Chicago on the Make
Page 29
UC chancellor Lawrence Kimpton, the man who had helped broker the real estate coup that was going to cleanse the area around the university of thousands of working-class black families, it is worth mentioning, was the same man who in 1958 had intervened to forbid the university’s literary magazine, the Chicago Review, from publishing the works of Beat writers Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. Kimpton was thus clearly not keen on allowing the University of Chicago to reach out into the community and become a refuge from the backlash, a role that universities at times played in the late 1950s and 1960s. But more important to Chicago becoming a full-fledged backlash city so early was the enormous power of the Daley machine in co-opting, blackmailing, infiltrating, and, when all else failed, using brute force to stifle any potential opposition to itself and its friends.
In fact, such practices predated Daley’s rule. Starting in the 1930s, Chicago had become, according to historian Frank Donner, “the national capital of police repression,” a reputation that went far beyond the Memorial Day Massacre of 1937.9 The Chicago Police Department’s “Red Squad” was rooting out Communists and using intimidation to subvert the labor movement throughout the 1930s and 1940s. The success of these efforts was revealed by the quiescence of its unions during World War II, while its industrial neighbor to the east, Detroit, was a hotbed of labor agitation. But the Red Squad’s purview did not stop at the workplace; it extended into any organization engaged in political activities. “Issues dealing with labor, wages, working hours, strikes, peace, housing, education, social welfare, race, religion, disarmament, and anti-militarization” were all named as sources of “subversive activities” by the Chicago Red Squad’s Lieutenant Frank J. Heimoski in a 1963 speech to a national conference of police intelligence officers: in other words, in the paranoid minds of Red Squad operatives, the very idea of politics itself, when practiced by any person or group not directly affiliated with the Cook County Democratic Party, was subversive. “Our job,” Heimoski claimed, “is to detect these elements and their contemplated activity and alert proper authorities.”10
The extent to which the Chicago Police Department’s Red Squad stunted the development of a political and cultural infrastructure for the left in Chicago is one of the great untold stories of American history.11 In 1960, the CPD claimed it had intelligence files on 117,000 local individuals and some 14,000 organizations nationwide, most of which were destroyed after the ACLU and a coalition of local civic and religious groups called the Alliance to End Repression successfully sued it for improper police intelligence activities. The files that survived the shredder, however, were more than adequate to show how aggressively the Red Squad had, through illegal surveillance and infiltration, intimidated, harassed, and effectively neutralized individuals and organizations who dared to think outside the box.
Police repression was thus a deeply established tradition in Chicago in the decades leading up to the great progressive challenges of the mid-1960s. It was as emblematic of the city as the ivy-covered red brick walls at Wrigley Field. But the technologies and methods of repression reached a whole other level during the turbulent years of the 1960s. To keep up with the rapid proliferation of political organizations and individuals with multiple and shifting affiliations, the Red Squad developed a sophisticated cross-referencing system, and to counter the development of threats to the machine’s power in black, Puerto Rican, and Mexican neighborhoods, it deployed an army of undercover operatives to engage not only in intelligence activities but also in tactics of subversion. The Red Squad left no stone unturned. There were even files on the Old Town School of Folk Music, and no small number of them either. But the organizations and activists that drew the most attention were those attempting to build bridges across different racial and ethnic communities, and it is here one can detect a mayoral agenda at work, even if the purge of documents would later cover most of its traces.
The Daley machine had expertly maintained its power by the logic of divide and rule and by fostering a political culture in which the substance of politics consisted of nonideological, neighborhood-level struggles for shares of the patronage pie. Anything that disrupted this status quo set off alarms in City Hall. In the months leading up to the convention, for example, the buzz in the Red Squad revolved around the potential for a concerted mobilization of white middle-class students and ghetto blacks affiliated with supergangs and black power groups—a potential demonstration of cross-class and cross-racial solidarity that would have created a public relations problem for Mayor Daley. Thus, this was not only a matter of police intelligence but also one of special operations. Chicago cops blanketed the South and West Sides, rounding up gang leaders and warning them that they would pay a heavy price if they were seen anywhere near the convention, while undercover police operatives sought to stir up racial tensions among both black power and student groups.
In fact, the Red Squad was a big beneficiary of the FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program), a holdover from the rabid anticommunism of the 1950s, which funneled manpower and resources to a number of major American cities to help them “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” organizations and individuals viewed as posing threats to national security and social order. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover believed, much like Mayor Daley, that black power organizations were worthy of special attention, and nothing caused more consternation at FBI headquarters than when these organizations began to make alliances and develop their bases.
A bright, charismatic young activist named Fred Hampton, who assumed the leadership of the Illinois Black Panther Party in 1968, found himself on COINTELPRO’s high priority list around this time. An electric orator and savvy organizer, Chairman Fred, as he was known within his entourage, had shown great promise by organizing hundreds of youths in the suburbs west of Chicago for the NAACP Youth Council. “Power to the people” was his mantra, and as chairman of the Illinois Panthers, the twenty-one-year-old Hampton quickly began forging ties with activists all over the city—black, white, and Puerto Rican. Hampton was in good company for this mission; among the leaders of the Illinois Panthers were several talented activists, including future congressman (and eventual mayoral candidate) Bobby Rush—the man who in 2000 would deal Barack Obama his first crushing defeat in electoral politics.
Understanding that it suited the needs of the Daley machine to keep these communities in competition with each other for resources and power, Hampton set out in 1969 to assemble what he referred to as a “rainbow coalition” that brought his Illinois Panthers together with the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican street gang turned political organization under the talented leadership of Jose “Cha-Cha” Jimenez, and the Young Patriots, an enlightened group of working-class whites, many of whom were the children of poor white southern migrants who had settled in a “hillbilly” section of the North Side Uptown neighborhood in the 1940s and 1950s. Their fathers had rallied around Confederate flags, but the radical currents circulating through Chicago in the 1960s had turned these Dixie sons into homegrown Marxists with a nuanced understanding of the interplay between race and class. These were strange and exciting times indeed. And even though the Black Panthers, Young Lords and Young Patriots were, as young idealists who dared to extend their hands across racial lines, not exactly mainstream elements of their communities, this astonishing alignment held the potential of establishing a power bloc that brought together the West Side ghetto, the Near North Side Puerto Rican barrios of Humboldt Park and Lincoln Park, and the white working-class sections of the Far North Side neighborhoods of Uptown, Edgewater, and Rogers Park.
Moreover, in an effort to get Chicago’s more powerful gangs behind his project to bring power to the people, Hampton had also made inroads into the Main 21, the governing body of the federation of neighborhood gangs that now constituted the mighty Blackstone Rangers. Many felt that if the Rangers committed to the cause, the Vice Lords and the Gangster Disciples would follow, and the Daley administration would be facing th
e dreaded alliance of supergangs it had feared for years. However, there was still some work to be done to make this happen. Hampton’s efforts to recruit in Ranger territory, for example, had led to the shooting of a Panther and then a heated sit-down with Jeff Fort that culminated in threats and dozens of Rangers bursting into the room with guns drawn. The Rangers were hostile to any encroachments on their turf, no matter how well intentioned. Yet, Hampton was allowed to walk out of that meeting alive, and in view of his charisma and determination, nobody in City Hall could be too sure that he would not be able to eventually get through to the headstrong Ranger leadership. The twenty-one-year-old was, by the winter of 1969, quite likely the most dangerous man in Chicago, and, as such, he was high up on J. Edgar Hoover’s list of the most dangerous men in the United States.
One can only imagine Hampton’s frustration about the refusal of his brothers in the Blackstone Rangers to accept that neither he nor their brothers in the Disciples were the enemies. What he would never know was how much this mistrust had been sown by informants and infiltrators executing stratagems issued from high up in the FBI. The Rangers were trying to make the transition to community activists, but they still lived by the codes of the streets, which told them that threats to their power and pride could not go unanswered, so it was all too easy for FBI and Red Squad operatives to plant all kinds of rumors and doubts in their heads. The Panthers, on the other hand, were less susceptible to such subterfuges; this was a group that furnished new members with readings lists that included works by Karl Marx and Frantz Fanon. Stopping Fred Hampton would thus require a different approach.
On December 4, 1969, just before dawn, a heavily armed tactical police unit under the command of state’s attorney Edward Hanrahan burst into the West Side apartment at 2337 W. Monroe Street where Hampton and several other Panthers lived and shot nearly one hundred rounds of ammunition at anything that moved or slept. When the guns fell silent, Hampton and fellow Panther Mark Clark lay dead and four other Panthers had been seriously wounded. Hampton had been shot in the head at point-blank range, execution style, while lying in his bed. Ostensibly, the police were there to serve a search warrant for illegal weapons and things got out of hand, but evidence from the crime scene strongly suggested political assassination. The police displayed a pile of weapons that “six or seven” Panthers had allegedly used to fire upon them, a story that was predictably backed up by the city’s investigation into the affair. But a federal grand jury report of the incident issued on May 15, 1970, was highly critical of the city’s handling of the autopsies and ballistics tests, which, according to the report, concealed the fact that Hampton was shot in the head from above and falsified indisputable ballistics evidence indicating that only one of ninety-nine bullets fired could not be traced to police guns. The report revealed hardly anything that most people did not already know, except perhaps the extent to which the machine and its hired guns could act with nearly complete impunity. As is often the case in Chicago, utter desperation about the impossibility of challenging the political order gave way to jaded sarcasm. Mike Royko, who, incidentally, was highly critical of the Black Panthers, remarked in response to Hanrahan’s comment that the police had “miraculously” escaped injury: “Indeed it does appear that miracles occurred. The Panthers’ bullets must have dissolved in the air before they hit anybody or anything. Either that or the Panthers were shooting in the wrong direction—namely, at themselves.”12
Further evidence would surface in the years to come that would shed even more light on the circumstances surrounding Hampton’s murder, and, for that matter, on the entire history of the left during its most pivotal moment on the political stage in the last half century. Reflections on why the left seemed to implode in 1968, opening the door for the backlash and the subsequent conservative ascendency, have often emphasized ideological factors that weakened its ability to rally people behind a coherent, unifying reform project. Some, like SDS veteran and prominent sociologist Todd Gitlin, point to the New Left’s abandonment of liberalism and move to extremist politics, while other, more reactionary commentators lampoon those who took to the streets in the 1960s as drugged-out or sex-crazed freaks driven by senseless rebellion against a society that had bestowed them with only privileges and opportunities. Another interpretation points to the idea that the rise of identity politics in the 1960s splintered the left into so many solipsistic, identity-centered projects—black power, brown power, yellow power, feminism, radical feminism, gay liberation, and so on—that it was no longer possible to build a progressive movement out of blocs that had everything to gain by joining forces against the status quo.13
Largely understated in most accounts of the period is the story of state-sponsored repression, which, as Fred Hampton’s murder so dramatically demonstrates, took the form of a highly sophisticated campaign of countersubversion involving the close cooperation of federal and local authorities. Chicago cops harbored a palpable hostility towards the Black Panthers because they had the audacity to stand up to them with lethal weapons, and Mayor Daley wanted them neutralized because of their increasingly popular breakfast programs in black Chicago and their coalition-building efforts throughout the city. But the FBI, which, like the Daley administration, wanted to see the gangs continue to kill each other off, played a critical role in ultimately closing the book on Hampton and the Illinois Panthers. It was the FBI that had enlisted the help of William O’Neal, who would become the Brutus in Fred Hampton’s very brief life on the political stage. A car thief by trade who had agreed to go undercover to avoid doing hard time, O’Neal was so convincing that by the winter of 1969 he was put in charge of security for the Illinois Panthers. In a story fit for Hollywood, O’Neal furnished the Chicago police with a detailed floor plan of Hampton’s apartment and, according to his own confession, slipped a powerful barbiturate into Hampton’s drinks the night before the raid, which explains why the normally agile Hampton never made it out of his bed during the raid. O’Neal, who was just eighteen at the time, spent the next sixteen years in a witness protection program, after which he returned to Chicago a broken man. In 1990, in the early hours of Martin Luther King Day, O’Neal’s gut-wrenching guilt finally pushed him to try to make his peace with Chairman Fred by fatally throwing himself in front of a speeding car on the Eisenhower Expressway.14
While there is no easy way to assess the impact that such countersubversive activities had on left politics nationwide, the evidence from Chicago is weighty, to say the least. Hampton’s murder was certainly the most dramatic case—the incident that threatened to blow the cover off the whole enterprise—but one would be hard-pressed to find a single political figure on Chicago’s left who did not feel the heat in the 1960s and early 1970s. In Chicago things got hot enough to, as COINTELPRO intended, “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” a generation of activists, some of whom would spend significant stretches of their adult lives in prison on charges they denied.
Although we will never know the entire truth, in view of what Fred Hampton’s murder reveals about the lengths authorities were willing to go in their war on the left, it hardly takes a stretch of imagination to believe that the FBI and CPD would also engage in an extensive campaign of frame-ups. Just three weeks before the raid on the Panthers, Vice Lord leader Bobby Gore, one of the main forces behind the West Side gang’s successful turn towards political activism, was arrested for a murder he maintained he did not commit until his death. Around the same time, State’s Attorney Hanrahan managed to get eighteen indictments (mostly for easily contrived charges of assault and battery on police) against Jose Jimenez in the span of six weeks, an offensive that coincided with Jimenez’s efforts to mobilize the Young Lords against a redevelopment plan in Lincoln Park that would lead to the displacement of thousands of Puerto Rican residents. This was just a few months after United Methodist pastor Bruce Johnson, who had provided his Chicago People’s Church as headquarters for the Young Lords, was viciously stabbed to
death in his Lincoln Park home, along with his wife, Eugenia. While we may never know for sure the truth about such incidents, the pieces seem to fit together.
What the events of 1969 tell us is that the brutality on display at the Democratic Convention of 1968 was far from aberrant; it was merely the spectacular coming out of a systematic, banal campaign of political violence that flourished in the new national backlash context of the post-1968 years. Some New Left leaders felt there was something to be gained by flushing this campaign out into the open for “the whole world” to see, but such hopes ultimately proved to be naive. Writing in this precise moment and with the unfolding Chicago story clearly in mind, Hannah Arendt warned in her essay On Violence that “since violence always needs justification, an escalation of the violence in the streets may bring about a truly racist ideology to justify it, in which case violence and riots may disappear from the streets and be transformed into the invisible terror of a police state.”15 This was a fairly accurate way to view what was transpiring in Chicago in the years following the convention. The war on gangs declared by Mayor Daley and his right-hand man Edward Hanrahan in the spring of 1969 represented the symbiotic relationship of racist ideology and police terror; notions of ghetto pathology reduced all black youths to gang members, and, as gang members, youths were thus deemed incapable of anything other than criminal behavior. This, in turn, justified a merciless wave of police repression, which, by criminalizing youths out on the streets, served to prove the point that all black youths were gang members, and all gang members were criminals. Once again, Chicago was in the vanguard of conservative politics. A little more than a decade later, during the Reagan administration’s War on Drugs in the 1980s, municipalities all over the country would seize upon similar antigang offensives to garner federal funds for law enforcement initiatives and win over fearful white middle-class voters.16