by Joshua Bloom
On December 11, Hanrahan delivered to the Chicago Tribune exclusive police photographs of Hampton’s apartment, claiming they proved that the Panthers had initiated the gun battle and that they showed bullet holes where the Panthers had fired at police. But after further investigation, the New York Times reported that many of the photos did not represent what their subtitles claimed. One depicted nail heads in the apartment kitchen doorjamb rather than bullet holes. Another photo that police claimed showed bullet marks on the outside of a bathroom door actually depicted the inside of a bedroom door.71
Hanrahan’s deceit further fueled community outrage. On December 15, a coalition of more than one hundred black community groups calling itself the United Front for Black Community Organizations (but with no apparent involvement of the Black Panthers, who opposed separatist measures), announced a curfew barring whites from black neighborhoods. The curfew announcement read, “Effective immediately, a 6 P.M.-6 A.M. curfew is established for all whites in the black community. No whites will be permitted to enter the black community—for any reason—during those hours and all whites inside the black community must leave by the 6 P.M. deadline.” Reverend C. T. Vivian, leader of the coalition, noted, “In recent days, the forces of power in Chicago have stepped up their campaign to oppress and repress black people. . . . We see these atrocities not as individual or isolated incidents but as a calculated pattern, a conspiracy by the forces of power in this city to crush the black drive toward liberation.”72 Prominent members of the coalition quickly denounced the curfew, saying that they had not been consulted, and the curfew was withdrawn.73
National black political figures condemned the government and praised the Panthers. Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell charged federal officials with conspiring to “exterminate” the Black Panthers.74 Jesse Jackson published a column in the Chicago Daily Defender endorsing the Black Panther explanation that Fred Hampton had been murdered by police while he slept, calling his murder a “crucifixion” and calling on black people to “resurrect” his spirit for liberation.75 Having returned to the United States from exile, radical Robert Williams spoke publicly about the repression of the Black Panthers: “It is not just a campaign against Panthers. It is not a campaign just against the Blacks. It is a campaign against all of those who oppose what is taking place in America today. It is against the resisters, those who resist imperialism, those who resist fascism, those who are non-conformists. . . . What is happening to the Panthers is happening to all of us. . . . I’m proud to return to this country and to find the new spirit that now exists among the Panthers. . . . And I’m happy to join my support.”76
Even moderate national black and political leaders supported the idea of a public investigation. Whitney Young, national executive director of the Urban League, sent a telegram to Attorney General John Mitchell calling for a special investigation of the killing of Hampton and Clark and of the repression of the Black Panther Party nationally.77 Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP, made a similar statement.78 Congressman Edward Koch of New York said at an antiwar rally, “I don’t agree with the goals or methods of the Black Panthers, but civil liberties transcend the issue of the Panthers’ goals.”79
Five black U.S. congressmen—Louis Stokes from Ohio, Charles Diggs from Michigan, Adam Clayton Powell from New York, John Conyers from Michigan, and William Clay from Missouri—toured the apartment with Bobby Rush and held a five-and-a-half-hour public hearing on Chicago’s West Side to hear community concerns about the shootings. Representatives Shirley Chisholm of New York and Augustus Hawkins of California also declared their support. David Hilliard and Charles Garry flew to Chicago to participate. Louis Stokes told reporters that he agreed with the Panthers’ interpretation of the evidence in the apartment: “All the physical evidence appears to be that there was shooting into the apartment but not shooting out. The wall appears to tell the story of what happened here.”80
In explaining the outpouring of black support for the Panthers in the wake of the Hampton and Clark killings, the New York Times quoted one protestor: “A well-dressed Negro mother summed up the feeling of the black community here as she walked with her family to a packed rally in a church a few days after the shootings. ‘They came in and killed Fred Hampton,’ she said in a soft, very even tone. ‘And if they can do it to him, they can do it to any of us.’”81
On December 19, the internal Chicago police investigation found no fault on the part of Hanrahan’s SPU, a finding echoed in a report by the Cook County coroner.82 In response to public pressure, the Justice Department appointed a federal grand jury to investigate the killings of Hampton and Clark.83
On January 6, Bobby Rush informed the press that results of a blood test of Fred Hampton in the independent autopsy revealed a heavy dose of Seconal, a drug that induces sleep. Rush charged that the killing of Hampton was a government conspiracy and that Hampton had been drugged by an FBI infiltrator to facilitate his murder.84 Hampton’s fiancée, Deborah Johnson (Akua Njeri), who was eight months pregnant at the time of his killing and was arrested in the raid, later recounted Hampton’s strange behavior the night of the raid. She said that Hampton never got up from bed during the raid and remained silent. He woke up and slightly lifted his head as guns were being fired but barely moved and never said anything. After the first wave of shooting, police arrested Johnson and pulled her out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. She said she heard a police officer say, “He’s barely alive, he will barely make it.” Then the police started shooting again. She says she heard “a sister” scream. Then a police officer said, “He is good and dead now.”85
Meanwhile, throughout 1970, national mobilizations in support of the Chicago Panthers continued. A number of New Leftists in New York City formed a group called the December 4 Movement to show “solidarity with the Black Panthers.” On March 14, 1970, the group held a rally at Columbia University featuring Abbie Hoffman, French writer Jean Genet, Panthers Afeni Shakur and Zayd Shakur, and Juan Ortiz of the Young Lords. Following the rally, several hundred students marched around campus breaking windows and then took over the university’s business school building. They promised to occupy the building until the university administration agreed to pay reparations to the Black Panther Party.86
On May 8, 1970, the state’s attorney Edward V. Hanrahan dropped all charges against the seven surviving Panthers arrested in the December 4 raid, saying that there was no proof that any of the defendants had fired at police.87 One week later, a federal grand jury issued a 250-page report finding that at least eighty-two bullets had been fired by the SPU officers, and only one shot appeared to have been fired by a Panther.88
After more than a decade of legal wrangling during which the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, the government eventually settled in 1982, agreeing to pay $1.85 million to the estates of Hampton, Clark, and the Panther survivors of the incident, with the federal, county, and city governments agreeing to split the bill.89
Fred Hampton was a revolutionary. The unusual aspect of his case was not that the state killed him—states often kill their enemies with impunity—but rather the broad mobilization in response to his assassination. If not for this support, the Chicago Panthers initially accused of starting the shoot-out and thus being responsible for Hampton’s death would likely have been convicted. The outrageous details of the killing would never have been exposed. But the Chicago Panthers were building support by addressing the needs of many poor Chicago blacks and organizing them politically. While mainstream black political organizations such as the Urban League and SCLC did not support the Black Panther Party’s political practices or its call for revolution, in 1969, they viewed the activities of the Chicago Panthers as an influential effort by young blacks to redress their plight. Despite their differences with the Panthers, the moderate black leaders of these organizations allied with the Party to expose and challenge state repression because they felt threatened by the killing of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. In ot
her cities, nonblacks provided the Panthers’ vital base of allied support.
11
Bobby and Ericka
On January 23, 1969, Ericka Huggins—carrying her three-week-old daughter, Mai—brought the body of her husband, John, to his hometown of New Haven, Connecticut, for burial. John’s parents still lived and worked in New Haven, which was the location of Yale University and a declining industrial city with extreme poverty and a sizable black ghetto. Ericka and Mai moved in with John’s parents.1 In the preceding months, the Panthers had begun organizing a chapter of the Party in Bridgeport, Connecticut, but their plans changed after John Huggins’s funeral. The Black Panther carried Ericka Huggins’s image on the front page, and she became an important national figure. Soon, the Panther focus in Connecticut shifted to New Haven, and the state’s few Panthers gathered around Ericka.
When Warren Kimbro attended John Huggins’s funeral in New Haven on January 24, 1969, he was thirty-five years old and going through a midlife crisis. Frustrated at work and in his marriage, he was greatly impressed with the newly widowed twenty-one-year-old Ericka Huggins. He joined the Black Panther Party and soon became infatuated with her. Kimbro quit his well-paying city job, offered his home for Panther activities, and separated from his wife and children. Ericka Huggins, while wise and exceptionally strong by most accounts, was not only a young widow but also a brand-new mother in need of emotional support. She soon succumbed to Kimbro’s advances.2
Huggins and Kimbro quickly drew about a dozen committed members to the Party and began running the Connecticut Panther chapter out of Kimbro’s house on Orchard Street in New Haven. They offered political education classes, tried to start a breakfast program, regularly made public speeches, and started attracting attention. In one provocative flier, they charged the city with murder for its housing policy: “Wanted for Murder by the people of New Haven for the use of lead paint in already inadequate Housing. We Charge these people: Murderer No #1 Mayor Richard C. Lee, Police Chief James Ahern . . . with these crimes: conspiracy with the intent to commit murder, premeditated murder. We charge all slum land lords with the same crimes.”3
The FBI paid close attention to the New Haven Panthers, tapping their phones and infiltrating their ranks with several undercover informants. In March, FBI Director Hoover fiercely reprimanded the New Haven field office for not producing hard-hitting counterintelligence measures for dealing with the Panthers there: “To date you have submitted no concrete recommendations under this program concerning the Black Panther Party, despite the fact this extremely dangerous organization is active in four cities in your Division.”4 In early May, New Haven Police Department wiretaps revealed that Bobby Seale would be speaking at Yale University later that month to raise funds for legal fees. The police passed on this information to the FBI.5
On Saturday May 17, New York Panther George Sams showed up at the New Haven Panther office with Alex Rackley in tow. Rackley was nineteen years old, homeless, desperate, and eager to please. He had joined the Panthers in New York looking for a place to fit in. Sams was a bully. He was short, stocky, unkempt, and usually carried at least two pistols in his brown trench coat. Earlier expelled from the Party for stabbing another Panther in Oakland, Sams was reinstated at the request of Stokely Carmichael, whom he had once served as a bodyguard.6
Sams had shown up in New York earlier that spring as police began arresting most of the Party leadership there in multiple raids. He called himself “Crazy George” and claimed that he was sent “to straighten out” unreliable Party chapters.7 In New York, Sams openly drank and used drugs in violation of Party rules and showed off his .45 caliber pistol. One Party member reported that he had beaten and raped a female Panther when she refused to have sex with him.8
Sams met Alex Rackley in Harlem and “disciplined” him for looking like a “pickaninny,” beating him and ordering him to run around the block. Shortly thereafter, Sams drove Rackley to New Haven. According to New Haven Panther Francis Carter, Sams was the “kiss of death.” When he arrived, Carter observed, “the whole family cohesiveness-camaraderie we were experiencing stopped.”9
When Sams arrived in New Haven, he claimed that he had been sent by the national headquarters to weed out spies. Violent, heavily armed, and scary, he immediately took control of the fledgling New Haven chapter. He charged Rackley with being a spy and set up a kangaroo court to interrogate him. With the help of Warren Kimbro and young new Panther recruit Lonnie McLucas, Sams tied Rackley to a chair and tortured him. The two beat Rackley with a club, twisted coat hangers around his neck, and poured boiling water over him. Sams ordered Ericka Huggins to record the “proceedings” on audiocassette, and the recording captures Rackley desperately screeching for mercy.10
On the evening of May 20, three days after Sams had brought Rackley to New Haven, Sams announced that he would drive Rackley to the bus station and let him go. With Kimbro and McLucas, Sams took Rackley to a wooded swamp in the suburbs. Sams handed Kimbro his .45 and said “Ice him. Orders from National.” Kimbro shot Rackley in the back of the head, killing him. Sams then took the gun back and handed it to McLucas, telling him to finish Rackley off. McLucas shot Rackley in the chest.11
The police and FBI had gathered extensive information on the New Haven Panther headquarters through paid informants and wiretapping. The night of May 20, Kelly Moye, a police informant, called Nick Pastore, the head of the information division of the New Haven police, and warned him that Sams and others were about to transport something important in Sams’s green Buick Riviera. New Haven police chief James Ahern later said that he and his colleagues suspected that the Panthers had kidnapped someone and that the hostage was in transit. Police, however, did nothing to stop Rackley’s torture or murder, later claiming that they did not know he was being tortured and that they had tried to follow the car that carried Rackley to his death, but it had eluded them.12
The next day, police recovered Rackley’s body, and late that night, they conducted raids to arrest Ericka Huggins, Warren Kimbro, Lonnie McLucas, Francis Carter, and four other young female Panthers on murder charges.13 In early August, Sams was arrested in a gun incident that embarrassed the fledgling Panther chapter in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and he was soon extradited to the United States for trial, where he turned state’s evidence.14 Within days, the Justice Department created a special unit with the “purpose of instituting federal prosecution against the [Black Panther Party].”15 On August 19, on the basis of Sams’s testimony, Bobby Seale, chairman of the Black Panther Party, was arrested in Berkeley, California, on capital charges of conspiracy to commit murder for allegedly ordering the killing of Alex Rackley.16 The state made a deal with Kimbro, offering him a light sentence and a return to his middle-class life in exchange for turning state’s evidence and pinning the murder on Panther higher-ups. Kimbro and Sams each served four years and were released.17 Lonnie McLucas maintained the innocence of the Party leaders and was slated to face trial.
Panther field marshal Landon Williams was also in New Haven during Alex Rackley’s torture and murder, and Sams testified that he had been taking orders from Williams and that Williams in turn was taking orders from Black Panther national headquarters. It is clear that Sams directed the gruesome events, and in the end, the state found insufficient evidence to support Sams’s claim that he was following orders from Williams. Williams pled guilty on lesser charges of conspiracy to murder and received a suspended sentence in November 1971.18
Hoping to pin the murder on national Panther leaders Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins, the state prosecuted a long and costly trial in an attempt to convict them. But its efforts failed, and all charges against Seale and Huggins were dismissed.19
The extent of the state’s involvement in setting up Seale and Huggins remains unclear. The FBI has resisted legal requests to release records of wiretaps of the New Haven Panther headquarters, which might reveal that the agency knew about Rackley’s kidnap and torture but did not act to prevent it.20
Even more grave are suggestions that Sams directed the torture and murder of Rackley while on the FBI’s payroll. Sams was the only first-hand witness to name Seale or other national Panther officials in the Rackley case, and authors Churchill and Vander Wall argue that the state based its charges on “material provided by ‘a trusted ten year informant,’” and that this FBI informant was likely Sams.21 Was it a coincidence that Sams showed up in New York as the New York 21 conspiracy broke, just in time to step into the power vacuum left by their arrest? Was it a further coincidence that he drove Rackley to the fledgling New Haven chapter two days before Seale was scheduled to arrive?22
On February 17, 1969, three months before Sams arrived in New Haven with Alex Rackley in tow, William O’Neal—the FBI infiltrator who provided the information used by the Chicago Special Prosecutions Unit in the killing of Hampton and Clark—wrote in the Black Panther that he used “intensive” torture methods to obtain a confession from a rank-and-file Panther, Derek Phemster, and that Phemster was an FBI informant.23 William O’Neal was one of the most valued and highly placed FBI infiltrators in the Black Panther Party, and it is not credible that the FBI would have paid him to torture and expose its other informants. More likely, the FBI directed O’Neal to publish the article to normalize the idea of torturing suspected informants and suggest its efficacy.
When police arrested the Black Panther suspects in New Haven the day after Rackley was murdered, Sams had already left town. But he left behind the tape recording he had made of Rackley’s torture, and police had no trouble locating and confiscating the tape when they arrested the New Haven Panthers.24 After those arrests, Sams traipsed in and out of various Panther offices nationally, with police and FBI raids following close behind. But, as Donald Freed has noted, “As George Sams traveled around the country, spending large sums of money, certain things began to happen to the Panthers. Each city he visited was thereafter subjected to predawn raids by combinations of city, state and federal police. But Sams was never caught; he always managed to leave before the raids were made.”25 The New York Times reported Sams’s unlikely narrow escape from an FBI raid of the Chicago Panther headquarters in June.26 Sams was not arrested until August, when police raided Black Panthers to derail an organizing effort in Halifax, Nova Scotia. In her book on the Black Panther effort in Halifax, Jennifer Smith argues that Sam’s actions in Halifax are hard to explain unless he was seeking to undermine the Party.27
