Flint Taylor - Fred Hampton's attorney

Host Bob Hercules sat down with attorney Flint Taylor to discuss the murder of Black Panther leader, Fred Hampton in 1969, who is the subject of the recent film, “Judas & The Black Messiah.”  With five Oscar nominations, including for best picture, this movie ultimately took home an Academy Award for Daniel Kaluuya’s performance as Fred Hampton in the Best Supporting Actor category.

Along with his partner, Jeff Haas, in the People’s Law Office, Flint Taylor takes us through the journey of how they uncovered and proved the truth about what happened to Fred Hampton and fellow Black Panther, Mark Clark.  They were able to alter the public’s perception being put forth by Cook County State’s attorney Edward v. Hanrahan and other public officials that the Panthers were a terrorist organization and were the aggressors in this altercation.  

Even though the media reported this fabrication initially as the truth, these two remarkably persistent lawyers were able to shine a light on the orchestrated assassination of Fred Hampton which was part of a larger Counterintelligence program initiated by the FBI, aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, disrupting and neutralizing American political organizations and leaders deemed subversive.

Flint Taylor is an American human rights and civil rights attorney based in Chicago, Illinois, who has litigated many high-profile police brutality, government misconduct and death penalty cases. Taylor has pursued public interest law to take on allegations of corrupt police tactics and wrongful convictions in the city of Chicago and elsewhere. Taylor was part of a team of negotiators in the 2015 landmark decision by the City of Chicago to award reparations to the survivors of police torture, becoming the first municipal government to do so.