Biography
Lionel Jean-Baptiste was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1949 and moved to the Chicago area as a teenager. After graduating from Princeton in 1974, he worked in education and housing in New York and organized through the African Liberation Support Committee, the Committee Against Dictatorship in Haiti, and the Mobilization Committee Against Police Brutality. He was confined for civil contempt from November 29, 1984 to July 3, 1985 after refusing to testify before the grand jury investigating the New York 8+. He later became an attorney, an Evanston alderman, and the first Haitian American appointed as an Illinois judge.
