Black intruders at Hanrahan wake

Just before 7 p.m. mass time at Ed Hanrahan’s wake last Thursday, June 11, five or six black people entered crowded St. Giles Church in Oak Park, two of them carrying video cameras, and pushed their way to the front, where the coffin lay, making quite a stir. 

By one account, “Trudy”’s at Chicago Daily Observer, they “nearly reached the casket, fists raised, shouting ‘Black Power’” before turning around and leaving.  By another account, from a source I contacted, the only “Black Power” heard at the rear of the church was yelled by the woman in the group, sixty-ish and wearing a big white floppy “church” hat, who yelled it, turning around at the church door on her way out, raising her fist.

The four (or five) men were in their 40s and 50s, my source estimated.  She was at the rear and, hearing commotion, had turned to see the group moving up the center aisle, then turning to the left, at which point a mourner yelled, “They’re coming up the left side, Ed” to Ed Hanrahan’s son.  At that point they were approaching the family gathered at the left front. 

They were persuaded to leave and did so, leaving some, maybe many mourners in the packed church shaken, according to my source.

So packed was the wake that my source had to park two blocks away.  When she arrived some time before the scheduled mass, an Oak Park police car was parked in front — there to direct traffic, she presumed.  No sheriff’s deputies were present that she saw.  The rude visitants left of their own accord and were not hustled out by deputies. 

Nor were they identified as Black Panthers, though they obviously were protesting the Fred Hampton slaying almost 40 years ago.  But they were clearly disruptive.  When they were gone, the priest apologized and announced it was time for the mass.

Nothing of the disruption was reported locally or metropolitan-wide until “Trudy” made her comment on a Don Rose column at Chicago Daily Observer. In the column, Rose crowed over his role as a consultant in defeating Hanrahan and destroying him politically in the wake of the Black Panther slayings.