Weather Underground

Six months after Chicago police assassinated Fred Hampton, New York magazine published a remarkable cover story written by Tom Wolfe. Entitled Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s, Wolfe’s account of a lavish fundraiser for 21  jailed Black Panthers held at the composer Leonard Bernstein’s tony Upper East Side townhouse was simply unlike anything ever seen in the annals of American journalism. For starters, there was the cover photo of three glamorous white women in evening gowns raising their gloved fists in a Black power salute, More shocking, though, was Wolfe’s novelistic treatment of the event, which made no pretense of objectivity and deployed an Oscar Wilde-like sensibility in its rendering of what unfurled as seamlessly as a finely-wrought fever dream.