The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther - Hardcover

Haas, Jeffrey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1556527659 ISBN 13: 9781556527654

Publisher: Chicago Review Press, 2009

Synopsis

It’s around 7:00 A.M. on December 4, 1969, and attorney Jeff Haas is in a police lockup in Chicago, interviewing Fred Hampton’s fiancée. She is describing how the police pulled her from the room as Fred lay unconscious on their bed. She heard one officer say, He’s still alive.” She then heard two shots. A second officer said, He’s good and dead now.” She looks at Jeff and asks, What can you do?” The Assassination of Fred Hampton is Haas’s personal account of how he and People’s Law Office partner Flint Taylor pursued Hampton’s assassins, ultimately prevailing over unlimited government resources and FBI conspiracy. Not only a story of justice delivered, the book puts Hampton in a new light as a dynamic community leader and an inspiration in the fight against injustice.

About this title

About the Author

Jeffrey Haas is an attorney and cofounder of the People's Law Office, whose clients included the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, community activists, and a large number of those opposed to the Vietnam War. He has handled cases involving prisoners' rights, Puerto Rican nationalists, protestors opposed to human rights violations in Central America, police torture, and the wrongfully accused.

From Publishers Weekly

On December 4, 1969, Fred Hampton, the 21-year-old chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, was shot dead in his bed during a police raid. Hass and his law partner, Flint Taylor of the perpetually underfunded People's Law Office, spent the next decade fighting a well-financed opposition team and a hostile judge to prove that Hampton had been shot not in self-defense, as the police advocates claimed, but as the result of an FBI assassination The dramatic David and Goliath struggle embodies many of the era's fiercest debates, but Haas lacks the skill to transmute his experience into compelling reading. The prose is studded with clichés, and nearly every physical description reads like a checklist: age, size, build, skin color and length of Afro. Hass strays from the narrative to relate irrelevant information about his personal life, as when he recollects that his third wife first captured his attention when she propped her red, calf-length boots on his desk. The book is most engaging when Hass offers a straightforward account of the legal process, a testament to the power of the story—not the author's proficiency. (Nov.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Chicago Review Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1556527659
• ISBN 13: 9781556527654
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 424