Acting on intelligence supplied by an FBI informant, Chicago police stormed an apartment on the city's West Side around 4 a.m. and shot Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton, 21, dead in his bed, along with fellow Panther Mark Clark. Investigations later revealed police fired far more shots than the Panthers did, fueling accusations that the raid was an assassination coordinated with the FBI's COINTELPRO program.
Fred Hampton was a rising star of the Black Panther movement, a 21-year-old organizer credited with brokering a nonaggression pact among rival Chicago street gangs and building a multiracial 'Rainbow Coalition' of poor whites, Latinos, and Black activists. That made him, in the FBI's internal language, a priority target for neutralization under COINTELPRO, the bureau's covert program to disrupt domestic political movements.
An FBI informant named William O'Neal, who had infiltrated Hampton's inner circle as a bodyguard, supplied police with a detailed floor plan of the apartment, reportedly including the exact location of the bed where Hampton slept—possibly drugged that night by O'Neal himself. At roughly 4 a.m. on December 4, fourteen Chicago police officers opened fire. Ballistics later showed the Panthers fired only once; police fired somewhere between 90 and 99 rounds.
Hampton was found dead in his bed; Mark Clark was killed guarding the door. Survivors, including Hampton's pregnant fiancée Deborah Johnson, were dragged out and charged with attempted murder, charges later dropped. A subsequent federal civil suit resulted in a $1.85 million settlement in 1982, and the raid remains one of the most cited examples of state violence against the civil rights and Black Power movements.