by Joshua Bloom
Over the next two weeks, discussions deteriorated, and the Chicago office of the FBI suggested to headquarters that the time was right to provoke the Rangers to take violent action by sending a forged letter to Fort:
Brother Jeff:
I’ve spent some time with some Panther friends on the west side lately and I know what’s been going on. The brothers that run the Panthers blame you for blocking their thing and there’s supposed to be a hit out for you. I’m not a Panther, or a Ranger, just black. From what I see these Panthers are out for themselves not black people. I think you ought to know what they’re up to, I know what I’d do if I was you. You might hear from me again.
[signed:] A black brother you don’t know.7
The FBI field office suggested sending the letter to Fort rather than Hampton because Fort was more likely to respond with violence: “It is believed the above may intensify the degree of animosity between the two groups and occasion Fort to take retaliatory action which could disrupt the [Black Panther Party] or lead to reprisals against its leadership. Consideration has been given to a similar letter to the [Party] alleging a Ranger plot against the [Black Panther Party] leadership; however, it is not felt this would be productive principally because the [Party] at present is not believed as violence prone as the Rangers to whom violent type activity—shooting and the like—is second nature.”8 J. Edgar Hoover approved the proposal, and the field office sent the letter to Fort.9
The FBI’s effort may have helped prevent a merger between the Panthers and the Rangers, but it did not precipitate widespread violence between the groups. Hampton and Fort figured out that the government was attempting to create a deadly conflict between them and decided not to take the bait.10
ICE CREAM
In early 1969, Fred Hampton initiated the Chicago Panthers’ first free food distribution. Hampton imagined himself a modern-day Robin Hood and “appropriated” an ice cream truck in Maywood, passing out more than four hundred ice cream bars—worth a total of seventy-one dollars—to neighborhood children. The Maywood police apparently did not appreciate his sense of justice and arrested him on charges of robbery and assault.11
In the weeks that followed, Hampton and the Chicago Panthers organized their first official program, a Free Breakfast for Children Program, which opened on April 1, 1969. Within two weeks, the Panthers had fed more than eleven hundred grade-school children, drawing new community support and also making it hard to ignore the political dimensions of Hampton’s case.12 During his trial that April, Hampton appeared on a local television show publicizing the free breakfast program, and appealing for public support for the Panthers.13
On April 9, 1969, Hampton was convicted of robbery and assault. Maywood Police Chief Kellough attempted to prevent the court from releasing Hampton on bail pending sentencing. But in part due to the efforts of Hampton’s civil rights attorney, Jean Williams, Hampton was released on $2,000 bail.14 Williams planned to appeal Hampton’s conviction on the grounds that newspaper articles about the Panthers during the trial had prejudiced the jury.15
Following the ice cream trial and the attention it brought, Hampton called the Chicago Panthers’ first press conference, in which he challenged the legitimacy of the state, asserting a higher morality underlying the Panthers’ revolutionary program and calling on people to mobilize to support the Panthers against state repression. Hampton argued that the Black Panther Party, not the government, acted in the interests of the people: “Our case should be taken to the people and the people will not tolerate any oppressive system or force that attempts to jail the very people who feed their hungry children.” Hampton announced that the Chicago Panthers intended to establish a community patrol of police, open liberation schools throughout the city, and set up free health clinics. “We’re being harassed constantly by the pigs, and they’re arresting us as fast as they can on any kind of charge, such as traffic violations, smoking on buses, carrying concealed weapons, just anything,” Hampton explained. “But no matter how many of us they try to lock up, force underground or even kill, the vanguard of the people’s revolution, the Black Panther Party will still go on. We are servants of the people, and any people who launch attacks against the servants of the people are enemies of the people.”16
The Chicago Panthers sought to mobilize a broad New Left alliance in support of Hampton. While Hampton was out on bail, they held a mock court with nonblack allies enacting the trial of Fred Hampton as an educational exercise. Hampton told the New Leftists, “We gonna fight racism not with racism, but with solidarity. We not gonna fight capitalism with Black capitalism, but we gonna fight it with socialism. We not gonna fight reactionary pigs . . . with any reaction on our part. We gonna fight their reaction when all of us get together and have an international proletarian revolution.”17
The fledgling Chicago Panthers seized the attention of the Party’s national leaders. When Panther chairman Bobby Seale visited Chicago, he joined Hampton and Rush in a church mobilization and spoke to an audience of blacks of various classes and New Leftists of various hues, explaining the revolutionary cross-race logic of Hampton’s action: “I’m so thirsty for revolution. I’m so crazy about the people. We’re going to stand together. We’re going to have a Black Army, a Mexican American Army, an alliance in solidarity with progressive Whites, All of us. And we’re going to march on this pig power structure. And we’re going to say: ‘Stick ’em up motherfucker. We come for what’s ours.’”18
On Monday May 26, with Illinois state attorney Edward V. Hanrahan publicly pressuring the judge, Fred Hampton was sentenced to two to five years in prison for robbery and assault. In a joint press conference at the Chicago Panther headquarters, Robert L. Lucas, national director of the Black Liberation Alliance and a former leader of the Congress of Racial Equality, condemned the sentence, noting that Hampton’s breakfast for children program fed three thousand children throughout Chicago, making Hampton a threat to Mayor Daley and the political establishment. “This type of program poses a devastating threat to the Daley political machine and the black lackeys who front for him in the city’s wards.”19
As late as March 1969, the Chicago Panther chapter was still small and garnered little local influence or national attention. While Rush and Hampton teamed up in June 1968, the Black Panther national office did not officially recognize the chapter until October, and the first Chicago office was not opened until November 1, 1968.20 There was no coverage of the Chicago Panthers in the Black Panthers’ own newspaper until May 1969.21 But as the state attempted to repress the Chicago Panthers in the spring of 1969, their membership grew, and they gathered increasing attention from the national office, local blacks, and New Left allies.
On April 9, the same day that Fred Hampton was convicted of robbing an ice cream truck, as Bobby Seale and the rest of the Chicago Eight were arraigned in Chicago on conspiracy charges for their part in the rebellion at the Democratic Convention, the Black Panthers joined with the Students for a Democratic Society to organize a rally in downtown Chicago. Speaking to the more than five hundred people gathered at the rally, the Panthers proclaimed their position as the “vanguard of the revolutionary struggle today.” Seale and Hampton jointly spoke of plans for a massive organizing drive in Chicago that summer in preparation for Seale’s trial in September.22
Federal efforts to repress the Chicago Panthers continued. In early April, undercover Chicago police approached Panthers and offered to sell them illegal submachine guns. On April 11, in what the New Left Guardian called a clear case of “provocation and entrapment,” seventy-nine federal agents and Chicago police, in a raid using hidden flood-lights for their public relations effect, arrested three Panthers—Merrill Harvey, Michael White, and Field Secretary Nathaniel Junior—for the attempted purchase of automatic weapons. The court set bails ranging from $65,000 to $75,000 for each of the three Panthers. The same court had released two white men in January on only $4,000 bail for selling similar weapons, presumably a greater of
fense.23
By the end of May, advancing their community programs and alliance politics in the face of overt repression, the Panthers were building a strong organization in Chicago. Energetic activists in their late teens and early twenties led many of the initiatives. Twenty-year-old Panther Barbara Sankey, who grew up on the West Side of Chicago and had been drawn to the Panthers by the activities surrounding Huey’s trial, directed the Free Breakfast for Children Program. The program served about five hundred breakfasts to children every week at three Chicago sites. One meat company gave the Panthers fifty pounds of sausage every week, and the Joe Lewis Milk Co. donated five hundred cartons of milk to the program every week.
Twenty-year-old Billy Brooks, who also grew up on Chicago’s West Side, directed the “internal education cadre” of fifteen Panthers. Each member was required to closely read a dozen books—six by or about Mao Zedong, three by or about Malcolm X, and one each by Huey Newton, Frantz Fanon, and Karl Marx. In turn, each member had to help other Panther members understand these texts. The reading list reflected the Panthers’ increasingly explicit embrace of Marxist, and especially Maoist, theory and ideology.
Deputy Minister of Information Rufus “Chaka” Walls, with a staff of twenty Panthers, was in charge of distributing the Black Panther. Walls, at twenty-eight, was older than most Panthers and was president of the Black Student Association at a local community college. By late May, the Chicago chapter was selling about eight thousand copies of the newspaper per week and was planning to increase sales to fifteen thousand copies a week. Chicago Deputy Minister of Health Ronald Satchel, who grew up in a middle-class family and had recently dropped out of the University of Illinois, was only eighteen. He and a group of about ten Panthers were trying to organize a medical clinic, but they were having a hard time getting doctors to donate their time. Communications Secretary Ann Campbell—with a staff of three—served as the office manager, oversaw communications within the chapter and reports to the national office, and handled the mail. Yvonne King, in her early twenties and new to Chicago, initially organized black workers in her position as deputy minister of labor and then took on the role of field secretary, overseeing community programs.24
The two-story Chicago Black Panther office at 2350 West Madison Street was a formidable presence in the community. Under three large bay windows on the second floor, a sign with large hand-painted black lettering on a white background read “ILL. CHAPTER BLACK PANTHER PARTY.” The sign was bookended on the left and right by life-size mirror images of a black panther springing into action in defense of the office and against any attackers. Beneath the sign hung seven posters of the Panthers’ most famous and powerful images: Huey Newton and Bobby Seale armed in defense of the original Panther office, Eldridge Cleaver speaking, Malcolm X, an Emory Douglas painting of Bobby Hutton, and Huey on the wicker throne.25
RAIDS
As the Chicago Panthers grew in number and political strength, state efforts to repress them escalated. At about 5:30 in the morning on Wednesday June 4, the FBI raided the Chicago Black Panther headquarters on Madison Street. Agents, armed with machine guns, rifles, and handguns, used sledgehammers to break down the two steel doors to the second-floor office. Without presenting search warrants, they proceeded to sack the office and arrest the eight Panthers present. The FBI agents told the press they had found several guns and ammunition in the office, but the weapons were not automatic and did not violate any federal regulation. Bobby Rush held a press conference later in the day decrying “illegal” FBI tactics; the Panthers, he said, planned to press charges. Rush said the FBI agents left the office in complete disarray, creating more than $20,000 in property damage, including destroying two desks and assorted office equipment and confiscating a safe containing $3,000, which the Panthers planned to use to equip a health clinic they hoped to open in July. The agents also took cereal meant for the free breakfast program. Rush described the raid as part of a concerted national effort by the FBI to crush the Panthers, citing similar raids in Detroit, New York, Connecticut, San Francisco, Indianapolis, Des Moines, and Denver. Michael Klonsky, area leader of the Students for a Democratic Society, joined Rush in the press conference and said that SDS supported the Black Panthers 100 percent in resisting illegal state repression.26
On Tuesday June 10, 1969, a Cook County grand jury indicted Fred Hampton, his bodyguard William O’Neal, and fourteen other leading members of the Illinois Black Panther Party on charges that included kidnapping and unlawful use of a weapon. The state’s attorney, Edward V. Hanrahan, said that the charges stemmed from the kidnapping and torture of a woman who had stored guns for the Panthers and then hidden them. Bail was originally set at $100,000 for most of the accused but $10,000 for O’Neal. Hampton was never convicted on the charges, but William O’Neal was later exposed as a provocateur working secretly for the FBI.27
On the morning of July 14, 1969, Larry Roberson and fellow Panther Grady Moore were selling the Black Panther newspaper when they saw two police officers questioning black patrons about a suspected theft of two baskets of produce from a nearby market. According to the Panthers, the police had lined up more than a dozen people—mostly older black men—against the wall and were harassing them. The police maintained that they were simply investigating a report of stolen produce when Roberson and Moore approached and asked them what they were doing. The officers said that when they told Roberson and Moore to leave, they became belligerent, calling themselves “protectors of the community.” The Panther newspaper reported that Moore and Roberson were not armed, but police told the press that Roberson drew a gun and started shooting at them. Roberson was shot three times by police and taken by ambulance to the county hospital, where he was admitted in good condition. Both Moore and Roberson were arrested on charges of attempted murder. No police officers were wounded.28
Two weeks later, Chicago police raided the Black Panther office a second time. They arrived at 1:15 A.M. on Thursday July 31, following a community rally outside the Black Panther office Wednesday afternoon. Twenty-four police cars shut down Madison Street in front of the Panther office, and the officers attempted to storm the building. Hampton was in jail on the ice cream charges, and no Panther leaders were in the office at the time, but three rank-and-file Panthers—Joseph “Pete” Hynam, Larry White, and Alvin Jeffers, each armed with a hand gun—held off police for thirty-five minutes until they ran out of ammunition. Eventually, police shot through the steel door and made their way upstairs, beating the Panthers with rifle butts, knocking Larry White unconscious and breaking his jaw, badly injuring the others, and arresting them on charges of attempted murder. Then, according to the Panthers, the police used gasoline to burn down the upper half of the Panther office. Video footage documents the charred office and the hundreds of bullet holes riddling the building façade and front door. Police claimed that the Panthers fired first, sniping at passing police cars, and that the fire was caused by tear gas canisters. Panthers reported that people on the street threw bottles and rocks at the police during the incident and later helped with repairs.29
By this point, the Panthers and their allies understood they were under siege and prepared for further raids. Video footage by concerned Panther allies shows more than a dozen rank-and-file members cleaning and readying guns in the Chicago office. In the video, one Panther, a woman, asks various members for their blood types, marking their answers on a clipboard. Another passes out cloth for people to use to cover their mouths and faces in the event of a tear gas attack.30
In the early morning hours of Saturday October 4, police again raided the Chicago Panther headquarters. The raid was in many respects a repeat of the July 31 police raid. Officers’ bullets riddled the front door and walls of the office. The police set the office on fire, smashed equipment, and destroyed stores of food designated for the free breakfast programs. After Panther resistance abated, police arrested six Party members on charges of attempted murder, alleging that they had tried to snipe at pol
ice from the headquarters rooftop. Again, Panthers alleged that the police intentionally set the fire. Neighbors carried water up to the office in buckets to help extinguish the flames. Hampton, from jail, maintained that again police took money intended for the breakfast program.31 National Chief of Staff David Hilliard sought to build support for the Panthers’ community policing initiative, declaring that the raid provided further proof of the need for community control of the police. He said that raids like the one on October 4 in Chicago “will continue and be escalated unless we move to circulate, as soon as possible, the petition for Community Control (decentralization) of police.”32
With the repeated raids and arrests of local Panthers that fall, many black organizations lined up in support of the Panthers. Many believed that such repression posed a threat to all black people: what could be done to the Panthers could be done to them as well. On November 3, a large coalition of black groups united to protest the government treatment of the Black Panther Party. The participating groups included a number of black gangs, including the P. Stone Nation and the Conservative Vice Lords, as well as representatives from other radical black groups, such as the Black Liberation Alliance. The coalition also included black political leaders such as Jesse Jackson, who had closely worked with Martin Luther King Jr. and was the director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Operation Breadbasket. The coordinator of the rally, Reverend C. T. Vivian, another important King ally, told the press, “This is a picture of illegal court systems operating against black men.”33
