Publisher's Synopsis
Fear of the truth swept the ALTON scandal under the carpet for 185 years, until Congressman Jamie Raskin compared the January 6, 2021 Attack on the Capitol to the mob murder of Elijah Lovejoy in Alton (1837) and Abraham Lincoln's warning soon after: "Danger can arise within," uncannily predicting current fascist threats.
ALTON, the conversion into a book of an action-packed screenplay with a deep message, is based on the original research and Harvard Ph.D. thesis of author Zann Gill's father, John Glanville Gill, who was fired from his job as Minister of the Alton Unitarian Church and forced to leave Alton after Ku Klux Klan burnings, reported in TIME. ALTON reveals the deep roots of today's racism, US election rigging, fake news, and police brutality today.
In the 1830s, slaves heroically risked their lives to escape across the Mississippi River from Missouri, a slave state to Alton, Illinois, a free state (Lincoln's home state). And Elijah Parish Lovejoy moved his newspaper from St. Louis to Alton, believing that in Illinois free speech would allow him to write about the evil of slavery. But slaveholding profiteers could block free speech. 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 and launched Lincoln's path to the Presidency.
