December 4th, 1969. 5:29 a.m. Chicago police burst into a westside apartment with a Thompson submachine gun. They fired 99 rounds. Fred Hampton, 21-year-old deputy chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, was shot twice in the head while sleepin
September 18th, 1960, an 18-year-old named George Jackson was arrested for armed robbery at a Los Angeles gas station. $71 were stolen. Nobody was hurt. It was his second robbery charge, but the first as an adult. His courtappointed lawyer told him t
August 28th, 1963, 5:30 in the morning, Bayard Rustin stood alone on the National Mall, staring at empty grass. In 4 and 1/2 hours, a quarter million people were supposed to show up for the largest demonstration in American history. They weren’t comi
The Marin County Sheriff gave an explicit order, do not fire on the van. The guards fired anyway. Four people died including the judge they were supposed to be protecting. Not one of the men who pulled those triggers was ever charged.
The Black Panther Party’s newspaper reached 300,000 readers a week by 1970 while Jay Edgar Hoover was running a classified program to shut it down. The program failed. What broke the paper was not an FBI raid. It was not an IRS audit.
Officer John Frey’s 1967 traffic stop wasn’t random. The OPD had built a written surveillance protocol that predated COINTELPRO. The targeting architecture that killed Fred Hampton started in Oakland.
In 1967, the NRA helped draft the Mulford Act, California’s first modern gun control law. The target wasn’t criminals. The target was the Black Panther Party, whose patrols were legal. That was the problem.
William O’Neal drew the floor plan. He slipped the secobarbital into Hampton’s drink. He got roughly $300 a month from the FBI. 21 years later, he ran into traffic on Martin Luther King Day.
53 days after Hoover ordered imaginative counterintelligence against the Black Panthers, two Panthers were shot dead in a UCLA classroom. The FBI built the rivalry from scratch with forged letters, fake cartoons, and LAPD-supplied guns.
Richard Aoki gave the Black Panthers their first guns and trained the founders to shoot. For 16 years, he was also FBI informant SF 2496-R. The bureau’s director called the armed Panthers America’s greatest threat.