Alton

campaign to end free speech

Release Date: 1/ 27/ 2023, 185th Anniversary of Lincoln’s first major Lyceum speech

Congressman Jamie Raskin’s testimony on the January 6, 2021 Attack on the Capitol focused the lens of history on today, comparing that Trump-incited Attack to the 1837 mob murder and Abraham Lincoln’s warning at age twenty-eight, shortly after the murder, when Lincoln in his first major speech warned the nation that “danger can arise within.”

In Alton, Illinois, Lincoln’s home state, which called itself a free state, Elijah Parish Lovejoy, Editor of The Alton Observer, was murdered for refusing to support slavery. A frenzied mob of white men, dressed in top hats and swallow tail coats, feigned respectability as they carried flaming torches to burn down the Alton Observer building and murder its Editor.

Two murders that provoked Lincoln to run for President

The murder provoked outrage. Newspapers nationwide wrote about this heinous crime, which launched Lincoln’s path to the Presidency. But the murder itself was swept under the carpet as too embarrassing to remember.

ALTON, based on the Harvard Ph.D. thesis on Elijah Parish Lovejoy by the author’s father, reveals the deep roots of today’s racism, speaking to US election rigging, media manipulation and police brutality today.

From then until now, what have we learned?

We almost saw “our constitutional republic, as we know it, toppled on January 6^th. . . Politicians whipping up mob violence to destroy fair elections is the oldest domestic enemy of constitutional democracy in America. . . In 1837 a racist mob in Alton, Illinois broke into the offices of an abolitionist newspaper and killed its editor, Elijah Lovejoy. Lincoln wrote a speech in which he said that no trans-Atlantic military giant could ever crush us as a nation. . . If downfall ever comes to America, he said, we ourselves would be its author and finisher.”
Congressman Jamie Raskin: Testimony to the House Panel investigating the U.S. Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021.

“The gun fired at Lovejoy scattered a world of dreams…. How prudently most men creep into nameless graves… while now and then, one or two forget themselves into immortality.”

Wendell Phillips on the murder of Elijah Parish Lovejoy

“Since Lovejoy’s martyrdom, no man has openly challenged free speech and the free press in America.”

Former U.S. President John Quincy Adams

“This struggle belongs in the annals of human liberty. This death will stun a drunken people into sobriety. We haven’t fully learned the bloodthirstiness of slave power.”

Former U.S. President Herbert Hoover

“The Mississippi… will not pour enough water to wash out the disgrace of the horrid murder at Alton.”

Louisville Herald

“such desperate acts of bloody tyranny…”

National Gazette (Washington D.C.)

Riots in Ferguson, St. Louis, Missouri, after the murder of Michael Brown Jr.

Authors of Invited Chapters for ALTON

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.

Mobolaji Olambiwonnu – Director of the documentary film Ferguson Rises, which won the Audience Award at Tribeca 2021, launched on PBS on November 8, 2021 and at Sundance in 2022.

Scott Lowell Cooper – Founder, Director of It’s Our Story, a project of the Victor Pineda Foundation to tell stories of disability leaders and support Workforce Development, Communications: “Becoming Understood,” a YouTube Channel.

Lisa Maydwell – Founder/ CEO of Maydwell Productions, an international award-winning filmmaker, author of The Final Round-Round 16, which is both a book and a film.

Dr. Joseph Okpaku Sr. – CEO of Telecom Africa International Corporation, Founding Member of the African ICT Advisory Group, Senior Founding Member of the Billion Minds Foundation, Advisor to the United Nations ICT Task Force, Consultant to the United Nations, UNDP, World Bank.