Biography
Mark Clark was a 22-year-old leader of the Peoria, Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. Born in Peoria, 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.
