Jeffrey Haas. The Assassination of Fred Hampton.

Jeffrey Haas. The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther. Lawrence Hill Books, 2010. 380 pages.

You’ve seen the movie, Judas and the Black Messiah. This is the story of what happened next, written by one of the attorneys for Fred Hampton’s family.

Jeffrey Haas was a fairly new lawyer in the late 1960s. Jewish and Southern, from Atlanta, he attended law school at the University of Chicago, and became involved in Civil Rights and anti-war work really early. After law school, he and three classmates formed the People’s Law Office, through which they represented (for free or cheap) the Black Panthers, various others engaged in Civil Rights, and prisoners charged in the Attica (NY) Prison uprising.

After Fred’s death, these young and inexperienced lawyers took on the Chicago Police Department and the FBI, working to prove that Fred’s death was murder, an intentional act of the CPD and FBI. They sought to uncover the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) whereby Hoover targeted Black leaders and others he deemed a threat to society.

The story is well told, with high courtroom drama and consistent narrative flow, but maddening, all the same. You didn’t think the FBI killed people? They didn’t (this time). They got the Chicago police to do it, promising no prosecutions. Add a right-wing conspiratorial judge (cut from the same cloth as the judge who presided over the trial of the Chicago Seven), a massive and corrupt bureaucracy, an opposition of unlimited resources, and the dirty tricks of the Nixon years, and the young lawyers seem up against a wall. These young, brash, “nothing left to lose” attorneys leave it all on the courtroom floor. Multiple times. The resolution isn’t as satisfying as I would have hoped, but it ain’t nothing.

I don’t love stories where white men are the heroes. I’ve read too many of those. (And none of these men holds a bravery candle to Fred Hampton and the Panthers.) I don’t love that the women in the office get lower billing and little notice. Surely their work on other cases or their free 24/7 research on this case aided the “stars” in the eventual outcome. Nevertheless, Haas and all his colleagues fought the good fight, and built careers on civil rights, eschewing the money they could have made in private sector work. None of their marriages seem to have lasted, but the People’s Law Office continues. Which is the most hopeful part of all.