ALTON shines a spotlight on the double scandal that provoked Abraham Lincoln to run for President. We see echoes of ALTON in threats to democracy from the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, the recent surge in mass murders and hate crimes – the “threat from within” that Abraham Lincoln warned of in his first great speech of January 27, 1838 after the Alton scandal. Lincoln’s speech launched his trajectory toward the Senate and Presidency twenty years later and issued a powerful warning that is eerily relevant again today.

ALTON revolves around the crucifixion of an innocent black man, Francis MacIntosh, in St. Louis, MO (1836), followed by the murder of a white man Elijah Parish Lovejoy (1837) who spoke out for McIntosh, demanding a fair trial. ALTON is based on the Harvard PhD thesis and biography of Elijah Parish Lovejoy by JJohn Glanville Gill, memoirs of escaped slaves William Wells Brown, Henry Bibb, and Solomon Northrup and a screenplay for a feature film ALTON.

The brutal murder of Francis McIntosh, and its dismissal in court, transformed Lovejoy from a moderate into an abolitionist. 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 all those who wanted to abolish slavery.

The villain in ALTON, a paid pro-slavery lobbyist, handed Elijah Parish Lovejoy, Editor of The Alton Observer, 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.

The book ALTON has sparked a "making media actionable" project led by five invited authors, who have contributed chapters.

Lisa Maydell, award-winning writer and film director in Atlanta, in her chapter in ALTON describes how the first African American President of the International Boxing Federation refused a bribe offered if he would compromise his values. Mobolaji Olambiwonnu, winner of a Tribeca Audience Award 2021 for his film Ferguson Rises, wrote a foreword for ALTON about harnessing media for social change. Dr. Marty Casey, winner of a Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award 2021, founded The UnGUN Institute following the murder of Michael Brown Jr. in 2014 to process individual and collective trauma from violent racist acts and is Chair of Black Son Day August 9th which drew 50,000 in previous years (both in person and online). Scott Cooper, Director of It’s Our Story, a project of the Victor Pineda Foundation, winner of a Best of Berkeley 2022 Award, describes collecting the stories of talented disabled leaders, inspired by Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, which collects the stories of Holocaust survivors. Dr. Joseph Okpaku writes about making media actionable. 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 the keys to unlock change agency. ALTON is part of a network of cross-sectoral equity projects to address disability, race, gender, and other forms of discrimination. It is timely now to empower everyone to address US election rigging, media manipulation, police brutality, and equal opportunity today.

ALTON Website: https://zanngill.com/