THE CASE OF FRED HAMPTON AND MARK
CLARK
The final case on Garry's listis certainly
the most important one, since it is the one that prompted
Garry to speak of a pattern of "genocide." It involves the
fatal shooting of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark by policemen
attached to the State's Attorney's office in Chicago on
December 4, 1969. While there may be varying degrees of
uncertainty about dome of the other deaths on Garry's list,
these two unquestionably resulted from a deliberately planned
raid on a Black Panther headquarters.
On December 3rd, Sergeant Daniel Groth,
a twelve-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department who
had been assigned to the State's Attorney's Special Prosecutions
Unit, told Assistant State's Attorney Richard S. Jalovec,
who was in charge of the unit, that he had received information
from a "confidential informer" that a cache of illegal weapons,
including sawed-off shotguns, and also riot guns stolen
from the Chicago police, was stored in a Black Panther apartment
at 2337 West Monroe Street. Having received information
from the Federal Bureau of Investigation just the day before
that the Panthers had recently moved weapons to that address,
Jalovec immediately ordered Groth to plan a raid on the
Panther apartment, and Jalovec prepared a search-warrant
complaint. Circuit judge Robert Collins signed a warrant
later that afternoon.
Groth and thirteen other policemen assigned
to the Special Prosecutions Unit assembled at the State's
Attorney's office at four the next morning. They were heavily
armed: five had shotguns, one had a Thompson submachine
gun, and one -- James Davis, one of five black members of
the raiding party -- carried with him a .30-caliber carbine
of his own. The raid was planned for dawn, to achieve the
maximum surprise and minimum potential for neighborhood
interference, according to Groth's later testimony.
The raiding party arrived at the West
Monroe Street apartment in three cars and an unmarked panel
truck, and Groth, Davis, and three of the other members
proceeded to the front door of the apartment, which was
on the first floor; six members went around to the back
door; and the three remaining members were stationed at
the front of the building. At approximately 4:40 a.m., Groth
pounded on the apartment door with his revolver butt. There
are markedly different versions of what happened next.
In the police version, which was published
in the Chicago Tribune, Groth shouted, "This is
the police! I have a warrant to search the premises!"
After a delay, he had Davis kick the door open.
The two men entered a small hall, where
they were faced with another closed door. Suddenly, the
police said, a shotgun blast from inside was fired through
this door and "narrowly missed the two policemen." Davis
then plunged through the inner door into a darkened living
room, with Groth behind him, as a "second round went right
past" him. Groth fired two shots at a woman who, he said,
had fired the second shotgun blast, while Davis, after also
firing at the woman and wounding her, turned and shot to
death a man sitting behind him with a shotgun, who was later
identified as Mark Clark. Moments later, three of the members
of the raiding party who had gone around to the back broke
in through the kitchen door of the apartment. Despite a
number of calls for a cease-fire from Groth, the Panthers
kept firing shotgun blasts, according to the police version
of the events, and a "fierce fire fight" ensued, in which
Hampton was killed and four other Panthers and one policeman
were wounded.
In the Panther version, as it was reported
in the Washington Post, the police burst into the
apartment almost simultaneously through the front and rear
entrances, without first identifying themselves, and although
no Panthers fired any shots whatever, the police opened
fire, also without warning. A Black Panther spokesman was
reported in the Post to have said that Mark Clark was fatally
wounded as he attempted to dodge police submachine gun fire,
and others were wounded. Meanwhile, according to the spokesman,
the police entering from the rear went immediately to Hampton's
bedroom and fired into it, and Davis then went into the
bedroom and fired more shots at Hampton. In Chicago
Today, the Black Panther spokesman added that "Hampton
was murdered in bed while he slept" by a policeman who "must
have come in the back door and murdered him with a silencer."
A few days later, a private autopsy, performed at the request
of Hampton's family, concluded that hours before Hampton
was shot to death he had been heavily drugged with Seconal,
a barbiturate, which the spokesman deduced had been administered
by a "pig agent" before the raid. The independent autopsy
also concluded that the bullet that killed Hampton was missing,
for the Panthers' pathologist found an entrance wound in
the head but no exit wound and no bullet in the head. Lawyers
for Panthers intimated that the missing bullet had been
secretly extracted and disposed of by the police, because
it constituted evidence of murder.
A third version was rendered by a federal
grand jury that had been specially empaneled to investigate
the December 4th shootings. After having all the physical
evidence recovered by both the police and the Panthers analyzed
by the F.B.I. Laboratory in Washington and evaluating additional
ballistic evidence uncovered by the F.B.I., and after hearing
all the witnesses willing to testify, the grand jury concluded,
among other things, that the Chicago police investigation
of the raid was "so seriously deficient that it suggests
purposeful malfeasance."
When Groth and Davis forced their way
in through the inner door, according to the grand jury's
assessment of the events, a 12-gauge slug was fired from
inside the apartment and passed through that door as it
swung open to a forty-five-degree angle. There were indications
that the shotgun was no more than fifteen inches from the
opening door. A 12-gauge slug found at the scene proved
consistent with a shotgun that was next to Mark Clark's
body and was stained with blood of Clark's type; the slug
was also found to match the hole in the door. Moreover,
an empty shell found nearby was "positively identified"
as having come from the shotgun. Piecing together the physical
evidence, the jury posited that Mark Clark, sitting behind
the door, fired a shotgun blast through the door just as
the police burst in. This, however, was the only shot that
could be definitely traced to a Panther weapon.
The grand jury concluded that Groth
and Davis apparently came in shooting, for one pistol shot
had been fired through the door. Davis shot Clark, who was
sitting behind the door holding a shotgun, and a woman then
in the room, Brenda Harris, who was holding another shotgun.
Minutes later, after the officers claimed they heard a shotgun
blast from a bedroom adjacent to the living room, the wall
between the living room and the bedroom was "stitched" with
forty-two shots from a carbine and a submachine gun. One
of these bullets passed through the first bedroom into a
second bedroom, where it fatally wounded Fred Hampton in
the forehead. Another bullet, apparently from the same volley,
since it was traveling at the same angle, struck Hampton
in the right cheek, and another struck him in the left shoulder.
This last, the only bullet recovered from his body, proved
to be a .30-caliber bullet from Davis's carbine. Aside from
Hampton and Clark, four of the seven other Panthers in the
apartment, as well as one police officer, were wounded by
police gunfire in less than twelve minutes after the raid
began. Eighty-three empty shells and fifty-six bullets were
recovered from the apartment by the police, the Panthers,
and the F.B.I., of which all but one shotgun slug and one
shell had been fired from police weapons. Although the police
steadfastly maintained that at least ten or fifteen shots
were fired at them by Panthers, a painstaking reconstruction
by the grand jury suggests that, following the first shot
by Clark, police entering from the back of the apartment
mistook Davis's and Groth's shots in the front of the apartment
for Panther gunfire, and the police in the front of the
apartment similarly mistook the return fire from the rear
of the apartment for continuing resistance. According to
the grand jury's version, the officers very probably fired
through the living-room wall under the erroneous impression
that they were in a gun battle with Panthers.
The grand jury also attempted to resolve
conflicts between the findings of the Panthers' private
autopsy and those of the police autopsy by ordering Hampton's
body exhumed and yet a third autopsy performed, by an out-of
state medical examiner in the presence of both a Chicago
pathologist from the coroner's office and a pathologist
retained by the Hampton family. Two points were clarified
by the third autopsy. First, despite the statement of the
Panthers' pathologist that there was no exit wound for the
fatal bullet that entered Hampton's forehead, this autopsy
plainly showed an exit hole in front of the left ear when
the sideburns were shaved. Second, the Panthers' claim that
Hampton was heavily drugged with Seconal before the shooting
was not supported either by this autopsy, which showed "no
trace of drugs in the body," or by the report of the F.B.I.
Laboratory in Washington, which had also tested the sample
used in the Panthers' private autopsy. The toxicologist
who performed the analysis for the Panthers told the grand
jury he had not performed the most specific test for Seconal,
the gas-chromatography test but had relied instead on a
less sophisticated test, which required some "subjective
evaluation." In performing the gas-chromography tests
on the same sample that the Panthers' toxicologist had used,
the F.B.I. found no Seconal or other drugs, but did find
deterioration in the blook that could have been partially
responsible for a mistaken analysis.
Are these ten cases of Black Panthers
killed by police part of a nationally coordinated pattern?
Although Hampton and Clark were the only Panthers killed
as a direct result of a planned police raid, or even in
a situation in which the police could reasonably be supposed
to have had advance knowledge that they would confront Black
Panthers, it still might be maintained that the police involved
had instructions of some sort to kill Black Panthers whenever
the opportunity presented itself. The theory broached by
John Kifner in the Times that the Nixon Administration
had, through the statements of public officials, "at least
contributed to a climate of opinion among local police ...
that a virtual open season has been declared on the Panthers"
seems historically inaccurate since five of the ten Panther
deaths that can be directly attributed to police action
occurred before the Nixon Administration took office. And,
as far as I have been able to determine, no Black Panthers
have been killed by the police since the Hampton-Clark shooting.
In all of the ten cases to which Garry’s
list has been reduced, at least some of the Panthers involved
were armed and presented a threat to the police. Six of
the ten Panthers were killed by seriously wounded policemen
who clearly had reason to believe that their own lives were
in jeopardy. In none of these cases, moreover, is there
any positive evidence to support a belief that the wounded
policemen knew they had been shot by Black Panthers. According
to the evidence that is available, Bartholomew, Lawrence,
and Lewis were stopped as burglary suspects; Pope approached
a robbery stakeout at night; Winters opened fire when two
policemen entered an abandoned building to investigate a
citizen's complaint; and although it is agreed that Roberson
took it upon himself to challenge the behavior of the police
investigating the burglary of a fruit stand, it is not reported
that he identified himself as a Black Panther.
In the four remaining cases, the fatal
shots were fired by policemen who had not themselves been
wounded. A further distinction might be made to take account
of the fact that in two of these deaths -- those of Armstead
and Clark -- the police state that in each instance they
were confronted by an adversary with a lethal weapon and
had reason to presume that their own lives were endangered.
Armstead pointed a rifle at a policeman and refused to disarm
himself; Clark confronted a policeman with a shotgun, which,
in fact, he had previously fired.
In any event, there are two cases in
which Black Panthers were killed by policemen whose lives
were not being directly threatened by those men. These are
the cases of Hutton, who was shot while allegedly running
from the scene of a ninety-minute. gun battle in which three
policemen had been wounded, and Hampton, who was apparently
hit by stray bullets in a reckless and uncontrolled fusillade.
Four deaths, two deaths, even a single
death must be the subject of the most serious concern. But
the basic issues of public policy presented by the militancy
of groups like the Panthers and by the sometimes brutal
police treatment of angry and defiant black people in general
can be neither understood nor resolved in an atmosphere
of exaggerated charges whether of "genocide" against the
Panthers or of "guerrilla warfare" against the police
that are repeated, unverified, in the press and in consequence
widely believed by the public. The idea that the police
have declared a sort of open season on the Black Panthers
is based principally, as far as I can determine, on the
assumption that all the Panther deaths cited by Charles
Garry — twenty-eight or twenty or ten — occurred under circumstances
that were similar to the Hampton-Clark raid. This is an
assumption that proves, on examination, to be false.
Special thanks to Lona Manning from
Kelowna, B.C. for her assistance in proof-reading the internet
version of this piece.
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