ALTON – campaign to end free speech
Two murders that provoked Lincoln to run for President
Beyond ALTON – action for social change. Zann Gill is working with It’s Our Story (IOS) to extend the IOS model to other equity-challenged domains.
Pricing – Universal Link to Purchase
eBook $4.99 ISBN 979-8-9852417-1-6
hardcover $24.99 ISBN 979-8-9852417-0-9
paperback $16.99 ISBN 979-8-9852417-2-3
large print $19.99 ISBN 979-8-9852417-3-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022902249
About the Author. Zann Gill, after following a conventional path, earning a graduate degree at Harvard, working as a Research Scientist at NASA, and later founding earthDECKS, ALTON’s author Zann Gill was struck by an epiphany: powerful stories are keys to unlock change agency. ALTON is galvanizing a network of cross-sectoral equity projects to address disability, race, gender, and other forms of discrimination at a time when we need to empower everyone to address US election rigging, media manipulation, police brutality, and equal opportunity today. ALTON References.
Invited chapter authors
Donald G. James – Former NASA Associate Administrator for Education overseeing NASA’s collaboration with universities nationwide. He is the author of MANNERS, Gold Award winner for non-fiction. He serves as the U.S. representative on the International Space Education Board.
ALTON headlines two murders that provoked Abraham Lincoln to run for President, the crucifixion of an innocent black man, Francis McIntosh, in St. Louis, Missouri (1836) followed by the murder in Alton, Illinois (1837) of the white newspaper editor Elijah Parish Lovejoy who spoke out for McIntosh, demanding a fair trial.
The brutal murder of Francis McIntosh, and its dismissal in court, transformed Lovejoy from a moderate into an abolitionist. He packed up his newspaper, The St. Louis Observer, and moved across the Mississippi River to Alton where it became The Alton Observer. ALTON is based on the Harvard PhD thesis and biography of Elijah Parish Lovejoy by John Glanville Gill, memoirs of escaped slaves William Wells Brown, Henry Bibb, and Solomon Northrup, and a screenplay for a feature film ALTON by Zann Gill.
In the 1830s, slaves escaped from Missouri, a slave state, risking their lives to ford the Mississippi River to Alton, Illinois, a free state, where they thought they would be free. A Missouri slave owner paid off an Illinois lawyer to pressure local residents to return his escaped slaves, manipulate the media, contrive a business downturn in Alton, and blame economic recession on abolitionists.
The villain in ALTON, a paid pro-slavery lobbyist, handed Elijah Parish Lovejoy a devil’s ultimatum: “Sacrifice your values. Give up your commitment to free speech. Abandon your newspaper and leave Alton. Or stay. . . and you’ll be murdered.” When Lovejoy refused to sacrifice his values, a frenzied mob of white men feigned respectability by dressing up in top hats and swallow tail coats to murder him. This murder in Illinois, Abraham Lincoln’s home state, awakened the nation to the evil of slavery.
RELEASE DATE – January 27, 2023 Pre-Orders:
Invited chapter authors (cont.)
Scott Cooper describes It’s Our Story (IOS) a project he founded and leads to collect the stories of talented disabled leaders, inspired by Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, which collects the stories of Holocaust survivors. IOS works under the auspices of the Victor Pineda Foundation and UC Berkeley.
Lisa Maydwell, award-winning writer and film director in Atlanta, described how the first African American President of the International Boxing Federation refused a bribe offered if he would compromise his values.
Joseph Okpaku wrote his chapter about making media actionable.
Mobolaji Olambiwonnu, winner of a Tribeca Audience Award 2021 for his film Ferguson Rises, wrote the foreword for ALTON about harnessing media for social change.27