FBI and Chicago Police Assassinate Black Panther Leader Fred Hampton in Pre-Dawn Raid

On December 4, 1969, at 4:45 a.m., fourteen Chicago police officers raided the apartment of Fred Hampton, 21-year-old chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party. Police fired between 82 and 99 shots into the apartment; the Panthers fired at most one. Hampton was shot twice in the head at point-blank range while lying unconscious in his bed, drugged by an FBI informant. Mark Clark, a Panther leader from Peoria, was also killed; four other Panthers were seriously wounded. The raid was a coordinated FBI-police operation to “neutralize” Hampton as part of COINTELPRO.

Fred Hampton had emerged as one of the most effective Black Panther organizers in the country. He brokered a nonaggression pact between Chicago’s major street gangs, organized free breakfast programs for children, and created the Rainbow Coalition—uniting Black Panthers with the Young Patriots (poor whites) and the Young Lords (Puerto Ricans) in a multiracial movement against poverty and police brutality. FBI Director Hoover identified Hampton as a potential “messiah” who could unify the Black movement and marked him for destruction.

FBI informant William O’Neal, who had infiltrated Hampton’s inner circle, provided a detailed floor plan of Hampton’s apartment to the FBI, which passed it to the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office. O’Neal drugged Hampton with secobarbital before the raid, ensuring he could not resist or escape. When officers burst in, Hampton never rose from his bed.

Cook County State’s Attorney Edward Hanrahan initially claimed the Panthers had initiated a fierce gun battle, but evidence contradicted this narrative. A federal grand jury investigation found that police fired 82-99 shots while Panthers fired at most one, likely a reflexive shot by Mark Clark as he was killed. Bullet trajectories showed police fired into the apartment from multiple positions. The “shootout” was an execution.

The families of Hampton and Clark eventually won a $1.85 million settlement from Cook County and the federal government in 1982, but no one was ever criminally prosecuted for the killings. The raid demonstrated how COINTELPRO operated: the FBI identified targets, planted informants, gathered intelligence, coordinated with local police, and provided cover stories for assassinations. The Hampton assassination remains one of the clearest examples of the American government conducting political assassinations of its own citizens.