In January 1990, activist Akua Njeri attended the funeral of William O’Neal, the man responsible for leaking information to Chicago police that aided in their assassination of her fiancée, Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, in 1969.
“I had planned to spit in the casket and then turn it over,” she said by phone from Chicago. “But when I got there, it didn’t look like O’Neal in the casket and I froze. I kept saying, ‘That’s not him.’ One of the brothers there said, ‘Oh yeah, that’s him.’ But it was a different O’Neal that was in the casket. So I didn’t get to do what I had planned for days to do.”
A career criminal turned FBI informant, the 17-year-old O’Neal infiltrated the Black Panther Party and quickly climbed the ranks to become one of the heads of Hampton’s security. He gave the FBI the layout of the apartment Hampton shared with Njeri and slipped the sedative secobarbital in Hampton’s drink so he wouldn’t wake up during the police raid and assassination. Hampton was just 21 years old when he was murdered. Read More...
