Jew World Order

On February 18, Adalah Justice Project’s Sandra Tamari  spoke with movement attorney Jeff Haas by videoconference. Jeff is a founder of the People’s Law Office in Chicago (1969-2003) and is the author of The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police  Murdered a Black Panther. In this conversation, Jeff recounts his work as co-counsel on Hampton vs. Hanrahan which exposed the police and FBI murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and his commitment to supporting Palestinian liberation. He is an Advisory Board member of the Adalah Justice Project and serves on the Board of the Water Protectors Legal Collective. The interview was condensed and edited for clarity.

AJP: What happened on the day of the raid? How did you become the lawyer for Fred Hampton’s family and the other survivors of the police raid that resulted in his assassination? You talked about these events in your book The Assassination of Fred Hampton so could you give us an overview of what you did and how you got involved? 

JH: On the night Dr. King was killed, there were riots in Chicago. I went to the police station to defend some of the young people [in jail] because they [the cops] were just picking people up off the streets who were watching and doing nothing. Dennis Cunningham was there, another lawyer who came down to volunteer that night, and we became a nucleus for the formation of the People’s Law Office a year later. I was working at Legal Aid and most of the founders of PLO were also working there. Fred Hampton came to Dennis and said we need people to represent us. The Panthers are getting arrested for selling newspapers, for going to demonstrations, every time we are on the streets.  We need a law office to represent the movement because we’re getting harassed by the police all the time. So we started The People’s Law Office in 1969, six of us, in what had been “Fless Homemade Sausage Shop.” We kept that awning over the office for the first year. It was a very humble beginning, but we had plenty of work defending different parts of the Movement from the day we opened.

I met with Fred Hampton two days before December 4th, [1969] the day of the raid. I went to the Panther office to get the information to prepare the documents so they could buy their office on Madison Street.  The Chicago Police had attacked the office twice, and the FBI once. The police had set it on fire one time, and urinated on the cereal for the Breakfast Program, and stolen their donor lists.  Law enforcement had left the office in shambles.  They [the Panthers] were getting evicted and so they wanted to stay at the Madison Street location.  I left the Panther office on Dec. 2nd after meeting with Fred, repeating back to him, his goodbye refrain, “Power to the People,” and expected to return two days later with documents completed. 

On the morning of December 4th at 6 a.m., my law partner Skip Andrew knocked on my back door. I got up and went to the door. Skip was already in a suit and tie and he said, “the pigs raided the Panthers’ crib.  The Chairman’s dead.” He continued, “There was an early morning raid. All I know is that Fred was killed and other people were shot. I’m going to the morgue with Bobby Rush to identify the body.” I was stunned by the news and mumbled, “What can I do?” Skip said there were survivors of the raid at the local police station at the 18th District, “Why don’t you go interview them?” While Skip and other members of our office went to the apartment where the raid happened (which had not been sealed), I went to the Wood Street Police Station. 

At first, I was prohibited from visiting the raid survivors by order of [Cook County State Attorney Edward] Hanrahan, to whom the raiders had been attached – he was a very ambitious prosecutor and heir apparent to [then Mayor of Chicago] Richard Daley. He said nobody could see them. But I called somebody I knew at the office and read them a statute about it being felony to interfere with a lawyer trying to see someone in custody. They begrudgingly let me in to see Deborah Johnson [Fred’s partner]. They let her into the room. She was still in her nightgown and was very pregnant, crying and shaking and she looked at me questioningly so I introduced myself. I asked what happened and she told me, the police knocked on the door and they came in firing. After a while, they pulled me out of the back bedroom because I was lying on Fred, trying to protect him. When they pulled me out, there was still no blood on the bed. I heard two police officers go in [after] and I heard one of them say “I’m not sure he’s going to make it, is he still alive? Then I heard two shots and the other one said, “he’s good and dead now.” 

Later, when we did the autopsy we discovered there were two parallel bullets at close range to Fred Hampton’s head. So that’s what she told me and the other survivors also told me what they had seen of the raid as well, which complemented her story. So that led to a thirteen-year-long trial to pin this killing on the Chicago Police, the people who actually pulled the trigger, but also the FBI. 

AJP: How did that trial start? 

JH: Well immediately, of course, we started with Hanrahan and the raiders. Hanrahan had enough motivation because he was going to be running for mayor. He had declared gang members in Chicago to be “nothing but animals” and he described the Panthers as a gang.  We knew that the Chicago Police assigned to Hanrahan had carried out the pre-dawn raid on Hampton’s apartment. They were willing to come in heavily armed to execute. What they admitted to and what our examination of the apartment and physical evidence showed was the plainclothes officers went in with a machine gun, shotguns, a .30 cal carbine rifle, and handguns They fired over ninety shots killing Mark Clark, executing Fred Hampton, and injuring four other Panthers in the apartment.  

Immediately following the raid Hanrahan held a press conference and said the Panthers had ambushed his officers but the physical evidence showed that there were ninety shots coming in from the police and the only shot from the Panthers was a reflex shot from Mark Clark into the ceiling after he had been fatally wounded.  

AJP: One of the things that is curious to me as we now experience a resurgence of socialist energy in the country and movements taking on capitalism is that Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers in Chicago were doing really revolutionary work, forming the Rainbow Coalition, organizing that was reaching across racial lines to form alliances with poor white Appalachians and Puerto Ricans in the city. This coalition-building across race for a working-class consciousness seems to me what was really threatening to the US government. In the course of your work on the case, what did you learn about the motives behind the US government taking down the Black Panthers and killing Fred Hampton? 

JH:  We filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in 1970 against Hanrahan and the Chicago Police, and two years later added the FBI when we learned of their role in initiating the conspiracy that led to the raid. In 1972, opponents of the Vietnam War took documents from an FBI office that  led to the discovery of the federal government’s COINTELPRO  (counterintelligence program) which targeted the entire movement, but in particular the Black movement.  Hoover declared the Black Panther Party  “the greatest threat to the internal security of the US.” Hoover put out a directive to all FBI agents in cities with Panther chapters to “disrupt, destroy, and neutralize” the Panthers by any means necessary, to “cripple” the Breakfast for Children Program, and to prevent the rise of a “messiah” who could unify and electrify the Black masses. 

The young and inspiring Fred Hampton in Chicago certainly fit that description. He had the ability to speak and organize welfare mothers, college students, white Appalachians in Uptown, who like the Panthers had terrible housing conditions and were brutalized by the police, as well as the Puerto Rican Young Lords Organization This ultimately became the Rainbow Coalition, which expanded the impact of Fred Hampton and the Panthers. They found commonality in many of these communities, but in no way accepted white supremacy.  As the leaders of the Young Patriots, the White Appalachian groups said it was their job to get white people to be in solidarity with people in similar oppressed conditions, not to look up to the white people at the top and emulate them. The Panthers were organizing a working class coalition supporting Black Power. The Panthers totally opposed the war in Vietnam and supported anti-colonial liberation struggles around the world. They saw themselves as part of what Fred recognized as the ”international proletarian struggle.”

AJP: You do Palestine organizing in New Mexico. How did you get involved in being a Palestine solidarity organizer? 

JH: It was a natural development because the Panthers talked about human rights and equal rights and so when you’re open to that, you really don’t want to accept injustice anywhere. I had grown up in a reform Jewish congregation in Atlanta that wasn’t particularly Zionist, but we had heard all the myths about “if we give money, we’re planting trees to make the desert bloom,” not to hide what had been done to Palestinian villages. As I and many others took up the liberation struggles of Central Americans fighting for liberation, the issue of Palestine came up directly when we learned about what was happening in Guatemala. The corrupt junta was killing and putting masses of indigenous people in internment camps aided directly by the state of Israel. Why was Israel doing the dirty work of the US? Why did Israel continue to support the apartheid government in South Africa to the very end? It became clear that Israel was an apartheid state itself and had not only sided with other authoritarian colonial oppressors, but sought to benefit financially by selling the surveillance and military technology they used to repress the Palestinian people to other colonial and imperialist powers.

With the first attacks on Gaza in 2014, I helped organize a group called Another Jewish Voice of Santa Fe. There was also Another Jewish Voice of Albuquerque and we joined together. We continue to organize and raise issues, to protest as Santa Feans For Justice in Palestine. We put up some very explicit artwork on a very public wall depicting Israeli atrocities to Palestinian youth a year ago and raised a lot of awareness . . . and not unsurprisingly got some Zionist backlash.  We worked closely with the Red Nation because they are frequently drawing the connection between the struggles of Native Americans and the struggles of Palestinians against colonialism. A lot of the techniques, military gear and devices that Israel uses against  Palestinians have been taught to and acquired by  US law enforcement  and used against the Black movement in Ferguson and the indigenous-led Water Protectors at Standing Rock. 

AJP: Fred Hampton’s story has been reintroduced in the popular imagination with the release of the film, Judas and the Black Messiah. Could you tell us what you think the film got right and what you wish it covered better?

JH:   Well I obviously since I wrote a book I know a lot, and I don’t think you can totally blame a two-hour movie for not including things that you think are very important because they can’t choose everything and they wouldn’t be effective if they did. They got right a lot of the aspects of Fred Hampton: what a powerful speaker he was, his organizing of the Rainbow Coalition, and just what a powerful impact he had in the Black community and beyond.

I think they also got right how nefarious the FBI was. It was very personalized in the movie which made it very dramatic. I hope people understand that it was the FBI, not [informant Bill] O’Neal, that killed Fred Hampton, although O’Neal was one of the cogs that was used. 

I think the movie did not water down Fred’s message about the need for international socialism and that he was fighting for revolutionary change.  

I would not have necessarily put this in a movie, but it is important to note that we got to know Fred’s mother and family pretty well.  They had an impact on Fred.  It would have been great to have included Iberia Hampton, Fred’s mother, who brought the family from Haynesville, Louisiana and carried so much with her.  She was a strong union organizer herself. How did Fred get to be Fred?  It would have been great to see some of the stories of his childhood and how he stood out. He led a boycott because black girls were not considered for homecoming queen at his high school. He started a breakfast program for kids in the neighborhood when he was 10. 

AJP: That’s such a beautiful reminder that we all are the result of generations that came before us, and it sounds like his mother had a huge impact on him. There has been chatter that your book might be turned into a movie and that would be a very different kind of film because you don’t focus on the informant, but rather on the movement and the man. Is that still in the works? 

JH: It’s a possibility. Right now, I think we might do a podcast to interview other people from the time, talking certainly more about the trial, and trying to project forward what it means for movements today.  I think another thing that that’s certainly influenced me is the coalition between the groups that I have supported–the coalition between Black Lives Matter between the Water Protectors and between solidarity with the Palestinians– and that each of them understand the interconnectedness and the anti-colonial nature of their struggle.

I think these movements are certainly connected and if you conclude that these are broad internationalist movements, it’s inevitable to feel solidarity with the Palestinians.

AJP:  That’s a really good place to land.  The power of the organizing that was attacked was the kind of multi-racial coalition-building that Fred engaged in and the solidarity that was being forged. Despite the threats, we have to proceed and know that victory is for us. 

This article is part of the Mondoweiss series Redefining Liberation by the Adalah Justice Project on moving past the narrow definition of national struggle and embracing liberation strategies grounded in the rich Palestinian legacy of joint struggle and transnational solidarity. With strong connections to radical organizing happening in their Palestinian homeland, Adalah Justice Project‘s vision of transformation is rooted in the understanding that race, gender, sexual orientation, and class all intersect to create the conditions of our current reality. AJP is a Palestinian organization that works to transform public discourse and U.S. policy on Palestine through public education, coalition-building, and advocacy within all realms of political activity, from the grassroots to Capitol Hill. Learn more about AJP’s work, and follow the entire series here.

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