How Fred Hampton Died: The Raid the FBI Helped Plan

At about 4:30 in the morning on December 4, 1969, fourteen Chicago police officers assigned to the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office went through the door of a first-floor apartment at 2337 West Monroe Street. Nine members of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party were inside. When the shooting stopped, the chapter’s chairman, Fred Hampton, was dead in the back bedroom at twenty-one, Mark Clark was dead in the front room at twenty-two, and four other people had been shot. The National Archives states the ballistics finding in one line: Chicago police fired ninety-nine shots, and the people in the apartment fired one.

The raiders had a floor plan of the place. The opinion of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Hampton v. Hanrahan, decided April 23, 1979, describes FBI Special Agent Roy Mitchell meeting an informant named William O’Neal and, “with O’Neal’s aid,” constructing “a floorplan of the apartment at 2337 West Monroe Street to which Hampton recently had moved.” O’Neal was the Illinois chapter’s chief of security. He had joined the party at the Bureau’s direction. Shortly after the raid, the same opinion records, “a three hundred dollar bonus was approved.”

Maywood, and the swimming pool

Hampton was born on August 30, 1948 and grew up in Maywood, the village just west of Chicago. He graduated with honors from Proviso East High School in 1966. Before any of the rest of it, he ran the NAACP’s West Suburban Youth Council and built it to roughly five hundred members, and the fight he picked there was over a swimming pool. Maywood did not have one. Black kids who wanted to swim got driven out to Brookfield, because the pool closest to home, in Melrose Park, was for white swimmers. He organized rallies for a village pool that anyone could use.

He joined the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party in November 1968, by the National Archives’ dating. Inside a year he was chairman of the Illinois chapter and deputy chairman of the national party, which made him one of the most watched political organizers in the country at an age when most people are finishing college.

Five breakfasts and a coalition

Under Hampton the Illinois chapter ran five Free Breakfast for Children programs on Chicago’s West Side, feeding more than four hundred children every morning. It was the local edition of the survival programs the party had started at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in West Oakland in January 1969, and it worked well enough that the city of Chicago answered with a federally funded hot breakfast program of its own.

J. Edgar Hoover put his assessment of feeding children in writing in a 1969 FBI memorandum:

The [Program] represents the best and most influential activity going for the BPP and, as such, is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for.

The other thing Hampton built that year was an alliance across three neighborhoods that had never been asked to share anything. In the spring of 1969 the Illinois Panthers, the Young Lords Organization out of Puerto Rican Lincoln Park, and the Young Patriots Organization, poor white Southern migrants in Uptown, went public as the Rainbow Coalition and worked together on police brutality, rent, and hunger. The historian Jakobi Williams, who wrote the history of the Illinois chapter, credits the Panther organizer Bob Lee as the coalition’s most active organizer, the one doing the work behind the press conferences. Speaking at Olivet Church in Chicago that same year, Hampton gave the argument in a sentence:

We say you don’t fight racism with racism,we’re gonna fight racism with solidarity.

The state’s case: $71 of ice cream

While that was going on, Cook County was prosecuting Hampton over ice cream. The charge was robbing an ice cream truck driver of $71 worth of bars on a Maywood school playground and handing them out to neighborhood kids. The trial judge had signaled probation. After State’s Attorney Edward Hanrahan went after Hampton in the press, the sentence came back as two to five years, and in May 1969 he was sent downstate to the penitentiary at Menard. Circuit Court Judge Sidney A. Jones then refused to set an appeal bond and said why on the record, as L. F. Palmer Jr. reported in The Nation of July 28, 1969:

This defendant admits to me that he advocates armed revolution. I cannot take the responsibility of allowing him to remain at large.

Hampton’s own review of the evidence, in the same article:

I may be a pretty big mother, but I can’t eat no 710 ice-cream bars.

He was released on an appeal bond in late August 1969 and came home to Chicago. He had a little more than three months left.

What the Bureau had written down

The FBI had been running a counterintelligence program against Black political organizations since 1967. Reviewing the Hampton case a decade later, the Seventh Circuit quoted the Bureau’s own long-range goals for it: prevent a coalition of militant black nationalist groups, and prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify and electrify the militant nationalist movement. The memorandum setting those goals named Malcolm X, murdered in 1965, as the sort of figure it had in mind. Hampton was doing the first thing on the list and being accused of the second, and he was twenty-one.

O’Neal’s information moved from him to Agent Mitchell to Hanrahan’s office. In the documents produced years later in the civil case, the Bureau described that information as being of “tremendous value” and called the raid a “success.”

One question in the file has never been settled. The Cook County chemist who tested Hampton’s blood reported barbiturates in it; an FBI chemist testing the same material reported none. The National Archives account states that the informant slipped a sleeping drug into Hampton’s drink. The two laboratory results sit in the record side by side, and readers should know that is where the matter stands.

The account fell apart inside a week

Hanrahan’s office said the officers had walked into an ambush and praised them for it:

We wholeheartedly commend the police officers for their bravery, their remarkable restraint, and their discipline in the face of this vicious Black Panther attack, and we expect every decent citizen of our community to do likewise.

A week after the raid, the Chicago Tribune published photographs supplied by the State’s Attorney’s office, circles drawn around what the captions called holes made by Panther gunfire. The Panthers had left the apartment open and were walking reporters and neighbors through it, so the checking took about an afternoon. As TIME reported on December 19, 1969, the holes in the door jamb turned out to be nail heads. The Chicago Sun-Times ran the correction on its front page.

Thirteen years in court

On January 30, 1970 a grand jury indicted the seven survivors of the raid on counts ranging from attempted murder to illegal possession of firearms. On May 8 the state dropped all of them, after FBI ballistics work failed to support the claim that anyone inside had been shooting. A federal grand jury reported on May 15, 1970 and returned no indictments. Hanrahan and thirteen others were indicted on state charges of obstructing justice in 1971, acquitted at a bench trial in 1972, and that November the voters of Cook County retired him.

The families and survivors sued. Their trial began on January 5, 1976 and ran about eighteen months, at which point the judge dismissed the case and taxed the plaintiffs $100,000 in costs. On April 23, 1979 the Seventh Circuit reversed him, holding that a jury should hear the evidence of a conspiracy “designed to subvert and eliminate the Black Panther Party” and that the federal defendants’ failure to hand over documents had obstructed the grand jury investigation. In 1982 the case settled for $1.85 million to nine plaintiffs, among them Hampton’s mother and Clark’s, paid in equal thirds by the federal government, Cook County, and the City of Chicago. Thirteen years, and no jury ever returned a verdict on any of it.

The pool got built

Fred Hampton Jr. was born on December 29, 1969, twenty-five days after the raid, to Akua Njeri, who was Deborah Johnson then and was in the bed when the shooting started. William O’Neal died by suicide on January 15, 1990. The building at 2337 West Monroe is still standing, and on August 30, 2025, which would have been Hampton’s seventy-seventh birthday, Chicago hung an honorary sign on the street outside it: Chairman Fred Hampton Sr. Way.

Maywood built its swimming pool. It carries his name, and the children who swim in it were born decades after the argument he made for it.