergeant the statute Hanrahan and he were violating. He wouldn’t budge, and he wouldn’t call Hanrahan. Frustrated and outraged, but with a 9:00 A.M. deadline for filing the housing proposal, I left and drove downtown to the City Urban Renewal Office. This project, which had been many months in the making and had successfully brought together black, Latino, and white community groups, suddenly seemed distant and insignificant.
After filing the housing proposal, I was driving back to the police station when I heard two police officers interviewed over the car radio. They claimed they had been on the raid but hadn’t known it was a Panther apartment. Suddenly shots were fired at them from the rear bedroom where they said they later found Fred’s body. They made it sound as if they barely escaped alive.
Back at the counter inside Wood Street, I heard the same response from a different sergeant. He was shorter and stockier than the first one but had the same look of satisfaction when he turned down my request to see the people arrested. I went over to the pay phone next to the lock-up and called Hanrahan’s office. Sheldon Sorosky answered. I knew him as a “special state’s attorney” assigned to prosecute political cases. That fall I had argued against him in bond court and at preliminary hearings defending the Weathermen. He was a slim, Jewish guy who liked to schmooze. He had been defensive about the tough positions his boss Hanrahan had required him to take and let me know by inference that what went on in court was just a job and less important than maintaining our Jewish professional acquaintance in the hallway outside.
“Shelly,” I said, “What the fuck’s going on? The police here won’t let me see the Panthers in the lock-up based on orders from your boss. You know you can’t do this.”
“Hold on,” he said. I could hear Sorosky conferring with someone I was certain was Hanrahan. When the muddled voices ceased, Shelly got back on the line.
“It’s all right.” Apparently Hanrahan had given in. “You can visit them.”
“How ‘bout telling the cops here that. They think they’re under orders from your boss not to let me in.”
“Will do, Jeff,” he confirmed. Then added, “You owe me one.”
A few minutes later, a patrolman came out from behind the counter and led me to the back of the station. He unlocked the door to a tiny, windowless interview room, with a small wooden table and two wooden chairs on either side.
There was a knock at the door. The patrolman unlocked it and Deborah Johnson was brought into the cramped room. This was our first meeting. She leaned over, crying and shaking, supporting herself with one hand on the table. Slowly she sat down. She looked at me guardedly, not quite fathoming who I was or why I was there.
“I’m Jeff Haas with the People’s Law Office.” The mention of my PLO connection and my Afro appeared to relax her a little.
“How are you and your baby?” I asked.
There was a pause as if she didn’t hear me, then she responded, “I wasn’t shot like a lot of the others. The pigs pushed me around, but I think my baby is OK.” She paused again. “Fred never really woke up. We were sleeping. I woke up hearing shots from the front and back. I shook Fred but he didn’t open his eyes.” Deborah demonstrated how she had pushed against Fred several times trying to wake him. “At one point he sort of raised up and then lay back down again.” She repeated that he never opened his eyes. “I got on top of him to try to protect him from the gunshots. The bed was shaking from the bullets.” She said the shooting stopped only after someone in the bedroom with her yelled, “We got a pregnant sister in here.” She told me two “pigs” came into the bedroom. One of them pulled up her nightgown and called out, “Look, we got a broad here.” Then they pulled her out into the kitchen.
Deborah stopped talking as she wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her nightgown. I was nodding my head trying to be supportive, “Fred never really woke up,” she repeated. “He was lying there when they pulled me out of the bedroom.” She paused.
Then she described two police officers going into their bedroom, hearing one of them fire two shots, followed by, “He’s good and dead now.” Deborah put her head down. A moment later she raised it suddenly and looked at me. “What can you do?” she asked.
Indeed, what could I do about the horrible murder she had just described?
Not knowing what to say, I wrestled with the idea of putting my arm around her but instead asked her, “Did it look like Fred had been shot already when you were pulled out of the bedroom?”
“He didn’t have any blood on him that I could see,” she replied. “I crawled on top of him during the shooting to try to protect him.” She showed me her patterned blue and white nightgown. There was no blood. Deborah’s description of Fred rising up but not opening his eyes, then lying back down, seemed strange. I couldn’t understand why he appeared dazed and semiconscious when he had not been shot.
“Were the men who raided the apartment in uniform?”
“No, but they were definitely the pigs.” She described how, after she was taken out of the back bedroom, she and other Panthers were pushed into the kitchen, handcuffed, and made to stand facing the back door. They were ordered not to turn around. She knew they had killed Fred because the police were bragging to each other, “Fred Hampton, the Panther chairman, is dead.” They told the occupants to keep their heads down as they took them outside and put them in police cars.
“Are you injured?” I asked.
“I guess I’m OK, but my baby could come any time.”
Even though by her account she was innocent of any criminal acts, I knew the police would try to justify what they did by accusing the victims of being the aggressors, initiating the gunfire.
“I’ll do everything to get you out as soon as possible and try to make sure you and the baby get medical care until you’re released. Some of the doctors who work at the jail hospital work at the Panthers clinic. I’ll ask them to look in on you.”
I wrote down Deborah’s mother’s name and phone number. “I’ll call and tell her you weren’t wounded and seem to be OK. She should start raising money for bail.” We shared a brief hug. She had never stopped crying.
I tapped the door to indicate that the consultation was over. In the next thirty-five years, I interviewed more than a hundred people in police lock-ups. None imprinted on my memory as strongly as Deborah Johnson, pregnant, in her nightgown, sobbing, and telling me that the police had just murdered her boyfriend in their bed.
After Deborah was led out, I sat down and tried to picture what she had described. It was difficult to imagine the scene. I had never been to the apartment and I was determined to get a sketch of the layout.
A few minutes later there was another knock. This time the lock-up keeper brought in a tall, square-shouldered man with short hair, about my age and another man, short and in his late forties with graying hair. Their handcuffs were removed and the keeper brought another chair to the table.
The tall, younger man introduced himself. “I’m Harold Bell from Rockford.” He said he was a Vietnam veteran and a college student. The other man was Louis Truelock. He told me Fred recruited him when they were in prison together at Menard and he had joined the party after his release, a couple of months after Fred’s. Both Bell and Truelock were trembling and looked in shock. Truelock was particularly anxious to tell what happened. He described how he had been asleep in the living room at the front of the apartment when he heard footsteps in the entranceway and a knock on the front door. Truelock said he asked who it was and he heard somebody say “Tommy,” followed by gunfire from outside. Harold said he heard “two thuds in the entrance hallway and then two shots.” I was writing furiously on my legal pad trying to keep their accounts straight.
Truelock and Bell said they immediately left the living room and ran to the back bedroom to wake up Fred. Bell saw “men with guns coming in the back through the kitchen door,” as he reached the entrance to Fred’s bedroom. He got on the bed with Fred and Deborah and shook Fred, yelling, “Chairman, the pigs are vamping!” But Fred would not wake up. “He only raised his head and slowly put it back down.” Bell saw pistols and shotguns being fired into the rear bedroom; he could also hear firing from the front of the apartment. He spoke in a formal, stiff way that partially covered his fear.
Bell told me that as he huddled on the bed with Fred and Deborah, “A hand reached in the room and pulled me out. I was pushed onto the floor in the dining room where I was told to lie spread-eagled. Then someone kicked me really hard in the groin. The police shooting in the apartment was like a firefight. They moved to strategic positions. It seemed to last forever. The police definitely knew what they were doing.”
Bell said after he, Truelock, and Deborah were in the kitchen, two police officers returned to the bedroom. “I heard more shots from the back bedroom. I could tell those were shots from a handgun.” Then he heard the police yelling, “That’s Fred Hampton, that’s Fred Hampton.”
Truelock said he also went to the bed where Fred and Deborah had been sleeping. After a brief pause in the shooting, he yelled, “We have a pregnant sister in here!” The police entered the back bedroom, pulled Deborah and him out, and pushed them toward the kitchen. Truelock heard more gunshots from inside the rear bedroom. When the gunfire finally stopped, Bell, Deborah and he were being held in the kitchen. “We were handcuffed and told to look at the floor.”
Truelock continued: “A policeman dragged Fred’s body out of the back bedroom and onto a door lying on the floor of the dining room. He wasn’t moving.”
As they were being led out of the apartment, Bell saw Fred lying in his underwear with a pool of blood around his head. “I saw where he had been shot in the head. I was told to keep moving, look straight ahead,” while the police were taunting, “Chairman Fred Hampton is dead.” I was trying to write down everything, but I finally stopped. I asked Bell to draw a sketch of the apartment from front to rear, from the north entrance and vestibule on Monroe Street to the kitchen door at the rear. His diagram depicted an entrance door off the vestibule into the living room and a hallway to the right of the front door, heading south toward the back of the apartment. The hallway lead past a small bedroom on the left, and then past another one, also on the left, where Deborah and Fred had been sleeping. Toward the rear of the apartment the hallway opened on the right into a dining room, followed by the kitchen. The kitchen was at the rear of the apartment with the kitchen door opening onto a landing and then the back stairs.
“Mark Clark … was lying on the floor in the living room after the raid,” Truelock added, pointing inside the living room square on Bell’s sketch, next to the front door. “He wasn’t moving.” Truelock said the police kept firing even after they had been brought out of the back bedroom.
Then Truelock pointed to the front bedroom on the diagram. “The people in there, Doc, Verlina Brewer and Blair Anderson, were all shot, and so was China Doll in the living room. Doc looked really bad. He was bent over holding his stomach. We were all told to shut up, look at the floor and not talk to each other.”
Bell asked me if I knew what happened to the people who were wounded. I told him they were at Cook County Hospital, but no one had been in to see them yet. Both Bell and Truelock were particularly concerned about Doc.
“His shirt was covered in blood. He could hardly stand up, but the pigs kept shouting at him not to lean over and stand up straight. He was trying, but he kept falling down,” Truelock said.
“What about Deborah? How’s she doing?” Bell asked.
I told him Deborah was still crying when I saw her a few minutes ago, but I thought she and her baby were OK.
Bell and Truelock explained that things happened so fast, they never even picked up or fired a gun. Instead, they were trying to wake up Fred to figure out what to do. Someone must have been assigned security, with so many Panthers sleeping in one place. Because of their location in the living room by the front door, it was likely Bell or Truelock or both. I didn’t ask them specifically whether they had been assigned security. They were miserable enough. They kept repeating how quickly the gunfire had followed the knock, and that they ran to the back to wake up and warn Fred. I thought they were embarrassed that they had done nothing to defend the apartment, but they didn’t try to make themselves look better.
Suddenly, as though he had just remembered something, Truelock leaned over and whispered, “Look out for Rush.”
“What do you mean?” I whispered back.
“One of the police officers here was bragging ‘Rush is next,’ and they said something about another raid.”
“Can you identify the cop who said this?” I asked instinctively. He said that although he could hear the police voices from his cell, he couldn’t see who was talking.
“I’ll warn him,” I said.
At the time of my interview, Bell and Truelock had been in custody four hours. They told me the police officers at Wood Street were laughing and gloating about Fred’s death. I told both of them that I didn’t yet know what charges would be placed against them but that our office would try to get them bail. I wrote down the necessary information to fill out petitions to reduce bond and collected the names of their people to contact about bail money and to inform them of their court date when it was announced.
I rapped on the door to signal the guard to let us out. “Try to get permission to call me at PLO later on in the afternoon,” I advised, as the door was being opened. “We will know more about your charges and the conditions of the people at Cook County Hospital.”
On my way out I checked at the front desk to find out if specific charges had been filed (they had not), and drove back to PLO.
I’m a slow emotional processor, gleaning the facts and ruminating over them before responding with my feelings. Not a bad trait for a lawyer, but not so helpful as a human being or spouse. It took awhile for me to comprehend the full impact of what the survivors had told me. What they described was nothing short of deliberate murder, certainly by the two officers who had gone into the bedroom and executed Fred. The raid looked like an assassination, something I had connected with the deaths of Malcolm X, Dr. King, and the Kennedys. Now I was staring at one up close.
Part of me wanted to gather evidence to help the survivors win their criminal trials and, if possible, prove through the courts that Fred was intentionally killed. The other side of me believed Fred’s murder proved the legal system didn’t work. What good did it do to have lawyers and courts and a constitution and legal precedent if the police under the direct control of the prosecutor could murder you in your bed? I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to be a lawyer fighting for justice inside an unjust system or on the outside exposing the legal system as a fraud, taking direct action against Fred’s killers. In the 1960s we used to repeat Lenny Bruce’s words, “In the halls of Justice, the only Justice is in the halls.” As lawyers for activists, it took us awhile to discover that in most cases, we could both participate in the legal system and expose its inequities.
When I left, I called Bobby Rush, the Panther defense minister, at the Panther office. I told him what Truelock had said about the police coming to his apartment next.
There was a pause. “Those motherfuckers will do anything. Don’t worry. I won’t go home.” Then, his voice crackling with emotion, he added, “Jeff, when I was at the apartment with Skip this morning, I saw the bloody mattress. Did they really shoot Fred in his bed?”
“That’s what Deborah said, and Bell and Truelock too. They said the police came in shooting. They went into Fred’s room and executed him right there on his bed. Deborah said he never really woke up.”
There was another long pause. “That fits,” Rush finally said. “The bullet holes at the apartment show they were shooting towards Fred.”
“They urged me to get the word out about what happened,” I added.
“I’ll do that,” Rush promised.