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BOOK REVIEW: THE ASSASSINATION OF FRED HAMPTON The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police 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 in his Chicago community. At the time of his death, he was chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party and an organizer of the Panthers' free lunch program and medical clinic. He taught political education classes daily and had negotiated a non-aggression pact among Chicago's street gangs. His accomplishments, his oratorical gifts and his implacable hatred of exploitation and oppression made him a target of the FBI's counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO), which did far more than gather intelligence. It utilized agents provocateurs to foment antagonism and to disrupt the activities of radicals and leftists. When those efforts failed, it engaged in political assassinations, including that of Fred Hampton, murdered while he slept - likely having been drugged - by the FBI and Chicago police agents who broke in his door, shot him and Mark Clark, and then claimed they were defending themselves in a shootout. Their claims began to fall apart almost immediately, as supporters got to his apartment before evidence had been removed and demonstrated, among other things, that virtually all the bullet holes that the state's attorney claimed proved the police were shot at were caused by shots fired into the apartment from outside. Regardless, no police agent was ever prosecuted criminally for the killings. The only measure of justice for the families of Hampton and Clark came,...