Remembering the assassination of Fred Hampton, and the threat to Black liberation today.
Civil rights attorney Flint Taylor recalls the murder of Black Panther Fred Hampton at the hands of the state in a pre-dawn raid 48 years ago, and connects the ideology and language of the FBI's illegal COINTELPRO directive against Black radicals of the 1960s to a new report issued by the FBI on Black Liberation movements in America today.
Flint wrote the op-ed On 48th Anniversary of Fred Hampton's Murder, Rampant Surveillance of Black Liberation Movements Continues for Truthout.
Flint Taylor
As a law student, Flint Taylor was a founding member of the People’s Law Office and has been a partner of the PLO since 1972. As a student and lawyer, he has been dedicated to litigating against police violence and racism for more than fifty-four years. Among the landmark cases that Taylor has litigated are the Fred Hampton Black Panther case; the Greensboro, North Carolina case against the KKK, Nazis and Greensboro police; and a series of cases arising from a pattern and practice of police torture and cover-up by Chicago police Commander Jon Burge, former Cook County State’s Attorney and Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, and numerous other law enforcement officials. He has represented, and continues to represent, many wrongfully convicted persons, including police torture victims who have spent decades in prison and on death row. He has chronicled his work and that of the People’s Law Office in an award-winning historical memoir titled The Torture Machine.
Fighting the torture machine: On the past and present of Chicago police violence.
