Please join us for a community discussion about the struggle against racial discrimination within the criminal justice system and its impact on black and brown communities.

The evening’s program will feature local criminal justice experts: Rep. Marcia Morey; Dawn Blagrove, Executive Director of the Carolina Justice Policy Center; and Professor Dionne R. Gonder-Stanley, Director of the Criminal Justice Clinic at NCCU Law School. In addition, there will be a very special one-on-one discussion with renowned racial justice lawyer Flint Taylor, who will speak about his new memoir, The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago.

During the interview, Dr. Kareem Crayton, Executive Director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, will explore how Taylor and the People’s Law Office joined forces with community activists, torture survivors, and local reporters to bring successful lawsuits against the Chicago Police Department officers and the City of Chicago. The conversation will also distill lessons from Taylor’s efforts to expand the struggle beyond police brutality into a successful campaign to end the death penalty in Illinois, and the awarding of reparations for many of the torture survivors and the citizens of Chicago.

G. Flint Taylor, a founding partner of the People’s Law Office in Chicago, has been counsel in numerous important civil rights cases over the past 48 years, including the 1968 Black Panther assassination case, the Jon Burge torture cases and the Greensboro civil case. His latest book, “The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago,” was released March 2019 to critical acclaim.

Co-hosted by the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, The Samuel Dubois Cook Center on Social Equity @ Duke University, and The Duke Human Rights Center @ the Franklin Humanities Institute.