Forty Years Later
http://www.monthlyreview.org/091201haas.php
An Interview with Jeffrey Haas
December 2009
Civil rights lawyer Jeffrey Haas, a founder, in 1969, of Chicago's
People's Law Office, has written one of the top books of the year:
The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police
Murdered a Black Panther (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2009). The
story could not be more worth telling. Police response to the 1960s
upsurge of the black community was immediate and brutal, especially
after the growth of a mass student and youth movement opposed to the
Vietnam War. The FBI, as the leading U.S. secret police force,
engaged in a nationwide campaign of provocation, infiltration, and
assassination, code named the Counterintelligence Program, or
"COINTELPRO." The resulting murders, on December 4, 1969, of
charismatic, twenty-one-year-old Chicago Black Panther state chairman
Fred Hampton and twenty-two-year-old Black Panther Mark Clark were a
pivotal event in the suppression of militant black resistance and the
emergence of today's U.S. police/prison state. The gradual collapse
of the Nixon presidency and public outcry against White House-ordered
burglaries opened a window permitting the exposure of secret police
crimes, including the Hampton assassination. Jeffrey Haas and his
partners at the People's Law Office made good use of this opportunity
through determined and creative litigation, and uncovered the story
recounted in his book. But the window was slammed shut in succeeding
years, and was finally removed entirely to be replaced by the blank
prison wall of the USA Patriot Act. Hampton's story is no longer
primarily a U.S. concern, but one that affects everyone in the world.
It is the story of the path to Abu Ghraib. We interviewed Jeffrey
Haas in late September 2009.
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MONTHLY REVIEW: Prior to your book, what were the leading accounts of
the December 4, 1969, assassination of Fred Hampton by the FBI and
the Chicago police? What has your book added to or corrected in these accounts?
JEFFREY HAAS: There are five prior accounts worth mentioning. First,
the Federal Grand Jury Report (May 1970) explained the physical
evidence quite accurately because it relied on an FBI firearms
examiner who showed real integrity. He proved the Panthers fired, at
most, one shot at the police compared to the police, who raided
Hampton's apartment and shot at the Panthers ninety-nine times. There
was no shootout as the police described. However, Jerris Leonard, the
federal prosecutor leading the investigation, who was also head of
Nixon's civil rights division, withheld from the federal grand jury
the FBI and COINTELPRO role in setting up the raid. Not surprisingly,
the federal grand jury indicted no one for civil rights violations.
Leonard, in his Grand Jury Report, claimed that Panther rhetoric was
more responsible for the Hampton and Clark deaths than the police shooting.
Two books are also important. Search and Destroy (1973), a
comprehensive analysis of the raid itself, looking at all the
physical evidence and testimony, was put together by the NAACP and
written by Roy Wilkins and Ramsey Clark. The report concluded that
Hampton was murdered in his bed while unconscious, and that he was
most likely drugged at the time of the raid. An American Verdict by
Michael Arlen (1973) is an impressionist view of the trial of Cook
County, Illinois state's attorney Edward Hanrahan and the police
raiders assigned to him. It covers their role in obstructing justice
and lying, in their testimony and official reports, about what
happened in the raid. The book captures the Chicago politics of the
era, with the Chicago trial judge sympathetic to Hanrahan and the
police, and eventually acquitting them. The book describes the fear
mongering tactics of Hanrahan's attorneys and their racist epithets
for the Panthers.
Two film accounts are significant. The Murder of Fred Hampton is a
documentary begun while Hampton was alive. The producer went to the
scene of the raid after Hampton's death and filmed the blood-soaked
mattress and the bullet-ridden walls, as the Panthers' lawyers
inspected them four hours after the raid. The film contains dramatic
footage of Hanrahan and the police being confronted with the physical
evidence and having no answer for the fact that it contradicted their
version of the raid. Eyes on the Prize, Segment 5 (1988) is a
half-hour TV documentary, and was the only public account done after
the exposure of the FBI's role. It includes an interview with the FBI
informant. It is an abbreviated but compelling version of some of the
facts showing the FBI's involvement.
My book adds history and context to events of December 4, 1969. It
sets the scene locally and nationally Chicago in the late sixties,
including the rise of the Black Panther Party. It contains the most
complete account of the emergence of Fred Hampton as a political
figure, his being targeted by the FBI and local police, and the
details of the FBI-local police collusion that led to the deadly raid
and Hampton's assassination.
This book is the only account of the thirteen-year legal struggle led
by the People's Law Office against the FBI and their Justice
Department lawyers to uncover and make public evidence showing the
FBI's leading role in setting up the raid. This evidence included the
floor plan of Hampton's apartment, indicating where he slept, drawn
by the FBI informant and delivered by his FBI control to the police
raiders the day before the raid. Another FBI document indicated that
a bonus was paid to the informant after the raid, because of its
"success," as the FBI termed it. My book describes confronting
well-funded government lawyers, intent on hiding the truth during an
eighteen-month trial, in front of a hostile judge similarly bent on
defeating our claims and exonerating Hampton's killers. The book
documents the enormous efforts of the FBI, local U.S. attorneys, and
the Justice Department to prevent the truth behind COINTELPRO coming
to light. After it was exposed that the murder of Fred Hampton fit
the FBI's goals of preventing the rise of a "Black Messiah, who could
unify and electrify the masses," the FBI continued to deny that
COINTELPRO was responsible for Hampton's death, even though their own
internal files showed it was. Even after documents proved that the
raid was a COINTELPRO action, the government denied responsibility
for Hampton's death.
MR: If, by some chance, Fred Hampton had survived, say, because he
slept in a different room on December 4, what is your best guess as
to what his life would have been like?
JH: First of all, the raid was not the first FBI effort to have Fred
Hampton killed. A year earlier, the head of the FBI in Chicago sent
an anonymous letter to Jeff Fort, the leader of the Blackstone
Rangers gang, falsely claiming Hampton had a "hit" out on him and
urged Fort to retaliate. Thus, if Hampton had not been home, it's
likely the FBI would have made other efforts to murder him.
But, assuming he survived, it's difficult to say what he would have
done. Even more than Dr. King and Malcolm, because he was much
younger, Fred Hampton was a work in progress. In my book, I follow
his development from head of the suburban NAACP chapter, to marching
with Dr. King, to his engagement with the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Black Power, to becoming, at age
twenty, the charismatic chairman of the Chicago Black Panthers. All
in less than three years.
His oratory skills could have carried him in many directions. He was
interested in law, and William Kunstler was one of his idols. He was
adept at organizing youth, and could have started and headed an
organization in Chicago that steered teenagers away from drugs and
gangs. He could have become a national spokesperson for blacks and
led campaigns against police brutality and to improve housing,
education, health care. While the Chicago Panthers were more closely
allied with the West Coast Panthers and not the Cleaver faction,
there was enough autonomy in Chicago that Fred did not have to spend
much time advocating the position of either faction. After his death,
many folks left the Chicago Panthers and a year later the Panthers
were no longer a political force in Chicago. It's speculative to say
how long Fred would have remained a Panther, given the declining
influence of the national organization, but his meteoric rise to
prominence and exceptional speaking and leadership abilities would
have likely resulted in his becoming a dynamic and independent local,
and probably national, figure.
MR: The Chicago black community has produced political leaders within
the system who are qualitatively more successful and given what is
possible effective than any other black community in the United
States; how would you account for that?
JH: Chicago has a large black community, which has operated both
inside and outside the power structure of the Democratic machine. In
fact, it was the reaction to Hampton's death that created the
independent coalition of blacks and liberal whites that resulted in
the election of Harold Washington as Chicago's first black mayor.
Some argue that Barack Obama is a direct descendant and beneficiary
of that legacy, and certainly his campaign would never have obtained
traction in Chicago had not the black community obtained substantial
power within the Democratic Party.
MR: Sectarians often criticize the Black Panthers as "militarist" and
the Weather Underground as "adventurist." To what extent would you
agree? If your experience permits you to say, how does the younger
generation of the politically aware, those born after the 1960s and
'70s, see the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground?
JH: The more I studied the sixties, the more I came to believe that
the Panthers and Weather Underground were both the natural and
perhaps necessary development of the movements of the era. The
Panthers sought to remedy the ineffectiveness of Dr. King's religious
and nonviolent movement to change the conditions of blacks outside
the South, and to channel the youthful rage of the many urban riots,
into a progressive and cohesive force for political and revolutionary
change. Similarly, the Weathermen evolved after years of increasingly
militant protest, which nevertheless failed to stop the Vietnam war
or stop the attacks on the black movement. To say that the emergence
of these groups was inevitable does not mean that their strategies
and tactics should not be reexamined today. However, to criticize
what they did, based on the contradictions of today, rather than on
what they knew and faced in the sixties, is shallow and prevents an
understanding of their critical roles in the history of the movement.
I am about to go on a book tour, which includes talking to young
people, including many in black communities. I will feel more
qualified to answer how the younger generation views the Panthers and
Weather Underground in a few months.
MR: In New York City since the time of Giuliani, the Corporation
Counsel has almost routinely paid out big sums in civil rights cases
against police misbehavior, yet the behavior at issue continues
unabated. It's almost as if police accept a civil judgment or
settlement cost for lawless repression as they would accept the cost
for tear gas or clubs. What potential, then, remains for the use of
civil litigation to change police behavior? Do you see the Fred
Hampton litigation as having significantly contributed to changes in
the behavior of Chicago police or of the FBI?
JH: One of the most frustrating things for me as a civil rights
lawyer in Chicago was to see that, after I sued a cop and obtained a
judgment or settlement (which the city paid), the police officer
continued to commit acts of brutality. Often, I would have a new
client with the same complaint against the same cop. We called these
cops "repeaters" and, although they were probably less than 10
percent of the force, they committed a much higher percentage of acts
of excessive force and brutality. While most cops were not repeaters,
the partners of the "repeaters" always covered for them, and not once
did a cop ever testify to seeing another cop commit brutality. This
"code of silence" allows the brutality to continue.
So, no, we never broke the code of silence. I do think, however, that
exposing the repeaters, and the damage repeaters caused to the
reputation of the police, as well as how much they cost the city,
sometimes led to their reassignment to less sensitive areas,
occasional but infrequent discipline, and in one case of a cop with
over eighty complaints of brutality even being fired. I also
noticed that, starting perhaps thirty years ago with the increase in
the number of black mayors and community outrage and protest at
police killings and the judgments obtained in civil cases, police who
shot and killed civilians were moved to desk and other assignments,
where they would not interact with the community. It was simply not
good business, financially or politically to have killer cops repeat
their deadly acts. However, they were almost never disciplined and
never prosecuted for their killings. I see civil litigation as
providing some compensation for the victims of police brutality,
exposing and sometimes changing the most outrageous police practices,
and providing limited accountability for police abuse.
I think the Hampton litigation, with the concurrent outrage of
Chicago's black community at the information we uncovered, prevented
Edward Hanrahan, a strong advocate of law and order, from being
reelected state's attorney. It also exposed the weakness of the
police internal investigation division and led to changes that made
it slightly more independent from the police they were investigating.
COINTELPRO, as a formal program, ended before we joined FBI agents as
defendants, and Hoover died before we learned of the FBI's role. It's
hard to evaluate the effect of the litigation. We exposed so much
about how the FBI targeted the black movement, how it got local
police to do their dirty work, and how the federal grand jury was
used as a tool to cover up the conspiracy behind the assassination.
State's attorney Hanrahan was never reelected to anything, and the
coalition of blacks and liberals who spoke out against the murder of
Hampton in his bed broke away from the control of the Democratic
Machine, eventually succeeded in getting Harold Washington elected as
Chicago's first Black mayor. He ran on a platform of curbing police
brutality and made some progress in reining in the police.
As for the FBI, the head of the Chicago office who oversaw the
COINTELPRO operations, and who personally authorized the threatening
letter to Jeff Fort, was later appointed chairman of the Chicago
Police Board. That said, I think the evidence of the FBI's initiation
of and collusion in the assassination were a great embarrassment to
the FBI. The Seventh Circuit found that the FBI and their Justice
Department lawyers' withholding of evidence in the long trial could
be considered evidence of guilt in a later trial. The fact that the
FBI contributed to the settlement, rather than incur another trial,
is also an indication that they felt they would be damaged by the
continuous exposure. Of course, no FBI person was ever charged
criminally for the raid and murder, and neither were Hanrahan and the
raiders ever convicted for what they did. We must remember that the
people don't control the prosecutorial mechanisms, so civil suits are
often the only legal alternative available, which allows for exposure
and some accountability for government wrongs.
In conclusion, we showed Chicago and the world that the Cook County
state's attorney, the Chicago Police, and FBI participated in
assassinating Fred Hampton, and covering up their actions. As Iberia,
Fred's mother, said, we also showed "They got away with murder."
MR: How would you assess the relative "success" of COINTELPRO in
doing what it set out to do; the "success" of the assassination of
Fred Hampton?
JH: Under the secret COINTELPRO, J. Edgar Hoover's explicit mandate
to all FBI offices was to prevent the rise of a "Black Messiah" who
could "unify and electrify Black Nationalist Hate Groups." Hoover
considered most leaders of the black movement including Dr. King
and Elijah Muhammad as threats and all primarily black groups as
"Black Nationalist Hate Groups." Thus, the SNCC, Dr. King's Southern
Christian Leadership Conference, and the Muslims were all targets.
But Hoover declared the Panthers "the greatest threat to national
security." He ordered all FBI offices with Panther chapters to open a
COINTELPRO section whose mandate was to "disrupt, destroy and
neutralize" the Black Panther Party and "what it stands for." In
another memo, Hoover mandated local FBI offices to "cripple" the
Black Panther Party, including its Breakfast for Children Program.
Fred Hampton, the young militant and charismatic leader of the
Chicago Black Panthers, fit Hoover's description of the Messiah. He
could speak to welfare mothers, street gang members, and law
students, and was a model leader, doing the work as well as planning
the strategy and giving orders. He brought together disparate groups,
and formed a coalition with the Puerto Rican Young Lords and the
white Appalachian Young Patriots. With Fred as Chairman, the Chicago
Panthers' membership increased so rapidly that, for a while, they had
to stop taking new members.
As Fred's reputation and prominence increased, so did the FBI's
tracking of him. As early as 1967, Hoover sent memos to the
President, the directors of the CIA and State Departments, and the
Department of the Army warning them of Fred Hampton. When Fred led a
march to the Maywood City Council demanding a community swimming pool
and recreation center, Hoover was sending memos to all branches of
government, warning them of Fred Hampton. Hampton was placed on a
national "Agitator's Index." Seeing him as a threat, the FBI and
Hoover set out to eliminate him.
A year later the FBI induced the local police under the direction of
state's attorney Hanrahan to execute a raid on Fred's apartment and
provided them with a floor plan showing where Hampton would be
sleeping. It was the location where the police bullets converged and
where Hampton was killed. Publicly, the FBI took no position on the
raid, while internally, they considered it a success and gave the
informant who provided the floor plan a bonus.
So yes, if the goals of COINTELPRO were to eliminate a potential
Black Messiah and to cripple the Black Panther Party, the murder of
Hampton achieved their goals. The FBI's other objectives, to hide
their role in Fred's assassination and to maintain the secrecy of the
COINTELPRO, succeeded for four years. Only after the informant was
forced to surface in another case did we have the evidence of a
direct, federal connection. So, yes, I would have to say COINTELPRO
achieved its primary goals to neutralize the Panthers, but the FBI
role was ultimately exposed. There was a backlash as represented by
the Church Committee, which mandated Congressional oversight of
clandestine intelligence activity. I might add that Donald Rumsfeld,
President Ford's chief of staff, and Rumsfeld's aide, Dick Cheney,
were the chief opponents of restricting this activity. They convinced
President Ford to veto legislation that mandated expansion of the
Freedom of Information Act to include intelligence documents.
Congress overruled the veto.
MR: From your vantage point, how would you describe what has changed
(and what has not) in the relationship between the police and this
country's black communities since the days of Fred Hampton's murder?
JH: Police, then and now, are in the black community to maintain the
status quo. In the sixties, there was more militant resistance to
police brutality, and confrontations between police and activists
seeking a change were more prevalent. Today that resistance is
preempted by the mass incarceration of blacks. Police arrests and
criminal courts provide the mechanism for imprisoning large numbers
of black youth because of enhanced drug penalties and greater
enforcement of drug laws in the black community. Prison guard unions,
controlled by whites, help keep the coffers of the prison industrial
complex full and the prisons overflowing, despite the desperate
financial status of the states that fund them. Numerous studies show
that incarceration is seven times as expensive as providing drug
counseling and rehabilitation, but these cost-saving methods are
ignored because they don't result in the desired mass incarceration.
In the past the cops' faces were almost always white, and killer cops
were allowed to continue to brutalize the community. As I said
earlier, there have been small changes in police disciplinary
procedures that have allowed a few police in the most egregious cases
to be disciplined. However, I think many police still believe they
can act with impunity in the black community.
Mass incarceration is the government's current favored method for
dealing with potential black insurrection and dissent. Increased
criminal penalties, particularly for drug offenses, have resulted in
more than 25 percent of blacks being imprisoned, on parole, or on
probation during their youth. As a result, there is substantially
less militant black protest. Fred Hampton and the Panthers were an
alternative to gangs and drugs. With the murder of Fred Hampton,
Chicago's West Side has been rampant with gang and drug activity,
leading to frequent arrests and long prison sentences.
MR: It seems to us that the People's Law Office has been the most
significant and best of the radical law offices to have emerged from
the sixties; how would you summarize that experience for young
lawyers today who seek to do people's law and to support those who
confront the police state?
JH: We began in the sixties when there were a number of law
collectives defending the movement and fighting for people's rights.
I think my book is a tribute to the trials and tribulations, and
ultimately the satisfaction of doing people's law. I have the benefit
of looking back on forty years of working with partners who value
their work, their relationships with clients, and the benefit their
work provides our clients and society. We started as the legal arm of
the movement, representing the Panthers, SDS, anti-Vietnam War
protesters, and fighters for Puerto Rican independence. We continued
to represent prisoners charged in the Attica and Pontiac prison
rebellions, and later we became the lawyers for ACT UP, Iranian
students protesting the Shah, and for demonstrators protesting the
brutal, U.S.-supported death squads in Central America. As fewer
movements were in the streets, we focused on litigation that exposed
government wrongdoing. This included civil litigation that uncovered
unlawful police procedures, inhuman prison conditions, and, most
recently, the torturing of black suspects by a Chicago police
commander. The Hampton civil litigation, which makes up a substantial
part of the book, is the story of a David-and-Goliath struggle
against city, county, and federal attorneys its ups and downs, and
ultimately, the satisfaction of not only enduring, but prevailing.
MR: Today, compared with 1969-70, the percentage of the U.S.
population imprisoned and the size of the various U.S. uniformed and
secret police forces have increased enormously. Technological tools
for surveillance have improved, and judicial enforcement of the
protections of the Fourth Amendment has largely disappeared. Assuming
a yet more outrageous police state emerges say, unabashed Fox
fascism comes to power what possibilities exist for successful
resistance in the United States? What, if anything, can be learned
from the experiences of the late sixties and early seventies?
JH: I think the role of people's lawyers is to expose and
delegitimize repressive government policies and practices. If
successful, this can lead to the defeat of public figures identified
with police violence, such as state's attorney Edward Hanrahan and
the firing of Jon Burge, the police torturer in Chicago. The
disclosures of government misconduct obtained by progressive lawyers
can lead to the elimination (on paper, at least) of programs such as
COINTELPRO, and lead to investigative committees responding to the
public will. In Chicago, the exposure, through PLO's lawsuits, of Jon
Burge as a police torturer has led, not only to his being fired, but
to the reversal of the convictions of the many people he put on death
row using false confessions. Our lawsuits also played a large role in
Governor Ryan's commuting all death sentences in Illinois, the
recovery of compensation for many of Burge's victims, and now finally
to his indictment.
We had a pretty good look at what the imperial presidency looks like
with Bush and Cheney calling the shots. And, of course, the best way
to fight against the type of atmosphere you describe is to prevent
its formation. The movement must find the right strategies and
tactics to fight off repression by exposing it for what it is, and
making people realize how the government uses fear to take away their
rights. We should demand a new Church Committee to expose and make
illegal the abuses the spying and infiltration of political groups
permitted by the Patriot Act. The agents and their superiors who
devised and carried out the deadly acts of COINTELPRO were never
prosecuted. We must prosecute Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their
Constitution-averse lawyers for creating and directing the torture at
Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. They must be held accountable for their
criminal actions. This is the way to establish a moral perimeter
outlawing these practices and deterring people from using them in the future.
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