# The Groundings *A Biography of Walter Rodney* — Legendary Biographies No. 095 - **Subject:** Walter Anthony Rodney - **Written by:** Solomon Treadway - **Shelf:** Movements / Civil Rights - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 196 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 196 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-094-2) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Edmund Hartley (ISBN 979-8-90623-165-9) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/095-the-groundings.html ## About this book June 13, 1980, Camp Street, Georgetown, Guyana. Walter Rodney, thirty-eight, the Pan-Africanist historian and author of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, is killed when a walkie-talkie his brother Donald is holding in the passenger seat of his car explodes. It has been given to them by Sergeant Gregory Smith of the Guyana Defence Force. Smith flees to French Guiana. The Forbes Burnham government denies involvement. A Guyana Commission of Inquiry in 2016 finds that the assassination was orchestrated by the Burnham regime. Solomon Treadway's biography opens earlier — in Georgetown, where Walter Anthony Rodney was born in 1942, the son of a People's Progressive Party tailor — and follows the arc through Queen's College Georgetown, the University of the West Indies at Mona, the doctoral work at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, the Dar es Salaam years at the University of Dar es Salaam, the 1968 declaration as a prohibited immigrant from Jamaica after his black-power lectures sparked the Rodney Riots, the publication of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa in 1972, the founding of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana in 1974, the long Burnham campaign of arrests and surveillance, and the morning on Camp Street. What emerges is a portrait of the Pan-Africanist historian whose How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remade the historiography of the continent and the Caribbean, and whose Guyanese assassination the country's own commission of inquiry took thirty-six years to formally attribute to the state. ## Contents 1. The Boy from Wortmanville 2. Mona 3. London and the Archives 4. Dar es Salaam 5. Grounding with My Brothers 6. The Rodney Riots 7. The Hill 8. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa 9. Patricia 10. Burnham 11. The Return 12. The Working People's Alliance 13. The Intellectual at Work 14. The Tightening Noose 15. June Thirteenth 16. The Inquiry 17. The Book That Survived 18. The Idea They Had to Kill ## Questions **Who is The Groundings about?** Walter Anthony Rodney. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Groundings — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 3,980 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 60,500 words, 18 chapters, 196 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Solomon Treadway is a Chicago-born culture critic whose biographies focus on Black American writers, intellectuals, and the post-war public sphere. His research utilizes deep archival investigations to reconstruct the social circles, political struggles, and literary debates that shaped mid-century American thought. In works like The Chairman, Passing the Torch, and The Papers, Treadway traces how ideas move from private correspondence into the broader cultural consciousness. His writing emphasizes the everyday realities and collaborative networks behind major intellectual shifts, avoiding dry academic jargon in favor of clear, character-driven narrative history. He lives in Chicago, Illinois, where he works as an independent researcher and spends his weekends volunteering at local community archives and bookshops.