Between 4:40 and 4:52 A.M. on December
4, 1969, plainclothes police in Chicago, while executing
a search warrant for illegal weapons, shot to death Fred
Hampton, the twenty-one-year-old chairman of the Black Panther
Party of Illinois, and Mark Clark, a member of the Party,
in Hampton's apartment. Four days later, at about the same
hour of the morning, the Los Angeles Special Weapons Tactics
Team, dressed in black jumpsuits and black hats, moved on
the Black Panther Party headquarters in that city with another
search warrant for illegal weapons and, in a heated gun
battle, shot and seriously wounded three more Panthers.
Commenting on these events, in San Francisco, Charles R.
Garry, chief counsel and spokesman for the Black Panther
Party, whose membership at the time was estimated at between
eight hundred and twelve hundred, declared to the press
that Hampton and Clark were "in fact the twenty-seventh
and twenty-eighth Panthers murdered by the police," and
that the deaths and the raids were all "part and package
of a national scheme by various agencies of the government
to destroy and commit genocide upon members of the Black
Panther Party."
Garry's assertion that twenty-eight
members of the controversial black-militant group had been
killed by the police was widely reported. On December 7
and December 9, 1969, the New York Times reported
as an established fact, without giving any source for the
figure or qualifying it in any way, that twenty-eight Panthers
had been killed hy police since January, 1968. On December
9, 1969, the Washington Post stated flatly, "A total of
28 Panthers have died in clashes with police since January
1, 1968." In a later article, the Post declared, "Between
a dozen and 30 Panthers have been killed in these confrontations."
On the basis of what had been reported
about the police killings and predawn raids, civil-rights
leaders expressed an understandable concern. Roy Innis,
director of the Congress of Racial Equality, called for
an immediate investigation of "the death of 28 Black Panther
members killed in clashes with the police since January,
1968." Ralph Abernathy, who succeeded Martin Luther King,
Jr., as the chairman of the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, attributed the death of Panther leaders to "a
calculated design of genocide in this country." Julian Bond,
a member of the Georgia state legislature, said, "The Black
Panthers are being decimated by political assassination
arranged by the federal police apparatus." And Whitney Young,
executive director of the National Urban League, urgently
requested the Attorney General to convene federal grand
juries in those "jurisdictions where nearly 30 Panthers
have been murdered by law-enforcement officials."
Garry's theory about "a national scheme
... to destroy" the Black Panthers was also taken up by
the press. Pointing to a "growing feeling (particularly
in the black community)" that the "Federal Administration
has had a hand in the recent wave of raids, arrests and
shoot-outs," an article in the Times by John Kifner
concluded that statements made by officials of the Nixon
Administration "appear to have at least contributed to a
climate of opinion among local police . . . that a virtual
open season has been declared on the Panthers." Time
reported, on December 12, 1969, that "a series of gun battles
between Panthers and police throughout the nation" amounted
to a "lethal undeclared war," and concluded, "Whether or
not there is a concerted police campaign, the ranks of Panther
leadership have been decimated in the past two years." In
the very next issue, Time, repeating Garry's claim
that "28 Panthers have died in police gunfire," asked, "Specifically,
are the raids against Panther offices part of a national
design to destroy the Panther leadership?"
The answer was more or less left open.
That same week, Newsweek began a news report entitled
"Too Late for the Panthers?" with the same question: "Is
there some sort of government conspiracy afoot to exterminate
the Black Panthers?" The article then proceeded to portray
a guerrilla war between “the gun-toting Panthers and the
police," in which the Panther "hierarchy around the country
has been all but decimated over the past year," and concluded
that "there is no doubt that the police around the nation
have made the Panthers a prime target in the past two years
. . ." A few weeks later, Newsweek reported that
"the cop on the beat has been joined by Attorney General
John Mitchell's Justice Department, which believe the Panthers
to be a menace to national security and has accordingly
escalated the drive against them"-- a drive that "has taken
a fearful toll of the Panthers." The Washington Post,
noting in an editorial that the "carnage has been terrible"
in the "urban guerrilla warfare" between Panthers and police,
concluded that "recent events" had given "added currency"
to the Panther charge that "there is a national campaign
under way to eradicate them by any means, legal or extra-legal."
Picking up the theme in his syndicated column, Carl T. Rowan
observed, "We have seen this nationally orchestrated police
campaign to turn the guns on the Panthers and wipe them
out," and referred to an "obvious conspiracy of police actions
across the country that has produced the alleged killings
of 28 Black Panthers." The Nation, in an editorial
titled "Marked for Extinction," asserted, "It is becoming
increasingly apparent that a campaign of repression and
assassination is being carried out against the Black Panthers."
Evcn a paper as cautious as the Christian Science Monitor,
after a telephone interview with Garry, cited the Panther
charge of "police murder" and “genocide" and expressed "a
growing suspicion that something more than isolated local
police action was involved."
Confusion about the alleged murders
began to set in early, and on December 21, 1969, the Times
reported that Garry had put the number of Panthers killed
by the police at twelve, although it later returned to the
figure of twenty-eight. While an Associated Press dispatch
in the San Francisco Examiner on December 9th reported
that twenty-seven panthers had been killed by police in
"Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, Detroit and Indianopolis,”
a UPI dispatch, on December 12th, listed twenty Panthers
killed in "cold blood" by police in Los Angeles, Oakland,
Seattle, San Diego, New Haven and Chicago. Life,
in a single issuethat of February 6, 1990, presented three
figures: Eldrige Cleaver, a Black Panther official was quoted
as saying that the police “ambush” had led to “28 murders
of Panthers,” but, at another point, the magazine declared
“at least 19 Panthers are dead," adding parentheses, that
"it is uncertan more than a dozen have died of police bullets."
While articles in the New Republic, Ramparts,
and The New Statesman have, at various times, put
the figure at twenty, an article in Newsday by Patrick
Owens asserted that no more than ten Panthers had been killed
by police. The executive director of the American Civil
Liberties Union in Illinois declared, according to the Washington
Post, that twenty-eight Panthers had died in clashes
with police since January 1, 1968, while the Los Angeles
branch of the same organization said that it was possible
to document twelve cases in which Panthers had been killed
in such encounters. In a column in the Post, a few
days earlier, Nicholas von Hoffman had written "The Panthers
alone claim that 28 of their top people have been murdered
in the past couple of years and there is no stong prima
facie reason to disbelieve them."
Even one victim of deliberate police
murder would be too many, but if twenty-eight Panthers had
been murdered by the police in two years, as Garry claimed
and many publcations reported, it might indeed represent
a pattern of systematic destruction. The implications would
be so dreadful that one would expect the figures to be checked
out with the utmost scruple. Since the number of Panthers
killed would seem to be an ascertainable fact, how can such
widely differing figures be accounted for?
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