On December 4, 1969, the Chicago Police burst into the apartment of Black Panther Fred Hampton. Equipped with machine guns, rifles, shotguns, and handguns, the police not only fired first but discharged upward of ninety shots. The Panthers, according to the findings of a grand jury, fired at most a single shot.

The violent raid took the lives of Hampton and Mark Clark. Hampton was murdered while he lay asleep in bed, likely drugged by FBI informant William O’Neal. After police removed Hampton’s pregnant fiancée, Akua Njeri, from the bedroom, she could hear an officer asking if he was still alive. She says two gunshots were then fired, and then another officer said, “He’s good and dead now.”

Hampton’s and Clark’s murders were directly the work of the Chicago Police and Cook County state’s attorney Edward Hanrahan. But a landmark Senate investigation into the misconduct of US intelligence agencies and a protracted wrongful death suit uncovered that the police raid was part of a secret FBI domestic intelligence operation to neutralize political movements that challenged “the existing political and social order.”