Biography
Michael Clark 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 21. 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.
In July–August 1976 a De Mau Mau prisoners’ statement named Michael Clark and Don Taylor as having received 20-to-60-year and 40-to-120-year terms plus four 150-to-200-year terms. It reported Clark and Ben Taylor in another murder trial in Southern Illinois. Illinois parole-board minutes in 2015 described Clark as then serving a 200-year sentence after a transfer from Dixon to Lawrence Correctional Center.
Original document 1258, PDF page 6; Original document 1258, PDF page 8; Original document 1257, PDF page 3.
