Biography
Reuben Taylor 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. He was 22. 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.