
“‘Off the pig!’ was one of their very provocative slogans, which to Panthers meant getting abusive police out of the community, but I’m not sure the police necessarily saw it that way.”īy connecting the dots, Haas and his colleagues were able to show that a Chicago FBI agent, Roy Martin Mitchell, was the one who provided the map to Hanrahan. “They very much had a militant, anti-police position of community control of police,” says Haas, who is also the author of The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther. That’s not to say that Black Panthers in Chicago shied away from confrontation and armed provocation.

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“He started a health clinic and a free breakfast program.” “Hampton was this incredibly charismatic, young, dynamic leader who formed this ‘rainbow coalition’ with Puerto Ricans and poor whites from Appalachia,” says Jeffrey Haas, one of the founders of the People’s Law Office in Chicago and a member of the legal team that sued the Chicago Police and the FBI over Hampton’s killing. When he joined the Illinois Black Panther Party in 1968, he quickly gained a reputation as a powerful speaker and a coalition builder across racial lines to fight police brutality and address poverty in Chicago’s most neglected neighborhoods.

Hampton was an honors student from the Chicago suburbs who, as a youth leader with the NAACP, successfully campaigned to have a non-segregated swimming pool built in his hometown.
