The Early Posthumous Work

A Thirty-Five-Year-Old Book Review

118 A Thirty-Five-Year-Old Book Review Michael Arlen’s An American Verdict (Doubleday, 196 pages, $6.95) is, among other things, an index of how seductive paranoia has become. The book is a short history of the aftermath of the December 1969 Chicago “gunbattle” in which Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed and four other Black Panthers were wounded. It is also an informal study of the effects of publicity on events. It deals in passing with Chicago history, recent American history and the end of “the revolution.” But first of all An American Verdict is the story of how the Cook County state’s attorney and a handful of policemen shot two black men to death and escaped punishment. In 1969, Fred Hampton was chairman of the Black Panther Party in Illinois. Arlen describes him this way: “. . . but Fred Hampton had seemed to many to have been a different sort of black activist. He was young. He came from solid people—his father had worked twenty years for Corn Products in nearby Argo. Hampton had played football at Maywood High School, and while there had organized a protest for a community swimming pool. As a Panther, he spoke well, with warmth, and not always with anger.” Steven Barthelme 119 The police raid occurred two weeks after one Panther and two cops had been killed in a gunfight, and after months of other gunfights, police harassment (“charges dropped”), and close press coverage. Panther headquarters was a shabby two-bedroom apartment on Chicago’s West Monroe Street. Nine men and women had been inside when fourteen cops showed up at five in the morning to serve a search warrant for illegal weapons. Afterward, the public show began. The state’s attorney, Edward Hanrahan, issued a series of statements. Hanrahan was important in the political structure and thought to be a likely future mayor; his “Special Prosecutions Unit” had planned and executed the raid. The police who had conducted the raid performed an elaborately rehearsed half-hour reenactment for a local TV station. The statements from Hanrahan and other official sources ran like this: As soon as Sergeant Daniel Groth and Officer James Davis, leading our men, announced their office, occupants of the apartment attacked them with shotgun fire. The officers immediately took cover. The occupants continued firing at our policemen from several rooms within the apartment. Thereafter, three times Sergeant Groth ordered all his men to cease firing and told the occupants to come out with their hands up. Each time, one of the occupants replied, “Shoot it out,” and they continued firing at the police officers. Finally, the occupants threw down their guns and were arrested. Or, at a press conference, behind a table of weapons from Panther headquarters: “. . . I point also to the automatic revolver which was used by Fred Hampton in the course of the attack on the police . . .” The curious synthesis of Jack Webb and Amy Vanderbilt is more than simple officialese. The man is not only bending the truth, he is also acting (not real well), and acting in a kind of theater in which we have required him to participate. Public reality. 120 The Early Posthumous Work The Chicago police’s Internal Investigation Division conducted a quick inquiry into the raid, concluding that the police were blameless. On January 23, 1970, the coroner’s jury returned “justifiable homicide.” A week later a Cook County grand jury indicted the seven surviving Panthers for attempted murder; the indictments were later withdrawn. A federal grand jury investigated and instead of indictments it produced (May 1970) a “report” which contained FBI findings to the effect that there was physical evidence of one shot by the Panthers and evidence of between eighty-three and ninety-nine shots from the police. Paraffin tests showed that Fred Hampton had not fired a gun. Autopsies disclosed that he had died from two shots through the head and neck, close together, and probably fired at close range. In other words, everything indicated that as Panther Bobby Rush said on the day after the raid, “Hampton was murdered in his sleep.” Still later, in April 1971, a special Cook County grand jury failed to indict the police for the raid itself, but did indict Hanrahan and thirteen others other for “conspiracy to obstruct justice” after the raid. It took four months and the Illinois Supreme Court to get the judge...