Biography
Nathaniel Burse was a young Black man from Chicago's South Side and a member of De Mau Mau, an organization formed by Black servicemen in Vietnam to resist racism in the U.S. military. In 1972 he was among those arrested and prosecuted in a series of murders of white people in the Chicago suburbs (including a family of four in Barrington Hills and a family of three in Monee). The Black Panther (November 1972) reported the case as racist sensationalism — built without clear evidence and tied to State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan's re-election campaign — that had "convicted" the defendants in the press before trial. The prosecutions were heavily contested; several of the De Mau Mau defendants were convicted in 1973.