Longtime attorney Flint Taylor’s new book tells the story of the People’s Law Collective, which grew out of the radical movements of the late 1960s.
Originally published in The Indypendent.
Chicago attorney Flint Taylor was still a student at Northwestern Law School when he joined up with the People’s Law Office (PLO) in 1969. Fred Hampton, the charismatic and effective young leader of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party had just been assassinated by the Chicago police. The murder was organized by Chicago’s main prosecutor, States Attorney Edward Hanrahan, a rightwing operative of Mayor Richard Daly’s machine.
Flint and the PLO brought the litigation following the assassination, it took 13 years before they won. He and his firm represented the estates of Fred Hampton and his comrade Mark Clark, the head of the Black Panther Party in Peoria, Illinois. The litigation demonstrated that the killings were assassinations called for by J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI, who worked with the Chicago Police Department to plan the execution of the men.
Hoover directed his local offices in what we now know as the infamous COINTELPRO program to prevent the rise of a “black messiah” – specifically, “to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discount, and otherwise neutralize, the activities of black national hate-type organizations and groups.“ He had the Black Panthers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. in his sights.
The crime was covered up. It was the greatest scandal in the history of Chicago. Flint Taylor tells the story in his meticulously researched, beautifully written, just published book, “The Corruption Machine: Prosecutors, Politicians, and Police Violence in Chicago.“ It is the companion volume to Taylor’s first book “The Torture Machine”.
The PLO was formed by a group of radical attorneys who could no longer work at Legal Aid because of its restrictions. They called their firm The Peoples Law Office and began representing the Black Panthers.
The Panthers had initiated the people’s breakfast program and the people’s medical program. The attorneys called themselves The Peoples Law Office as attorneys for the Black Panther Party. Their office represented other revolutionary groups including The Young Lords and Vietnam war protesters.
The PLO was a collective. They earned little but everybody got paid the same. As a member, lawyer Michael Deutsch said, “I didn’t go to law school to make rich people richer”.
The birth of radical legal collectives occurred about the same time in New York City and in Detroit, where this writer was a partner in a firm of seven people practicing in an old house we had fixed up. Of our firm, Lt. Dennis Mulaney of the Detroit Police Department’s anti-left “Red Squad” wrote, “There’s hardly an underground newspaper, black liberation, or left-wing group of any kind in Detroit that at one time or another, was not represented by the law firm”. Our firm was regularly under police surveillance and suffered late night break-ins.
In New York City, the Center for Constitutional Rights was started by the great attorney William Kunstler and others, founded in 1966. They rented office space in the seedy red-light district off of 42nd St. The office had a linoleum floor, half-wall partitions separated the handful of lawyers. When Michael Ratner went to work there he taped on his wall what he called four key principles of being a radical lawyer:
1. Do not refuse to take a case just because it has long odds of winning in court.
2. Use cases to publicize a radical critique US policy and to promote revolutionary transformation.
3. Combine legal work and political activism.
4. Love people.
The historic victory by the People’s Law Office in the Fred Hampton case was made possible by excellent legal work and by the constant participation of the Chicago activist community who were there at every important court hearings and demonstrations.
Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton was assassinated in 1969 by the Chicago Police Department while sleeping in his bed.
The cop’s first mistake after the murder was to allow the apartment house where the killings took place to remain open for inspection. The PLO and the Panthers brought people from the community to inspect the apartment. They demonstrated clearly that it was not a shoot-out but a shoot-in. Ninety-nine bullets were shot from the outside into the apartment. Only one shot was fired from the inside. It was a reflexive shotgun blast by Mark Clark after he was shot.
They proved that Fred Hampton was shot in his bed, likely drugged by an informer, the same informer that supplied the cops with a blueprint of the apartment. His name was William O’Neill, he was Fred Hampton‘s bodyguard and head of security. The FBI gave him a $300 bonus for his work.
57 years after the Fred Hampton assasination, the People’s Law Collective is one the premiere litigators of police abuse in the country.
Bobby Rush, a former US Congressman and a former Deputy Minister of Defense of the Illinois chapter the Black Panther Party wrote that, “Flint Taylor has given us an intimate, accurate, behind the scenes, forceful portrayal of the murderous imaginations of the underbelly of American justice…. I was to be included in its deadly, deliberate undertaking! Fred’s assassination is the framework, the backdrop, the murderous modus operandi that still permeates our American law enforcement policy. In Minneapolis, the murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti by America’s police operators are our most recent reminders that much more remains to be done, and it must be done by the power of the people, common ordinary people.”
After 57 years, the People’s Law Office and Flint Taylor are still going strong. The firm is known as one of the premier litigators of police abuse in America. Taylor and Attorney Ben Elson along with attorney Ben Crump in the New York City law firm of Beldock, Levine, and Hoffman are currently suing the New York City Police Department and the FBI. They represent Malcolm X‘s daughters. They are are alleging that Malcolm was assassinated along the lines of what was done to Fred Hampton.
Learn more about the People’s Law Office and its ongoing work: peopleslawoffice.com.
The Conviction Machine: Prosecutors, Politicians, and Police Violence in Chicago
By Flint Taylor
Haymarket Books
May 2026, 352 pages
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