Biography
Mark Clark was a 22-year-old leader of the Peoria, Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. Born in Peoria in 1947, he had organized the chapters Free Breakfast for Children program. On the night of December 3-4, 1969, he traveled to Chicago with other Panthers to attend a meeting at Fred Hamptons West Side apartment.
In the predawn hours of December 4, 1969, fourteen members of the Cook County States Attorneys office, working from a floor plan supplied by FBI informant William ONeal, conducted a no-knock raid on the apartment. Clark was killed by a single gunshot to the chest as he sat in a chair near the door, in what the official autopsy and ballistics reconstruction later established was the first shot fired in the raid — by police, not by Panthers, despite official initial claims of a Panther shootout. Fred Hampton was killed in his bed minutes later. A federal civil-rights lawsuit by the survivors and the Hampton and Clark families was eventually settled in 1982 for $1.85 million, paid jointly by the federal government, Cook County, and the City of Chicago. The Jericho Movement lists Clark among its ancestor political prisoners.
