How the FBI Conspired to Destroy the Black Panther Party

from In These Times:



How the FBI Conspired to Destroy the Black Panther Party
The assassination of BPP leader Fred Hampton 44 years ago was just the beginning.

BY G. Flint Taylor


[font size="1"]Included in the FBI's file on the Black Panther Party was a floor plan of Hampton's apartment specifically identifying the bed where he slept. (People's Law Office)[/font]


On Dec. 4, it will have been 44 years since a select unit of 14 Chicago police officers, under the direction of Cook County State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan, executed a predawn raid on a West Side apartment that left Illinois Black Panther Party (BPP) leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark dead, several other young Panthers wounded and seven raid survivors arrested on bogus attempted murder charges. Though Hanrahan and his men claimed there had been a shootout that morning, physical evidence eventually proved that in reality, the Panthers had only fired a single shot in response to approximately 90 from the police.

In the wake of the raid, Illinois BPP Minister of Defense Bobby Rush stood on the steps of the bullet-riddled BPP apartment and declared that J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were responsible for the raid. At the time, Rush had no hard proof to back up his claims. Over the course of the next eight years, however, activists and lawyers, myself included, would eventually discover the truth: The FBI had, in fact, played a central role in the assassinations, and Hanrahan’s initial lies were only the top layer of what proved to be a massive cover-up.

The first evidence to support Rush’s allegation surfaced in March 1971, when a group of anonymous activists who called themselves the “Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI” broke into a small FBI office in Media, Pa. to expropriate more than 1,000 documents. In doing so, the Commission exposed the FBI’s “COINTELPRO” program, a secret counterintelligence program created to, as the L.A. Times put it in 2006, “investigate and disrupt dissident political groups in the United States.“ According to the Commission’s purloined documents, Hoover had directed all of the Bureau’s offices to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit and otherwise neutralize” African-American organizations and leaders, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Nation of Islam, Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown.

Two years later, it was publicly revealed in an unrelated case that Chicago Black Panther Party Chief of Security William O'Neal was a paid informant for the FBI. At the time, I was a young lawyer working with my colleagues at the People’s Law Office on a civil rights lawsuit we had filed on behalf of the Hampton and Clark families and the survivors of the December 4th raid. We quickly subpoenaed the Chicago FBI’s Black Panther Party files. In response, the FBI produced a small number of documents that included a detailed floor plan of the BPP apartment specifically identifying the bed where Hampton slept, which O’Neal had supplied to Hanrahan before the raid by way of his FBI control agent. ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/15949/how_the_fbi_conspired_to_destroy_the_black_panther_party/