◆ SpookStack

By Jerry Crimmins —_— after 11 o’clock on the night of Dec. 3, 1969, a group of members of the Black Panther Party returned to an apartment on West Monroe Street after attending a “‘political education” class. Some of the Panthers, including the leader of the Illinois chapter, Fred Hampton, 21, lived in the apartment, on the first floor of a two-flat. Others slept there occasionally, and some simply did not want to go home yet. By any standards, it was a crummy place at 2337 W. Monroe. It was run down and dirty, it needed painting, it was cold and drafty. It consisted of five small rooms and a bathroom. . From a distance that night, a whirl- wind was bearing down on this apart- F ment. This is not to say that what was to pass was preplanned. That is much disputed. But the whirlwind was com- c ing, even if all who were eventually involved did not know it. In the apartment, Harold Bell, 23, a Viet Nam veteran whose hometown was Rockford, went into the kitchen but found nothing to eat. The group decided to send’ someone.out to buy food, and afterwards they shared a cheap meal of spaghetti, hot dogs, and Kool-Aide. The conversation continued well past midnight, and gradually those who were going home drifted away. Among those who left early, probably even before the main group arrived, was Panther Wil- liam O’Neal who, unbeknownst to the others, was an informant for the Feder- al Bureau of Investigation. O'Neal had told the FBI that the Panthers had collected a lot of guns, including some which were illegal, in the apartment, * and this information had been passed on to the special prosecutions unit of the . State's attorney’s police. Deborah Johnson, 18, who was preg- nant with Hampton's child, retired: to the rearmost of thé two bedrooms {known subsequently as the south bed- room) shortly after midnight. Hampton soon joined her. On the bedroom phone, Johnson called up the Hampton family in Maywood, and she and Hampton talked to family members, but Fred fell asleep with the phéne at his ear. After Johnson hung up, both went to sleep. In the living room, Bell and Mark Clark, 22, a member from Peoria, along with Louis Trueluck, 39, and. Brenda Hairis, 18, continued talking. At the same time, they took apart a shotgun and began to clean it. By 4:45 a.m., all but Trueluck and December 2, 1979 - Mark Clark perhaps Clark were asleep. At this time, eight policemen were out in front of the apartment and six at the rear, but the Panthers were apparently una- ware of that fact. Each policeman carried a revolver. ” The raiders also had five shotguns, a .30 caliber carbine and a .45 caliber Thompson submachine gun. Sgt. Daniel Groth, who planned and led the raid, knocked with his hand on the outside door of the first floor apart- ment. When no one answered, he knocked with his gun. The Black Panther Party for Self De- fense (the original name) was founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, Cal., on Oct. 15, 1966. That day, the two wrote up their 10-point program, later summarized by a feder- al grand jury: ““(It) demands social change by di- rect action, including force, if neces- sary, to restructure the ‘system’ to per- mit blacks to control their own status and values without dependence on or exploitation by the ‘white establish- ment.’ The program calls for land, bread, housing, education, and employment; it also calls for communi- ty control of police and schools and such things as all-black juries for black defendants.” The program does not completely de- scribe the Panthers, who also proudly called for “revolution” by the gun. In Seale’s opinion, Newton, 24 years old at the founding, was one of the toughest residents of the Oakland ghet- to. In the béok “Seize the Time,” Seale described the early recruiting for the rty: . Pe Huey wanted brothers off the block — brothers who had been out there robbing banks, brothers who had been pimping, brothers who had been ped- dling dope, brothers who ain't gonna take no once they get themselves together in the area of political educa- tion ... Newton realized that once you organize the brothers he ran with ... you get revolutionaries who are too much.” Seale was 29. The Panthers regularly quoted from Mao's Little Red Book about revolution. They glorified guns and resisting police. The founders called police an “‘occupy- ing army” in the ghetto. For Panthers, the feud was more per- sonal than it was for middle-class “‘re- volutionaries.”’ The founders said blacks were con- continued on pags 58 . i H }