Reflecting on Five Decades of Civil Rights Practice: Flint Taylor

On March 30, 2026, esteemed civil rights attorney Flint Taylor of the Chicago-based People’s Law Office (PLO) and Tayleece Paul, an associate in the office, gave a talk, sponsored by CRRJ, to the law school community.

Taylor, a founding partner of the PLO, took his audience on a journey across his remarkable career in civil rights litigation, which began in 1969 when he joined a group of attorneys working out of a storefront during the height of the Vietnam War. Over the course of fifty years, Taylor has litigated in courts across the country, both at the trial and appellate level, including in the US Supreme Court. His 2020 book, The Torture Machine, provides an account of how activists and lawyers unearthed and then fought against a torture scandal that shook the City of Chicago and led to condemnation by United Nations experts. Taylor was invited by CRRJ attorney Alex Stein to address the law school, and this visit was his second one.

Early in his career Taylor served as one of the attorneys in the litigation arising out of the assassination of Fred Hampton, the 21-year-old Illinois Black Panther Party chairman killed in 1969 in a predawn raid on his apartment by Chicago police. As the broad and lengthy litigation ultimately proved, the FBI and the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office colluded with local police in the conspiracy leading to Hampton’s assassination. In 1982 Taylor, working with a team of lawyers, settled the matter for the families of Hampton and Mark Clark who was also killed in the raid.

In the 1990s Taylor and the PLO played a prominent role in the political campaign and litigation that followed revelations that the Chicago police routinely tortured detainees. As Taylor related, from 1972 to 1991 Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge and his colleagues in the department applied torture methods Burge had learned in the Viet Nam war to about a hundred men and women, but it was not until 1990 that the infamous electric shock box, radiator, and “midnight crew” came to public attention. Revealed were the systematic abuse, including electric shock treatment, suffocation, and mock executions that were applied to coerce confessions. Ultimately, in 2015, after Taylor, the PLO, and other attorneys pursued lawsuits on behalf of the torture survivors, the Chicago City Council adopted a reparations measure providing financial compensation and other relief to the survivors. Taylor and his colleagues also initiated legal proceedings to dismiss the convictions of the scores of men whose false, torture-produced confessions led to their wrongful conviction.

Currently Taylor co-counsels, with Benjamin Crump, a lawsuit pending in the US District Court for the District of New York on behalf of the estate of Malcolm X, who was assassinated in New York in 1965. Filed in 2024, the suit alleges that the US Department of Justice, the FBI, the CIA, and the New York Police Department played a significant role in the events leading to Malcolm X’s assassination and participated in a decades-long cover-up to shield their involvement from the public.

The suit claims these government agencies were aware of threats against Malcolm X’s life and failed to intervene but rather actively conspired to reduce his protection, exposing him to an attack that they knew was imminent.

Tayleece Paul, an associate who joined the PLO in 2022, addressed the firm’s current legal work fighting against large-scale immigration enforcement by ICE and other federal agencies in Chicago. She described how legal workers have supported the rapid-response networks that organizers have created.

Stein observed that “lawyers like Flint Taylor, Tayleece Paul, and everyone at the PLO have shown for decades what lawyers, as part of a broader movement, can do about some of the worst types of police violence. As our students envision careers where they can apply — to clients, cases, and movements — concepts from the class that I teach along with Professor Burnham, Race, Police Violence, and Law, we’re grateful for the expertise and example that Flint Taylor and Tayleece Paul bring.”

Taylor closed his presentation with a reflection on what decades in the civil rights legal vineyards have taught him: change requires patience, but sustained effort can produce meaningful transformation. For students at Northeastern Law, the afternoon offered both a history lesson and a model of sustained civil rights practice.