IT IS DECEMBER 1969. You are at a very chaotic and disorganized house tour, which is also the scene of a double murder. The murder occurred a few hours ago, and there is blood everywhere. You’ve waited in line on a subzero Chicago morning, and hundreds of people will follow you, snaking around the block. Inside, documentary filmmakers pace the premises, and lawyers pick through bloodied bedclothes, tag and bag spent casings, photograph and label bullet holes. There are no police in sight. People are pretty sure the FBI did it.
The tour begins with an unusually emphatic version of the standard docents’ warning: “Don’t touch nothin’! Don’t move nothin’! We want to keep everything just the way it is! Don’t touch the walls. Please!”
Those walls are important. One bears the spray-painted words “All power to the people,” the rallying cry of the Black Panther Party, whose Illinois chairman, Fred Hampton, was killed here, while he slept, along with Peoria Black Panther member Mark Clark. Hampton was twenty-one; Clark was twenty-two. They were assassinated through a joint…