Dead of Night: The Execution of Fred Hampton
Pegasus Players Julius Caesar ChicSpeare Production Company at TinFish Theatre
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Already a seasoned activist when he was killed at the age of 21, Hampton was a teenage NAACP organizer from Maywood who became chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party when it was chartered in 1968. Under Hampton’s guidance, the group sought to improve both the material and intellectual lives of the residents of Chicago’s impoverished west- and south-side ghettos: the Panthers ran a health clinic and free-breakfast programs for kids, while Hampton preached a Marxist gospel of proletarian revolution. The group quickly attracted the attention of local law-enforcement authorities, including Cook County state’s attorney Edward V. (for “Vicious,” some said) Hanrahan and the local office of the FBI, which sought through the COINTELPRO program to infiltrate and disrupt radical organizations.
FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover was particularly concerned that a “black messiah” might emerge to take the place of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.–and the charismatic, educated Hampton fit the bill. But this Jesus had his Judas: William O’Neal, a car thief turned informer who joined the Panthers as an FBI plant, passing on information to his overseers that helped them harass the Panthers and fueled the paranoia leading to increased violence on both sides. O’Neal provided the floor plan for the policemen who burst into Hampton’s west-side apartment in the predawn hours of December 4, 1969, and fired nearly 100 rounds of ammunition, killing Hampton as he slept next to his pregnant girlfriend.
But Wilson’s relatively simple staging generally fails to communicate the heated atmosphere of Chicago in the late 60s: the Hampton case was part of a much larger tapestry that also included the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. and the riots that followed, as well as the Democratic National Convention riots and the Chicago Seven trial. Nor does it capture the way the Hampton affair galvanized black resistance to the local machine. Also missing is any mention of the Panthers’ minister of defense, Bobby Rush–now a congressman and probable mayoral candidate next year. Rush was also visited by Hanrahan’s squad the same night, but he was tipped off by a source inside the Police Department and escaped his comrade’s fate.
But James never really explores the implications of her analogy. Instead she settles for simplistic racial casting: Caesar, Antony, and most of their allies are black, while their enemies–including Caesar’s friend turned killer Brutus–are white. The idea makes no sense: there was no secret treacherous white supporter in Washington’s city council. His white foes were well-known, while his few white allies were extraordinarily loyal. A more accurate approach would have had Brutus played by a black actor, representing Washington’s unreliable black “friends” who conspired with their white colleagues to undermine the mayor and seize more power for themselves.
