CHICAGO _ For a generation of Chicagoans, their opinion of what happened in 1969 when Chicago police raided the West Side apartment of Black Panther Party members depended greatly on what neighborhood they called home.
For the public at large, it was as police officials described: a dramatic gunfight launched against police by violent black nationalists that left two dead and four wounded.
But for others, particularly socially conscious African Americans, the Dec. 4 raid on the two-flat at 2337 W. Monroe St. was a cold-blooded execution of Black Panthers leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, ordered by federal authorities eager to snuff out burgeoning black leadership.
Officially, the Cook County state's attorney's 4:30 a.m. raid by 14 Chicago police officers began as the execution of a search warrant to turn up weapons and explosives that the feared black power group was supposedly hoarding inside.
But it didn't take long for the police's version of events _ that Black Panther members opened fire first on officers knocking on the door _ to be challenged.
Survivors described a far more frightening scene: Officers armed with shotguns and rifles opening fire on sleeping Black Panther members inside, among them Hampton's pregnant fiancee. A special federal grand jury determined that police sprayed 82 to 99 gunshots through doors, walls and windows while just one shot appeared to have been fired by someone inside.
Clark was killed in early gunfire, but survivors Harold Bell and Hampton's fiancee, Akua Njeri, then known as Debra Johnson, testified at the 1972 criminal trial against the state's attorney and officers in the raid that Hampton was pulled alive from his bed and shot dead after the group had surrendered. Later, an FBI whistleblower said the agency coaxed local law enforcement across the country, including Chicago police, into deadly clashes with heavily armed Black Panthers.
In 1983, a federal judge approved a settlement that awarded $1.85 million to survivors of the raid and families of the two men who were killed, to be paid by the federal government, the city of Chicago and Cook County.
Historian Clayborne Carson, director of Stanford University's Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, said the Black Panthers' fast rise during 1960s was due to their leadership's ability to speak to young black disenfranchisement.
"What the Black Panthers did was take that generation of young people who were disturbed by what was happening in the black community and developed a political answer," said Carson, who has written extensively on the Black Panthers, King and Malcolm X.
"The Black Panther Party had dynamic leadership that drew people to it, and Fred Hampton was a wonderful example of that. He would have made a wonderful leader."
Carson and G. Flint Taylor, a longtime Chicago attorney who has worked on cases involving the use of excessive force by police, said modern movements like Black Lives Matter that address police brutality have taken up the mantle of the Black Panthers. Taylor also represented the Hampton and Clark families in the 13-year civil lawsuit.
If the 1969 deaths were meant to stall black leadership in Chicago, Taylor said the outrage by activists across racial lines over Hampton and Clark's deaths helped lay the political groundwork that "led in a straight line to the voting out of (State's Attorney Edward) Hanrahan in 1972 ... and of course, that political movement became the underpinnings of the movement" to elect Harold Washington as the city's first black leader and later Barack Obama, as the nation's first black president.
Decades later, the West Side killings could still divide the city and cause tempers to flare. In 2006, a West Side alderman proposed naming a section of Monroe Street as Chairman Fred Hampton Way. The proposal, which initially flew under the public radar, soon raised the ire of the local police union and the relatives of fallen police officers. They claimed police were merely pushing back against violent militants who encouraged armed resistance.
"It's a dark day when we honor someone who would advocate killing policemen and who took great advantage of the communities he claimed to have been serving," the Fraternal Order of Police president said at the time. Weeks before the 1969 raid, a gunbattle had left two Chicago officers and one Black Panther member dead.
The attempt to rename the street failed, aggravating past scars and showing that the "echoes of that turbulent era still reverberate in a city still divided by race and class," writer and commentator Salim Muwakkil wrote in 2006.
