8
A particularly brutal incident occurred on October 4, 1969. Someone fired at the Panther office, and the Panthers fired back. The Chicago police were called. They broke down the front door, charged inside, and pushed everyone down the front steps. Che (Billy Brooks) was the first to emerge at the bottom, where Officer Richard Curly hit him in the temple with the butt of his shotgun. Panther member Bradley Greene was also struck and beaten outside the front door. The police said they had seen someone on the roof with a shotgun who looked like, but in fact wasn’t, Terry Watson, a Panther inside the office. When they arrested Watson, they beat and kicked him more than anyone else.
The police made no efforts to hide what they were doing on busy Madison Street outside the Panther office. When a spectator outside the Panther office objected to the police beatings, he was grabbed and struck as well. In all, six Panthers and the bystander were arrested and taken to the Wood Street station.
In the station parking lot, the arrestees were removed from the police wagon and beaten again. One of the cops, who weighed over two hundred pounds, sat on Watson’s back as Watson lay on the ground, and slammed his head into the pavement. Bradley Greene thought they were going to kill him. As Terry lay moaning and crying, one of the other Panthers said he shouldn’t be making sounds like that because “He’s a Panther.” Bradley disagreed and yelled for the cops to stop.
Afterward, the Panthers were picked up and made to run a gauntlet fending off punches and clubbing by the two shifts of officers, one leaving and one coming on duty. The next morning, they were charged with attempted murder of the cops who came to the Panther office. Skip and Don represented them in court. Skip pointed to the defendants’ bruised and swollen faces and told the bond judge, “Look at this, this is what the police did to them after the raid.” The injuries obviously needed medical attention. The judge reduced their bonds, ordered medical treatment for those who could not make bail, and set a preliminary hearing for November 10. On that date Skip cross-examined the arresting officers so skillfully that the contradictions between their testimonies and their arrest reports, as well as between each other, became so obvious that all charges except those against Terry Watson were dropped.
During the October 4 raid, the police had again ransacked the Panther office, and important files containing lists of members and contributors were confiscated or destroyed. William O’Neal, who joined the Panthers shortly after they opened their office in November 1968, voluntarily took charge of repairing the damage. He was one of the few Panthers with mechanical and carpentry skills and he was able to repair even the walls damaged by the police.
Flint and Seva, PLO’s law students, brought Fred Hampton to speak at Northwestern Law School later in the fall. Flint drove out to the suburbs to pick up Fred and during the ride, Flint said, “Fred was speed-rapping about the cops, describing them as out to get him.”
Flint had expected a few students to show up for the talk. When they walked into Northwestern’s Robert McCormick Hall, it was packed with over three hundred people. Flint had never spoken before a large audience. He stumbled through his introduction of Fred. Humiliated, he turned the podium and microphone over to Fred, who received a standing ovation. Fred chided Flint about his awkwardness, but he added that Flint was part of the reason he was out on bail. Fred said that Flint, and the rest of the lawyers who wanted to help the Panthers, had better get their act together because “what the Panthers are doing is serious, and the police are serious about trying to stop us.”
Fred described the police raid on the Panther office a few days earlier. He told how Panther members had been taken outside and beaten and how the police had gone out of their way to dump out the kids’ food in the Panther office. Fred talked with particular satisfaction about seeing the children eating and Panther members serving them. He explained this was how people could understand socialism, “through participation and serving the people.”
Fred ended by telling the law students and lawyers that they had a role to play in helping make revolutionary change and that he particularly respected lawyers who had gone South to represent civil rights activists. Fred adapted his talk to law students without diluting the militancy and energy I had witnessed at the People’s Church in August. When Fred ended with “Power to the people,” the normally staid law school audience responded in kind, loudly, mesmerized. After the speech Flint and Seva proudly introduced Fred to the dean and faculty. Fred was at home in any conversation. But during the ride back with Flint, Fred switched into his earlier mode, talking continuously about how the police were targeting him and the Panthers.
In October, Fred was still spending some nights at his parents’ home in Maywood and some in other Panther apartments. Deborah Johnson was seven months pregnant with Fred’s baby; she and Fred wanted to live together. When he had gone to prison in May, Fred had asked his friends, including Che, to look out for her. Later Che warned Fred against getting his own place in the city, urging Fred to get an apartment in the suburbs, further from the Chicago police.
Despite the warnings, Fred and Deborah rented a small five-room apartment on the first floor of a two story flat at 2337 West Monroe, one street over from the Panther office. It quickly became a Panther hangout where Che, Doc, and others often stayed with them. Sometimes, Deborah and Fred moved to other Panther cribs as a cautionary measure.
The FBI and local police immediately took note of Fred’s new address. In retrospect, it’s a little hard to understand why Fred, who was so conscious of being a target of the Chicago police, did not see the danger of living so close to the Panther office. They were in the heart of a community that was in a virtual state of war with the police. Guns, usually registered, were often kept at the apartment. While they may have given an illusion of security, there seems to have been little control over who brought what weapons into the apartment and how they were accounted for and maintained.
The Panthers, including Fred, used rhetoric that increased hostility with law enforcement. Expressions such as “You kill one pig, you get some satisfaction, you kill all the pigs, you get complete satisfaction,” were taken literally by some police. The Panthers also didn’t heed their own words for the truth they contained. Fred and the Panthers knew that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI as well as the local police were out to get them. Fred understood he was a marked man, but the security at the new Panther crib was irregular and haphazard.
A few blocks away from Hampton’s new apartment, residents of Henry Horner Homes, an all-black housing project, were having their own confrontations with the police. For over a year teenagers from the projects had been petitioning for the installation of a traffic light at a corner where people crossed to get to local schools and the neighborhood health clinic. In September, one month before Fred moved into his new apartment, two young kids had been killed on separate days crossing the intersection. The city still refused to install the light.
Seventeen-year-old John Soto became the leader of the campaign to get a traffic light put in and organized protests in the neighborhood. His brother, Michael Soto, a twenty-year-old decorated Army sergeant, came home on leave from Vietnam to visit his family and participated in the protest led by his brother in September.
On October 5, the police killed John Soto. The police version was that John Soto had been stopped by the police and when he fought with them, an officer’s weapon went off “accidentally” firing a shot into the back of Soto’s head. Several witnesses denied that John had fought with the police and said he had been shot without provocation.
Community anger grew and Michael extended his leave to attend his brother’s funeral. On October 10, Michael Soto was also shot and killed by the Chicago police, who claimed they shot him after he pulled a gun. Again, the police version contradicted that of civilian witnesses, who said the incident started when a police squad car blocked the path of Michael Soto and two friends. When the youths separated, the police chased Michael to the second floor of the projects, where they shot him. People on the second floor said Michael had been unarmed.
Immediately the community became more outraged and rioting escalated into gunfire. In the exchanges of gunfire ten police officers and a twelve-year-old were reported wounded. According to the NAACP’s Commission of Inquiry set up later, “The Commission discovered that a substantial segment of the community believed that, contrary to all police reports, John and Michael Soto had been murdered by the police because of their participation in the traffic light protests.”
The coroner’s inquests were delayed; meanwhile the internal police investigation found John’s death to be “accidental homicide,” and Michael’s “justifiable homicide.” The Soto killings were well publicized locally. They took place in the same neighborhood as the Panther office and confirmed for many people the Panthers’ view that the police were licensed thugs, who served as an occupying army in their community. There was no effective means of redress for the victims of police abuse. The prosecutor and the internal police investigative agency invariably closed ranks to support the cops. It is hard to overestimate the effect the Soto brothers’ deaths had on both the community and the Panthers. In speeches, Fred spoke about the incidents repeatedly. They became exhibit number one in the Panthers’ demand for community control of police and added credibility to their call for armed self-defense.
Ten years later, our office could well have been the one called to represent the family of John and Michael Soto. By then we had learned how to prosecute a civil rights case. High profile cases against the police became our specialty. The transparently implausible police explanations of the Soto killings matched the patterns we would come to recognize later. But in 1969 we had neither the experience nor the reputation as civil rights lawyers to attract these cases, and few Chicago lawyers wanted to sue the police without an airtight case. We felt as helpless as everyone else when we read that no action, either disciplinary or criminal, was being taken against the cops responsible for the Soto brothers’ deaths. A few weeks after Michael Soto was killed, Fred spoke at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, about eighty miles from Chicago, and devoted a substantial part of his speech to police abuse and killings:
You’ve got Bobby Seale being chained and gagged at the federal building. You’ve got John and Michael Soto, who were murdered in two days. We need some guns, we need some guns, and we need some force. Now they brutalize without even arresting them. They shoot somebody with no intention of arresting them.
After specifically attacking Mayor Daley and “Hammerhead” Hanrahan, Fred continued with the words that were often quoted after his death. Words that inspired his audiences and that we very much wanted to be true:
Don’t worry about the Black Panther Party. As long as you keep the beat, we’ll keep on going. If you think that we can be wiped out because they murdered Bobby Hutton and Bunchy Carter and John Huggins, you’re wrong. If you think because Huey was jailed the party’s gonna stop, you see you’re wrong. If you think because Chairman Bobby was jailed, the Party’s gonna stop, you see you’re wrong. If you think because they can jail me you thought the Party was gonna stop, you thought wrong. You can jail a revolutionary but you can’t jail revolution. You can lock up a freedom fighter, like Huey Newton, but you can’t lock up freedom fighting.
Looking back on history, it’s not so clear that you can’t kill a revolution or a movement if you assassinate its leaders. It’s unlikely the Chinese Revolution would have succeeded with Mao dead, or that the Vietnamese would have obtained their independence without Ho Chi Minh. The latter continued successfully after Ho died, but only after he had put in forty-six years of organizing and fighting. The Cubans would not have driven Fulgencio Batista out and gotten rid of his oppressive government without Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. The Colonists may not have been successful in establishing a democracy without George Washington’s determination and leadership, particularly when he stopped his rebellious unpaid soldiers from their attempt to impose military rule after defeating the British. The murder of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in 1961 and Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 are examples of freedom struggles that were defeated because the CIA determined to kill their leaders.
In another part of Fred’s November speech, he said:
And when pigs move on our cribs, we have to protect our cribs with gun force. Pigs don’t move on Panther cribs, they make sure the Panther’s out of town…. Because they know when they comin’ to a Panther crib that we might talk a lot of rhetoric, but we deal with the same basic jargon that the people in Babylon dealt with. It takes two to tango, motherfucker. As soon as you kick that door down, I have to kick it back on you. We don’t lock our doors. We just get us some good guns and leave them motherfuckers open.
It’s hard to imagine Fred believed the police were afraid to raid an apartment with the Panthers present. So what was he saying? Knowing the police were listening, was he warning them the Panthers were armed? Was he telling Panthers they should have guns in their homes to protect themselves or was he signifying big time with the police? The rhetoric that energized the Panthers was often the same rhetoric that the police used to justify attacks on them.
From the time Fred and Deborah moved in, there were guns kept at 2337 West Monroe. While the outer doors were locked, the tiny locks at the front and rear were not reinforced. As for security, people with guns were normally assigned to stay awake by the front door when Fred slept there. But even later, after I interviewed the Panther survivors, I never heard of any drills or preparation for an actual raid, or any specific instructions of what the Panthers were supposed to do if the police came.
Fred ended his speech to the students at Northern Illinois with the Panther refrain, “Time is short, let’s seize the time.”
It’s often difficult to separate Fred’s rhetoric from what he believed. I have wondered if he was always able to make this distinction.