Hello everyone,
This is part 2 of my sit down with Michael Steven Smith. Michael is an accomplished progressive lawyer and a former board member of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He is also co-host of the nationally broadcast Law and Disorder radio show, where he has interviewed some of the most prominent voices of the American left, including Chris Hedges, Daniel Ellsburg, and Democracy @ Work’s own Richard Wolff. Michael co-authored Who Killed Che? with his co-host Michael Ratner, and his latest book, From the Flag to the Cross: Fascism American Style, is highly recommended and available now from OR Books.
If you haven’t done so already please read part 1 here:
Isaiah Blum: You mentioned to me previously this very important case that your nephew is involved with. Anything about it that you’d like to mention or are able to divulge, I’m sure everyone would love to hear.
Michael S. Smith: I heard most of this secondhand. Our nephew, Ben Elson, is one of the lead attorneys in the case. He’s a partner at the People’s Law Office, which is a law firm in Chicago. And he’s been working with, for years, Flint Taylor and Jeff Haas. They represented the estate of Fred Hampton, who was assassinated through the efforts of the Chicago Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. J. Edgar Hoover himself said that we must prevent the rise of a Black Messiah. And Fred Hampton was an extraordinary young man who fit that description. Hampton was a real student, he worked around the clock, really, he had a job at a factory, but he got up early and studied. And he was brilliant, and a great orator. And Hoover recognized that. So Hoover and the Chicago Police Department recruited a spy who actually gave them the layout of the apartment where Fred was living, and the spy drugged Fred. So Fred couldn’t be roused, and the cop shot something like 90 bullets into his place. And one bullet came out. So it was clearly an assassination. And they left the place open after they murdered him. So the whole neighborhood came and inspected it, and they saw the bullets coming in. So Jeff Haas and Flint Taylor had just started the people’s office, and they were engaged on a contingency basis by Fred Hampton’s mother to sue the Chicago Police Department and the FBI for the wrongful death of their son. They litigated the case for 13 years, and finally, the judge forced a settlement, and they got a monetary settlement for Mrs. Hampton, and their reputation as great litigators against police brutality, police abuse, was made manifest across the country.
When Malcolm X’s daughters retained Ben Crump, the well-known civil rights attorney, he brought in Flint and others from the People’s Office in on the case, because they suspected a pattern here, which I believe is true. The New York Police Department had a spy, just like the Chicago Police Department. They had a spy in the ranks of Malcolm X’s supporters. Malcolm X’s bodyguard was an NYPD police officer. When Malcolm X spoke at the Audubon ballroom in February when he was killed, the protectors that he had in the audience were all withdrawn. Malcolm was shot at numerous times, but what killed him was a shot from a sawed off shotgun, wielded by a Nation of Islam member from New Jersey named William Taylor. Taylor was also working for the New York Police Department. And when Taylor was identified and tried, they let him off. The other man that was tried served 18 years; Taylor never served a minute. Two years later, after they let him off, he was picked up for a bank robbery, and when somebody passed a note to the judge, they dismissed the charges. That’s something that the People’s Law Office is trying to litigate here. The problem that they face is that the case is 60 years old. So the defendants, the cops and the FBI, are raising a defensive statute of limitations. They say: it’s not fair to try us for something that’s 60 years old. We can’t defend ourselves. All the witnesses are dead or missing, and you have to dismiss the case. Our nephew, Ben, who wrote the response to the summary judgment by the New York City Police Department, said you can’t profit from your own wrong. You’re the reason that all this stuff has been covered up, and therefore, you can’t allege that you have the advantage of the statute of limitations having expired, because you were the ones that caused it to expire. The case is now in front of the judge, he hasn’t ruled yet. And I’m hoping, now that Mamdani has been elected, he will intercede with the police and help settle the case. One of the demands that the plaintiff’s attorneys are making, in the form of reparations, is that money be allocated to the New York City school system to teach about Malcolm X and what was done to him. Which is what’s been done in Chicago, and the police torture cases in Chicago. There was a lieutenant there named Burge, who tortured black suspects into falsely confessing crimes. And Flint and the People’s Law Office handled that case. And one of the settlements was for the Chicago Educational System to teach the truth about what the police did.
IB: You were telling me about this book about the assassinations of the 1960s. I’ve heard it’s an extraordinary book, and not just from you. It seems like it would be an especially relevant and compelling read in today’s atmosphere.
MSS: The book is called Martyrs to the Unspeakable by James W. Douglas. It’s the second volume. The first book he wrote was about the assassination of JFK, and it claims that the CIA, principally Alan Dulles, who had been the head of the CIA and was fired by Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs, was the organizer of the assassination of Kennedy. This book is broader than that, and it puts the assassination of Kennedy in context of what the American secret police state accomplished in killing Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. The assassination of Kennedy was a turning point in American history. Because Kennedy realized that the Cold War was a dead end. He was a cold warrior initially. And towards the end, he had tried to get the United States to withdraw from Vietnam and work with the Russians to end the Cold War. That’s what got him killed. Martin Luther King got himself murdered by the state for opposing the war in Vietnam.
IB: In some ways it’s a cautionary tale about trying to work from within the system. If you are trying to be a reformist within the system, the moment you question the parameters that have been set for you, what you can say, what you can’t say, what you can advocate for. You see how quickly these people are turned upon. I think it’s telling that these were all fairly young men when they were murdered. You often have young people at the forefront of progressive social movements, although typically quite a bit younger than those four men. It was true in much of the 1960s, the civil rights movement, May of 1968, the broad anti-Vietnam War movement. I think we’re seeing parallels to it today, especially with the protests and the encampments in response to the Gaza genocide. We’re seeing, I think, parallels to how young people took to the streets in the 60s. I guess it makes sense, because a lot of young people, quite rightly, I think, see the system as having failed them.
Isaiah Blum is Graduate of the New School, teacher and contributor with Democracy @ Work. he writes about economics, politics, history, culture and more. Follow him on Instagram @blumbergznews