“Government attacks on today’s radical movements have continued and intensified.” Read it @BlackAgendaReport -New Documents Suggest J. Edgar Hoover Was Involved in Fred Hampton’s Murder
In March 1976, we sat in a cavernous Chicago courtroom while FBI agent Roy Martin Mitchell testified in the federal civil rights case that we and our partners at the People’s Law Office had brought on behalf of the families of slain Illinois Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark and the seven survivors of the murderous pre-dawn Chicago police raid on their West Side apartment.
Thanks to the liberation of FBI documents from the Media, Pennsylvania FBI offices, the revelations of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities and our own hotly contested pretrial battles to uncover the truth about the raid, we had been able to document the local FBI’s central role in setting up the raid as part of the Bureau’s secret and highly illegal COINTELPRO Program . This program had previously targeted Black liberation leaders including Malcom X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Elijah Muhammad and the organizations that they led. As the Senate Select Committee would later find in its April 1976 report, the FBI had more recently turned its attention to “destroy[ing] the Black Panther Party.”
