Epilogue

It’s Mother’s Day weekend 2005 in Haynesville, Louisiana. Iberia and Francis have asked me to come for their annual family reunion. They want me to see where they grew up, where Fred spent his summers when he was young. Where he is now buried. I arrive at the family home on Saturday morning. It is a simple wooden, one-story house with wood panels and linoleum floors. Outside is a huge oak tree, which gives us shade on this hot, humid day. We sit on folding chairs, sipping lemonade.

On the dirt road in front of us, Tennessee walking horses are parading up and down in twos and threes. Suddenly they break into the elaborate prance that they are known for. Bits of dirt flash about their hooves. Iberia’s nephew, who still lives on the family compound, hosts a horse show with Tennessee walkers every year. Family members and friends who left Louisiana come back with their horses in trailers and compete in a horse ring around the bend in the road from Iberia’s house. Before the show, the riders are putting the horses through their paces.

“Things are a lot different now from when Iberia and I grew up,” Iberia’s sister Marie tells me. She shakes from an advanced case of MS. “Black kids ride the school bus now, and there’s one school for everyone. It isn’t like when Iberia and I grew up. We had to walk the five miles into school on Sunday night and stay with an aunt until after school on Friday,” she said. “And coming home, the white kids on the school bus would throw mud at us and call us names.” She still carries the hurt. Her story reminds me of watching my classmates in Atlanta yell “nigger” at the black kids going to the symphony. “Even though most everybody left the country, our family kept this place here. I still come on weekends from Baton Rouge,” Marie said.

Fred’s cousin, Charles White, comes up to us. Apparently he’s heard that one of Fred’s lawyers is here. I’m not hard to find, being the only white person among the scores of black families celebrating.

“So you were one of our family’s lawyers?” he asks.

“For a long time,” I say. “It took us thirteen years to prove they murdered Fred.”

“Fred and me did ‘most everything together when he came down here. We stood on our heads in the shallow end of the lake and we rode horses. I sure hated it when he got killed. I was gonna move to Chicago to be with him.” He paused. “But I’ve done all right staying here. Got jobs mostly working on oil rigs, and I love the horses. I wasn’t cut out for city life.”

Francis is fanning himself with a paper plate and tells me a story of his grandfather.

“Uncle Wylie, that’s what they called my grandfather, heard the Klan was coming after him one night,” Francis said. “Nobody messed with Uncle Wylie. He told my father and his brother to get behind the house and shoot at anything white that moves. Uncle Wylie sat in a chair inside the front door with his double-barreled shotgun in his lap. When them Klan boys came up on the front porch, Uncle Wylie opened the front door and faced them with his shotgun. They took off running so fast and made such a commotion that Uncle Wylie’s son, my uncle, shot one of them white-faced cows running away.” We both laughed.

I could see Francis recounting that story to Fred as a boy with the same chuckle. “Fred had a lot of Uncle Wylie in him,” Francis says.

I look at the etched lines on the faces of Iberia and Francis. I can see fifty years of Chicago winters, working in the industrial plant at Corn Products, raising a family, teaching their children to stand up for what they believed—and then having a son shot down by Chicago police. Despite everything, they are still at home in Louisiana.

Every year on the Saturday before Mother’s Day, Iberia’s family visits Fred’s grave. This is my first time joining them. It’s hot and I’m already sweating at 11:00 A.M. when I step into the Hampton car. We join the caravan heading for the cemetery in the country. The graveyard is near the church, long since destroyed by fire. The Church was where Iberia and Francis first met at Sunday services. Fred’s grave, like the others around it, is set in a clearing with a grove of pine trees behind, much like the landscape around the Georgia farm where I grew up.

I squint from the sun as Iberia and I approach the tombstone. It has several pockmarks.

“Some people came and fired shots to deface the tombstone the year after we buried him,” Iberia said. “People down here heard about Fred. A group of Panthers came down for the burial and stood around guarding his body in the church. The sheriff almost went crazy, arming his deputies and surrounding the church, but there was no trouble.”

Fred’s granite tombstone had a pair of outstretched hands, palms upward. On it are carved the words, “Fred said, ‘If I were free, what would I spend my life doing?’” I don’t know where the quote came from. I walk a short distance away, leaving Iberia to stand there silently facing the tombstone, and watch her put down the fresh flowers she brought. Someone brings her a chair, and she sits down looking straight ahead at the tombstone, chin resting on her hands.

It is twenty-two years since Flint, Dennis, and I announced the settlement. The case did not end with our press release. It took three more years to resolve our fee dispute with Montgomery. Eventually, Judge Grady ruled our way. The plaintiffs shared two-thirds of the $1.85 million dollars. Our office got paid some $450,000, less than $15.00 per hour for the over 300,000 hours we put in. Still, it was a lot of money for us back in 1986, and it kept the People’s Law Office going.

By the end, all the plaintiffs—including Montgomery’s clients—understood who earned them the settlement. Mrs. Clark told us when she came to get her check, “My family and I will never forget the work you did. You won, and you showed the world that Mark was trying to do something to make things better.” Doc kept in regular contact, even after he moved from Chicago. In 2004, I interviewed Brenda Harris in a West Side apartment. Her Afro was showing a bit of gray, and her youthful face was drawn, but her voice was as soft as ever, and her slight, fragile appearance reminded me of her nickname, China Doll. She’s now a Muslim and a nationalist. Life has not been easy for Brenda, who left college at the University of Illinois to join the Panthers.

“There were so many people who joined so quickly. We had no way to check them out,” she said over the sound of a space heater churning along to keep us warm. “We talked so much about guns, and most people didn’t know how to use them. We didn’t have enough classes in black history or a clear idea about the role of women.”

“How were women treated?”

“Some of the brothers hit on us. But not Fred, he wouldn’t allow women being put down, and he gave women a lot of responsibility. He understood we did a lot of the work.”

“What happened after he was killed?” I asked.

“After he was killed, the party floundered. We lacked leadership. A lot of people were scared after the raid. I left in October.”

“Did your injuries heal?”

“My fingers are still stiff from the bullets. I never played the violin again.”

Deborah Johnson, who now goes by Akua Njeri, worked as a paralegal at PLO in the late 1980s and worked with us to organize the twentieth anniversary commemoration of Fred’s death. After the ceremony late at night on December 4, 1989, many of us went from the event to 2337 West Monroe, by then a boarded-up and dilapidated building. It was not planned, but Dennis, Flint, and I pried open the back door and twenty or so of us went inside. It was pitch black. We took everyone on an eerie tour with flashlights. “This is where Fred died,” Dennis said, standing in the bare dining room, repeating what Skip had said on that spot twenty years earlier in front of Mike Gray’s camera.

Iberia, Francis, and Bill Hampton were honored guests at PLO’s twentieth and thirtieth anniversary celebrations and received standing ovations both times. PLO and the entire progressive community in Chicago have paid tribute to Fred Hampton’s brief but indelible impact as well as his family’s loss.

Jim Montgomery’s professional reputation continued to grow after the case. Mayor Harold Washington picked him as Chicago’s corporation counsel. Several years ago, Jim and I participated in a trial practice seminar at the University of Chicago Law School. His hair was gray and there were more wrinkles, but he still had that broad smile.

“How are you, and how is good old Flint?” he asked, his deep, baritone voice bringing back the days in Perry’s courtroom. “You guys are still fightin’ the good fight, I hear,” he said amicably.

“Flint’s fine,” I said. “It’s been a long time, but it’s good to see you.” I meant it. His cordiality made me forget the fee dispute and the arguments. We talked about cases, Chicago’s political situation, Harold Washington’s death, and the trial seminar as though there had never been a rift. Montgomery later affiliated with Johnnie Cochran and returned to representing civil rights plaintiffs.

Shortly after his reversal by the Seventh Circuit, Judge Perry and his cohort Judge Julius Hoffman were prohibited from taking complex cases and those requiring more than five trial days. Perry retired in 1983 at the age of eighty-seven and died the following February.

Edward Hanrahan never publicly accepted the settlement. On the day we gave our press statement, he responded by saying the Panthers were rewarded for their “lawbreaking and irresponsible charges,” and he said the settlement shielded the “FBI’s deception of the federal grand jury, the State’s Attorney’s Office, and the public.”

Hanrahan remained bitter at the FBI—as well as the Panthers and us—and disappeared from the public scene in Chicago. In ensuing years, Flint and I occasionally saw him standing hunched over with a briefcase in the Dirksen Federal Building elevator on his way to the federal law library, a dreary relic of the person he had been in 1969. We always recognized each other, but Flint and I never could bring ourselves to say hello. Nor could he. His 1972 prediction, “Monroe Street will be my obituary,” turned out to be accurate, at least politically. In early 2009, I attempted to interview Hanrahan, but he did not respond to my call. Five months later, on June 9, he died at age eighty-eight. His obituaries focused on his role in the Hampton raid and cover-up and the fatal toll these took on his political career.

In the late 1980s, William O’Neal agreed to be interviewed on camera for the PBS Eyes on the Prize television series documenting the civil rights movement. In the documentary he describes arriving at the Panther office with Bobby Rush on the morning of December 4, after the raid:

We both were speechless. We just walked through the house and saw where—what had taken place and where he’d died—and it was shocking. And then I was, you know, I just began to realize that the information that I had supplied leading up to that moment had facilitated that raid. I knew that, indirectly, I had contributed, and I felt it, and I felt bad about it. And then I got mad. You know, I had—. And then I had to conceal those feelings, which made it worse. I couldn’t say anything; I just had to continue to play the role.

Years after the trial and not under oath, O’Neal finally acknowledged his responsibility for the raid. Shortly thereafter, on January 17, 1990, he ran in front of an oncoming car at 2:00 A.M. on the Eisenhower

Expressway on Chicago’s West Side. When I read the short column in the newspaper describing his death, I felt no joy and no sadness, only the recognition that even O’Neal must have had a conscience.

Iberia is still sitting at Fred’s grave and someone announces, “It’s time for lunch.”

I get back in Francis’s car and we head to Iberia’s house. My plate isn’t big enough to get all the chicken, corn bread, greens, and catfish I want, but Francis follows me to the table with a smaller plate containing the macaroni and cheese and candied sweet potatoes I’d passed up.

“Fred would like it here, too,” Iberia says after she sits down with us. “But he wouldn’t have been content. He had to be doing something for someone else. He could never sit still.”

“He was never happy if someone else was being mistreated,” Francis adds. “That’s why he wanted to be a lawyer. But he couldn’t wait.”

“The sixties were a hard time to wait,” I say. “It seemed like the world was exploding. There was no sitting on the sidelines.”

“Not everyone paid the price Fred did,” Iberia says. She was right. Bobby Rush is now a fourth-term U.S. congressman. Rush never disavowed his membership in the Panthers or his admiration for Fred. He was the first to proclaim that the FBI and federal government murdered Fred. Others who had protested Fred’s murder had also risen to prominence. Danny Davis, an alderman when he decried Fred’s murder, is now in the U.S. Congress. Harold Washington, who was a state senator when he loudly and persistently demanded an independent investigation of Fred’s death, became mayor of Chicago in 1983. In fact it was the coalition of blacks and progressive whites and Latinos that came together to protest Fred’s murder and to unseat Hanrahan that later coalesced into the force that elected Washington as Chicago’s first black mayor.

But another legacy of Fred’s death was that Chicago’s West Side deteriorated further into a haven for drugs and gangs. Fred was an inspirational leader with the ability to reach street kids and get them involved in supporting and building their communities, not preying on them.

I didn’t want to explore the diverse legacies of Fred’s assassination with Iberia. She was still bitter. “We should own city hall for what they did to my son,” she blurted out at one point. On Sunday morning at a communal breakfast, I am welcomed. I say goodbye to Francis, Iberia, and her family, and they invite me back for next year.

Maggie and I separated in 1983. By the time we realized our relationship had become a routine focused on the kids, it was too late to reclaim. Moving out and away from living with Roger and Andrew was the most wrenching experience of my life. But we continued to share the parenting, and I discovered there is life after divorce.

In 1988, Mariel Nanasi, a law student from Denver, came to work at PLO. I first noticed her when she propped her red, calf-length boots on my desk and asked me why I thought law would change things. We made a date to discuss this and ended up starting a relationship. We’re still discussing her question. My work and my love life have always been intertwined. We now have two children and have been married almost twenty years. And yes we are still very much in love.

In 1989, Flint and I, together with John Stainthorp, who had worked on Attica and joined the office in 1980, were on trial once again in the Dirksen Federal Building. The three of us had just won a large civil rights verdict, and with the proceeds of our attorneys’ fees we bought the building where PLO is presently located on Milwaukee Avenue at Division and Ashland. Janine Hoft, Stan Willis, Michael Deutsch, and Jan Susler were now partners, and Erica Thompson would be shortly. We were suing Jon Burge, a Chicago police commander who tortured black suspects using electroshock and “dry submarino,” a technique similar to water boarding, in which a plastic bag is placed over the victim’s head to prevent breathing until the victim loses consciousness. Many of Burge’s victims spent the best parts of their lives on death row because of the false confessions he and his cohorts extracted.

After twelve years and two lengthy trials with another hostile, racist judge, who held both Flint and I in contempt and who maneuvered a verdict for Burge, we obtained a reversal in the Seventh Circuit and eventually got a summary judgment from a judge similar to Grady and a settlement of 19.8 million. Again it was a very lengthy, hard-earned legal victory against publicly funded attorneys. The exposures and our organizing to publicize them eventually led to Burge getting fired. Many people on death row had their convictions reversed, and our lawsuit played a large role in Governor Ryan’s pardoning or commuting to life everyone on Illinois death row in January 2003. Flint and PLO continued seeking compensation for Burge’s victims and in 2008 announced a 19.8 million-dollar settlement for some of them. In October 2008 Burge was indicted for the federal crimes of perjury and obstructing justice. A jury found him guilty on June 28, 2010.

I now live in New Mexico, having left Chicago in 2001. Leaving was not easy. I spent the major part of my adult life there. It’s still my city. But life in the shadow of Taos Mountain was different, spectacularly beautiful, muse to lofty thought. Yet the beauty here also makes me remember the cold gray of Chicago, the El train rumbling close to the apartments where I lived, and driving down Lakeshore Drive looking up at the skyscrapers and catching glimpses of the gray-green lake with whitecaps on my way to the Loop. Half my years in New Mexico have been spent writing about Fred Hampton. My memory of him and our pursuit of his killers remain the defining points of my life.

Some of us are born with courage. Others, like me, need models to help us stand up. I would like to think I picked up some of Fred’s daring, determination, and commitment, as many others did. After Mariel and I moved to Taos, we learned that former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld had several estates here and frequently visited. She and I, with help from local activists, formed the Action Coalition of Taos (ACT). We organized a march and demonstration of three thousand people, the largest in northern New Mexico history, to protest the Iraq War. We chanted and marched to Rumsfeld’s house. There, at sixty years old, I stood precariously perched on his fencepost, my ankles held by friends. Self-conscious after all these years, I wondered what I was doing there. Then I flashed back to Fred speaking out at the church and remembered his words, “If you don’t struggle, you don’t deserve to win.” Reenergized, I declared Rumsfeld “a war criminal for waging aggressive war, the same crime we prosecuted and executed Nazis for at Nuremberg. The crowd repeated, “Rumsfeld’s a war criminal.” A charge that has been repeated often since. It is the moment I am most proud of in Taos.

Like others who heard Malcolm X, Dr. King, and Fred Hampton speak in the 1960s, I learned that fighting injustice and inequality is the struggle of our lives, and perseverance in this struggle is what makes our lives valuable.

In 2006 the black aldermen and alderwomen on Chicago’s City Council introduced a resolution to name the block of Monroe Street where the raid occurred Fred Hampton Way. The proposal was about to be approved when the Fraternal Order of Police objected. A bitter fight ensued between black and white aldermen, and the resolution was defeated. Mayor Richard M. Daley refused to take a position.

The conflict in city council demonstrated how strongly Chicagoans are still divided over the killing of Fred Hampton. By contrast, the suburb of Maywood has continued to operate the Fred Hampton Memorial Pool for more than thirty-five years. In 2007 a bronze statue of Fred was unveiled outside its gates in a ceremony presided over by local officials. Many of the people who knew Fred and protested his murder back in 1969 were present and spoke. Flint was one of them.

“I’m glad the pool and his statue are in Maywood. This is where Fred lived,” Iberia told me when I visited her in 2008. Francis had just passed away. “I didn’t want the place where Fred was killed named after him, anyway. It made me sad.”

It was also sad visiting the Hampton home without Francis there, even though the collard greens, sweet potatoes, and cornbread were as good as ever.

“Fred’s son came by the other day,” Iberia told me, thankful, but regretting that she and Francis had had little contact with their grandson in the past ten years. Recently, Fred Hampton Jr. has been working closely with Aaron Patterson, one of Burge’s torture victims, and speaking out against the still unpunished torture by Chicago police. He is chairman of the Prisoners of Conscience Committee, in which his mother, Akua, is also active.

“Are you going down to Haynesville for Mother’s Day this year?” I asked Iberia.

“I’m gonna try,” she said. I knew she’d make it.

A few minutes later, I stood up to leave. We hugged, and I started toward the door, but there was a question I had to ask her.

“After all these years, what do you think our lawsuit proved?”

Without hesitation Iberia replied, “They got away with murder.”