On this day, 4 December 1969, Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was murdered while asleep in his bed during a raid on his apartment by Chicago Police in conjunction with the FBI. Hampton had been drugged earlier in the evening by an FBI informant, who also told agents the location of Hampton's bed, where he slept alongside his nine-month pregnant fiancée, Akua Njeri. Fellow Panther activist Mark Clark was also killed in the attack, and several others injured. Aged just 21, Hampton was an active, charismatic and effective organiser, who had been making significant inroads into making links with working class whites and building a "Rainbow Coalition" including Puerto Rican, Native American, Chicane, white and Chinese-American radicals. Hampton and Clark were amongst the most prominent victims of the FBI's COINTELPRO program, which amongst other things was directed by FBI director J Edgar Hoover to "prevent the rise of a Black Messiah".
On this day, 4 December 1975, workers' representatives from the main factories around Getafe, Spain, held an assembly and voted to begin a general strike in protest at a wage freeze amidst high inflation. It would begin a wave of strikes across the region over the next two months following the death of dictator general Francisco Franco covering hundreds of thousands of workers in industries as diverse as construction, banking, manufacturing, insurance, taxi drivers, communications and transport. The strikes were supported by local communities, housewives and a good number of clergy, and workers organise themselves by holding mass assemblies in factories, football stadiums, public squares and streets. At its peak, over 350,000 workers were on strike, mostly in the industrial areas around Madrid. Eventually violent repression and arrests by police, the militarisation of transport work, as well as lockouts and tens of thousands of sackings and suspensions without pay, forced the strikes to end by late January. However, in many places workers negotiated pay increases, and reinstatement of sacked militants.
