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David GespassBook Review: TheAssassination ofFred HamptonThe Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the ChicagoPolice Murdered a Black Panther by Jeffrey Haas; Chicago:Lawrence Hill Books, 2009. 424 pages.Fred Hampton was twenty-one years old in 1969, but already a leader inhis Chicago community. At the time of his death, he was chairman of theIllinois Black Panther Party and an organizer of the Panthers’ free lunchprogram and medical clinic. He taught political education classes daily andhad negotiated a non-aggression pact among Chicago’s street gangs. His accomplishments,his oratorical gifts and his implacable hatred of exploitationand oppression made him a target of the FBI’s counter-intelligence program(COINTELPRO), which did far more than gather intelligence. It utilizedagents provocateurs to foment antagonism and to disrupt the activities ofradicals and leftists. When those efforts failed, it engaged in political assassinations,including that of Fred Hampton, murdered while he slept —likelyhaving been drugged—by the FBI and Chicago police agents who broke inhis door, shot him and Mark Clark, and then claimed they were defendingthemselves in a shootout. Their claims began to fall apart almost immediately,as supporters got to his apartment before evidence had been removed anddemonstrated, among other things, that virtually all the bullet holes that thestate’s attorney claimed proved the police were shot at were caused by shotsfired into the apartment from outside. Regardless, no police agent was everprosecuted criminally for the killings. The only measure of justice for thefamilies of Hampton and Clark came, ten years later, from a law suit initiatedby Chicago’s newly-formed People’s Law Office. Jeff Haas, one of the PLO’sfounders, tells the story in his book, “The Assassination of Fred Hampton:How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther.”I read Jeff’s account in November 2009, just after Imam Luqman AmeenAbdullah was killed in an FBI raid. So, while I am old enough to recall FredHampton’s death, Jeff’s account, riveting as it is, did not strike me simply asa story from a bygone era where J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was exempt from thescrutiny of civilization and free to trample on the rights of citizens. Rather,___________________David Gespass practices law in Birmingham, Alabama and is president of the NationalLawyers Guild. He can be reached at ThePasss@aol.com.