December 4th, 1969.
Akua Njeri was 19 years old,
and sleeping next to her fiancée:
the Illinois Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton.
The next thing I remember was someone in our room
shaking Chairman Fred. "Chairman, Chairman, wake up, wake up."
Plaster was flying off the wall.
You could smell the cordite from the gunshot.
If you've ever been under gunfire, five minutes is five hours.
To you, it seems like forever.
The shooting started back again.
Then another voice unfamiliar to me said:
I knew they were talking about Chairman Fred.
Fred Hampton was murdered by his government.
But before that,
he was a leader in a movement practicing a new kind of activism.
A movement targeted because of its power to unite people.
"Marking 1964 as a historic year in race relations,
on July 2, President Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act."
In the 1960s, racial progress in the US was at a turning point.
Activists won major civil rights victories, and the era of Jim Crow laws came to an end.
But at the end of the decade,
there were still deep social and economic gaps for Black people across the country.
Black Americans continued to face high poverty,
poor housing,
and unemployment,
and they still had little to no political representation.
These disparities, and an increase in brutal police violence,
led to uprisings across the country.
Many young Black activists grew frustrated
that the changes they'd hoped for hadn't come.
After the police killing of an unarmed Black teen in San Francisco,
two activists in Oakland, California,
Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, founded what was initially called
the Black Panther Party for Self Defense.
Newton had studied law,
and knew it was legal to carry arms in California, as long as they were not concealed.
The Panthers began to patrol their communities.
As the movement grew, several highly-publicized confrontations with police
would bring about mainstream awareness of the Black Panther Party.
The allegations in these confrontations were serious.
But the public accounts of them were typically one-sided,
and shaped largely by police.
Media coverage depicted party members as a caricature of Black militancy.
The Black Panther Party was portrayed as a marauding gang.
They say our goal was to kill all the white people.
In reality, the Panthers did call for radical change.
What they were hoping for was a revolution.
A revolution to overthrow the capitalist enterprise.
But what they called revolution might not actually sound so radical today.
They focused on socialism as a way of solving economic means.
They looked to places like Canada, which always had a democratic political system,
but the economic system has always been socialism.
So they wanted a democratic socialist country here in the United States,
which they saw as a more equitable, more humane system.
They released a "Ten Point Plan" for broad social reform,
that called for an end to police brutality,
and for Black employment,
housing,
education, and freedom from prisons and jails.
Chapters began forming across the country.
They started to implement social programs,
which they called "survival programs."
The Panthers would say, put that theory into practice.
If you really want to change minds, and you really want to meet the people where they are,
you have to give them the services which they need.
The programs included food and clothing drives,
free health clinics,
and sickle cell disease testing,
and were funded largely by volunteers and donations from businesses.
One of their biggest programs was a free breakfast for children initiative.
Here we are, living in 1966, '67, it's the most wealthy nation in the world.
And kids were going to school hungry,
especially in the African American communities.
So one of the first community service programs was free breakfast for school children.
And all the children had to do was come.
It was during this time
that Akua Njeri, then known as Deborah Johnson,
met Fred Hampton.
I was a student at Wright City College
and Chairman Fred had come up to the school to speak.
And he said, "in the breakfast program,
we're feeding over 3,000 children a week.
We're serious about making power to the people a reality,
we're not just sitting up here jaw jabbin and talking shit.
You know, we're about work."
And I said, damn, he's serious about this business.
Fred Hampton grew up in Maywood, Illinois,
just west of downtown Chicago.
He became president of his local NAACP Youth Council in 1967,
at 19 years old.
Shortly after, he was recruited by a founder of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party.
"You can jail a revolutionary,
but you can't jail a revolution."
Because of his charismatic skills,
he quickly rises to the top of the crop.
Here he is at age 21,
building and leading the Illinois chapter of Black Panther Party.
Soon after they met, Njeri and Hampton became a couple.
Anybody that has met him or heard him speak,
they say he wasn't bullshit.
He was for real.
Chicago in particular was a place where the party's ideals especially resonated.
It was then the second largest American city,
and due to decades of discriminatory policies,
also one of the most segregated.
Chicago's mayor at the time, Richard J. Daley, opposed neighborhood integration.
And in the 1950s, the city had begun to redevelop certain neighborhoods,
pushing low income residents out, and into densely packed, high-rise public housing
in already overcrowded neighborhoods.
Black people were pushed primarily to the south and west side of Chicago.
A large Puerto Rican population was here, in Lincoln Park.
And poor white people were concentrated here, in Uptown.
These groups all faced similar problems.
They all had dilapidated schools.
They all had dilapidated homes.
They were all being drafted into Vietnam.
Very few of those communities had health care.
In 1969, Hampton led the Panthers towards an unexpected alliance:
a coalition of activists, working across racial lines,
against a corrupt city government that threatened their communities.
What they had in common was their poverty.
So they were building a revolution based on class solidarity that transcends race.
That they all had the same hell to pay.
Hampton named the group: the Rainbow Coalition.
It included the Black Panthers,
a Puerto Rican group called the Young Lords,
and a group called the Young Patriots,
made up of largely poor white migrants from Appalachia,
who had moved to Chicago seeking economic opportunity.
"We don't hate the white people, we hate the oppressor,
whether we be white, Black, brown or yellow."
I don't mean sing Kumbaya and make a quilt.
I'm talking about bringing them together
on common things they can unite on.
Not everything, but who could say the children do not deserve to have a healthy meal?
Hampton and other Panthers helped the Young Lords and Young Patriots
launch their own social programs.
They organized protests together.
And it was working.
Members were traveling across the country to organize Rainbow Coalition chapters.
Particularly where Black Panther chapters were,
but also in these rural white communities as well,
to bring the revolution to bear.
This blows people's minds.
These people are not supposed to get along,
but here they are operating as brothers of the struggle,
as revolutionaries against the capitalist structure.
And that was the threat.
To the state, at the local level, but also at the national level.
In 1968, the FBI had sent around this internal memo.
It outlined goals:
to "prevent the coalition of militant Black nationalist groups"
and "prevent the rise of a messiah,"
"who could unify and electrify the militant Black nationalist movement."
It wasn't written about Hampton specifically.
But by 1969,
Chairman Fred Hampton was the one that fit the bill.
Revolution was in the air.
And the ways in which the Panthers were able to transcend those racial lines,
especially the charismatic leadership of one like Fred Hampton,
they saw him as a greater threat.
A greater threat even than Martin Luther King or Malcolm X ever was.
In one FBI memo about the Black Panthers' breakfast program,
they claimed the real purpose was to "poison minds" with "anti-white propaganda"
and "indoctrinate youngsters in hate and violence."
The FBI, under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover,
had deemed the Black Panther Party,
as the number one threat to the internal security of this country.
The FBI operated a counterintelligence program,
called COINTELPRO.
It was a program that targeted dissident political groups in the US.
Their methods typically went outside the law.
They were using tactics such as
assassination,
discrediting,
false narratives.
They were falsely putting people in prison and exile,
which were all illegal.
Several Black Panthers were killed or imprisoned,
including the party co-founders.
In Chicago, the party was also targeted by Mayor Daley and the Chicago Police.
Our office was burned down at least three times.
People would disappear.
You'd never see their bodies again.
Hampton, a rising star at just 21 years old,
knew he was a target, too.
He'd been arrested in 1968 for
allegedly robbing an ice cream truck
and handing out $71 of ice cream.
In 1969, he was sentenced to two to five years in prison.
He appealed, and was released on bond,
but lost the appeal.
He'd have to return to prison by December 6th.
"Free Fred Hampton, free Fred Hampton..."
On December 4th around 4 am,
14 Chicago police officers arrived outside Hampton's apartment
on Chicago's West Side.
Inside, Hampton, Njeri, and seven other Panthers
were asleep.
I was very pregnant.
And the first thing I remember
was Chairman Fred had fell asleep while talking on the phone.
The next thing I remember
was someone in our room
shaking the chairman.
Chairman, chairman, chairman, wake up, wake up.
The pigs are vamping.
And I'm seeing Chairman Fred look up and then he laid his head back down real slow.
Officers kicked open the door
and shot Mark Clark,
a visitor from another party chapter.
They shot a sleeping 18-year-old named Brenda Harris.
Then, they shot in the direction of Hampton's bed.
I had moved over on top of Chairman Fred
because they were shooting into our mattress.
The person that had come into the room kept shouting,
Stop shooting, stop shooting.
We have a pregnant sister in here.
Eventually, the shooting stopped.
Njeri was forced into the kitchen,
when she heard another voice.
Someone said, he's barely alive,
he'll barely make it.
I assume they were talking about Chairman Fred.
The pig said, he's good and dead now.
As they took me out and jammed a revolver to my stomach,
as I was handcuffed behind my back,
I didn't look towards our bedroom because I didn't know what I would see,
or how I would respond.
The police fired nearly 100 shots.
Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were dead.
The seven surviving Panthers were arrested.
And police smiled as they removed Hampton's body from the scene.
The Chicago Police and the state's attorney's office
quickly shaped the narrative
to call it a gun fight, a battle, and a shoot-out.
"Officers involved in the raid testified they were fired on from four different rooms in the apartment by shotgun."
"Before I could get past the threshold,
there were three shots fired from the rear bedroom."
They played back a story that you could not even fathom.
They gave a fictional account of what happened, again vilifying the Black Panther Party.
"Yes sir, we saw the shots coming out of the two bedrooms."
"This attack by the Black Panthers on the police
clearly demonstrates the true character of the Black Panther Party."
But experts and lawyers hired by the Panthers,
along with other journalists, inspected the crime scene.
The Panthers even opened the apartment so that anyone could examine it.
And a drastically different picture emerged:
it was clear that the police had fired unprovoked.
Of the nearly 100 shots fired,
only one possible shot could have come from a Panther's gun,
likely from Mark Clark at the front door.
The bullet holes that the police said came from Black Panthers,
were nail heads.
Later, it also emerged that the FBI had assisted Chicago Police with the raid.
The FBI had an informant within the Black Panther Party,
named William O'Neal,
who had become chief of security and Hampton's bodyguard.
O'Neal had provided the FBI with a hand drawn floor plan of the apartment,
which the FBI then gave to Chicago Police.
And evidence strongly suggests that before the raid,
O'Neal had drugged Hampton.
In the years after Hampton's assassination,
the police and the FBI continued to imprison dozens of party members across the country.
The official Black Panther Party would continue to exist until 1982.
But membership decreased dramatically
and it would never be the same.
Fred Hampton wanted revolution.
Those in power wanted to destroy him, and what he stood for.
But they weren't totally successful.
Chairman Fred lives, you know what I'm saying?
Through the military assault,
through the destruction of the party as an organization itself,
you know, by the state.
The legacy of the party is still here.
Today, the work of Fred Hampton is alive
through some of the same programs that marked him as a threat.
Many of the programs that the Panthers created
are now staples of our society.
We didn't have free breakfast in schools prior to the Black Panther Party's free breakfast program.
Those free clinics. Almost every major college campus got a free legal aid clinic.
The ways in which sickle cell testing is now respected
as a disease by the CDC and others.
None of that stuff existed before the party.
I think that's revolutionary.
The history of the Black Panther Party, as going toe to toe with this government,
will never die.
Never die.
Thanks for watching this video.
If you want to learn more about Fred Hampton,
there's an amazing 1971 documentary
called "The Murder of Fred Hampton,"
available to stream via the Chicago Film Archives at the link in the description.
They also have a film called American Revolution II,
which documents the work of the Rainbow Coalition in action,
and the many activists who helped to spearhead the movement.
Thanks again for watching our piece
and stay tuned for one more episode in this season of Missing Chapter.