Abayomi Azikiwe, Pan-African News Wire Editor, speaking at the Central United Methodist Church in Detroit at an anti-war rally on March 15, 2008. PANW articles have been published in many newspapers and websites around the world. (Photo: Rudy Simons).
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos
FBI continues Cointelpro with the assassination of Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah
By Abayomi Azikiwe
Editor, Pan-African News Wire
December 4 marked the 40th anniversary of the targeted assassinations of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, two leading members of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party. These young revolutionary activists were killed in a Panther residence on Chicago’s west side in a neighborhood where the organization ran free breakfast programs and was in the process of establishing a free medical clinic.
Hampton was 21 when he was killed in his apartment while sleeping. Clark was 22 and was visiting Chicago from Peoria where he had been an activist with the organization. Despite their youth, both Hampton and Clark had been organizers for several years. Hampton had worked with the NAACP Youth Council in Maywood, a suburb outside Chicago. Clark had also worked with the NAACP in Peoria where they sought to educate and mobilize young people to fight segregation and racism.
During 1969, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had identified the
Black Panther Party for liquidation. Hundreds of Panther leaders and
cadres were arrested on trumped-up charges. Several were killed,
including Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and John Huggins, who died as a result of a FBI program to foment tensions between the BPP and the US organization in Los Angeles.
Other Panthers had been driven underground and into exile such as
Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver, who eventually took refuge in Algeria
where they established the International Section of the BPP in 1969.
Corporate media accounts of the BPP sought to portray the organization as violent and bent on inflicting harm on whites in general and the police in particular.
The Black Panther Party grew out of the civil rights and black power
struggles that had their origins in the southern, western and northern
sections of the United States. In Alabama in 1965-66, the Lowndes
County Freedom Organization utilized the black panther symbol to build an independent political organization in the state. By early 1966,
other areas of Alabama had set up Panther organizations and these
efforts entailed the armed self-defense of African-Americans against
the racist attacks leveled against them by the Ku Klux Klan and
law-enforcement agents.
Stokely Carmichael, (aka Kwame Ture), Willie Ricks, (aka Mukasa Dada) and H. Rap Brown (aka Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin), were leading organizers for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committtee (SNCC) which built the initial black panther organizations in Alabama. After the cry for “Black Power” gained national attention in the summer of 1966, several groups around the country began to form Black Panther organizations.
In California, there were at least three different Black Panther
organizations in both the southern and northern areas of the state. In
October 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, along with a few other young men such Bobby Hutton and Elbert Howard, formed the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Eventually this grouping became known as the Black Panther Party and would open approximately 40 chapters of the organization throughout the United States and the International Section in Algiers.
In 1969 Fred Hampton had gained a national reputation for his
organizing efforts in Chicago. He had joined the Black Panther Party
in 1968 and quickly rose through the ranks to become Deputy Chairman of the Illinois chapter. He soon became a target of the police and the FBI for neutralization.
In early 1969 Hampton was falsely accused of robbing an ice cream
truck. He was convicted and sent to state prison in Menard, Illinois.
He was released in August 1969 on appeal and continued his organizing work.
Hampton was instrumental in forming alliances between the Panthers and youth organizations such as the Disciples on the west side. He would later form coalitions with the Young Lords Organization, a youth group of Puerto Ricans who sought to build a revolutionary movement in Chicago and New York.
In addition, he worked with organizations from the Chicano community as well as whites from Appalachia who had formed a group called the Young Patriots. Hampton worked with other leftists from the student movement including members of the Students for a Democratic Society.
During the Fall of 1969 the Chicago 8 conspiracy trial began where
Bobby Seale, the BPP chairman, was a co-defendant along with seven other members of anti-war, peace and student groups who were charged with plotting to disrupt the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. However, Seale was attacked by presiding Judge Julius Hoffman who denied him the right to represent himself in the absence of his attorney Charles Gerry. Hoffman ordered Seale bound and gagged. He was eventually removed from the trial and thrown into prison.
The Black Panther Party in Chicago was attacked on numerous occasions by the police during 1969. In one armed confrontation at their office, five police officers were wounded along with three Panthers in the gun battle. On November 13, 1969, former Panther Spurgeon “Jake” Winters was killed in a shoot out with the police where three officers were killed. Hampton eulogized Winters as a fallen comrade.
After the deaths of the three Chicago police officers in November, FBI
and police efforts intensified against the Illinois chapter. FBI
Special Agent in Charge (SAC) Marlin Johnson had recruited William
O’Neal, a petty thief who had been arrested for taking a stolen car
across state lines, to infiltrate the Panthers.
O’Neal engaged in agent-provocateur behavior inside the organization. He was reported to have built an electric chair to torture informants, when he himself was a snitch for the FBI. O’Neal drafted a floor plan of the Monroe street apartment where Hampton and other Panthers lived and turned it over to the FBI.
The FBI did not carry out the deadly raid but utilized Illinois
State’s Attorney Edward V. Hanrahan who had political aspiration to
eventually become governor of the state. Hanrahan recruited 14 Chicago police officers who conducted the raid. Prior to the raid, O’Neal drugged the occupants of the apartment so they would be unable to defend the residence against the police as the Panthers had done before at their offices on the west side.
When the police conducted the raid at 4:45 a.m., they killed both Fred
Hampton and Mark Clark. Four other Panthers and one supporter were wounded in the raid. The people wounded were Ronald ‘Doc’ Satchell, Verlina Brewer, Brenda ‘China Doll’ Harris and Blair Anderson.
Louis Truelock and Harold Bell were brutally beaten after they were
taken to jail after the raid. Deborah Johnson, later known as Akua
Njeri, was eight months pregnant with Fred Hampton’s child. The seven survivors of the raid were falsely charged with numerous felonies including attempted murder.
Even though the charges against the survivors were eventually dropped, the coroner’s inquest reached a verdict of “justifiable homicide.” A federal inquiry admitted that the raid was botched and resulted unnecessarily in the deaths of two people, however there were no criminal charges filed against the police.
A civil suit filed by the survivors, which went on for over a decade,
led to an out of court settlement. However, no one was ever found
criminally liable by the courts for the murder of Hampton and Clark or
the wounding and false attempted prosecution of the others present in the apartment on December 4, 1969.
Lessons for Today
In the present period U.S. imperialism is involved in two major wars
in Central Asia (Afghanistan and Pakistan) and Iraq. In the aftermath
of the attacks on September 11, 2001, Muslims, Arabs, Africans and
African-Americans have been subjected to targeted assassinations,
false imprisonment and torture.
Recently outside Detroit in Dearborn, a leading African-American
Muslim leader, Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah, was gunned down by the FBI. The FBI’s story has changed since the assassination of Imam Abdullah and the arrest and attempted frame-up of 10 members of his family and mosque.
The Michigan Emergency Committee Against War & Injustice (MECAWI) has held two demonstrations demanding justice for Imam Abdullah and the dropping of the charges against the Detroit 10. On December 12, the Detroit branch of Workers World will hold a public forum entitled “Police Violence and the Capitalist State”, where the nature of law-enforcement attacks on the working class and the oppressed will be examined from a historical and political perspective.
This event is being held in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the murder of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark as well as to build support for the Detroit 10.
There was also a tribute to Fred Hampton and Mark Clark held in
Chicago during the weekend of December 4-6. Attorney Jeff Haas, who worked as a lawyer for the Panthers during the time period as well as representing the survivors of the December 4, 1969 raid in fighting the criminal prosecutions and launching the civil suit against the government, has recently published a book on the assassination of Fred Hampton.
Haas as well as survivors of the December 4, 1969 raid spoke at the
public tribute held in Chicago. Haas was interviewed about his book on the Democracy NOW! television program in early December.
In New York, Workers World is holding a public forum on December 11 in honor of Hampton and Clark and their contributions to the struggle against national oppression and state repression.
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