William O'Neal

Fred Hampton was 21 years old and chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party when Chicago Police killed him in his bed. Mark Clark died in the same raid. The police fired as many as 90 to 99 shots into the apartment on West Monroe Street; the Panthers fired one, into the ceiling. Witnesses said officers shot Hampton twice in the back of the head at close range. A coroner's jury called it justifiable homicide. The raid worked because the FBI had a man inside. William O'Neal had risen to head Hampton's security and held keys to Panther headquarters and safe houses. At the Bureau's instruction he drew a floor plan of Hampton's apartment, marking where Hampton slept. The FBI passed that diagram to State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan before the raid and paid O'Neal a bonus afterward. This was COINTELPRO, the FBI program built to infiltrate and break Black movements and discredit their leaders. Later documents tied Director J. Edgar Hoover and the Bureau directly to the operation. How to judge O'Neal himself is genuinely unsettled. The FBI first caught him at 18 for car theft and offered to drop the charges and pay him to spy. His uncle said he cooperated to stay out of jail, got in over his head, and was tortured by guilt for the rest of his life. O'Neal refused that frame in his own words: "I had no allegiance to the Panthers," he said, and "I was part of the struggle... I'll let history speak for me." He died in 1990, struck by a car on Interstate 290 the night his "Eyes on the Prize II" interview first aired. The killing of Hampton stands at the center of this history; O'Neal is a figure within it.