The Eight-Week March
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Read the opening free
4,184 words · no email, no account
No. 024 · Movements · Civil Rights
The Chairman
a biography of Frederick Allen Hampton Sr.
What the book is
December 4, 1969. At 4:45 a.m., fourteen Chicago police officers fire ninety-nine rounds into Apartment 2337 on West Monroe Street. Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, is shot twice in the head in his bed. He is twenty-one years old. Mark Clark, the Peoria Panthers' defense captain, is killed beside him. Hampton's fiancée, Akua Njeri, eight months pregnant with their son, is in the bed when the raid begins.
Solomon Treadway's biography opens earlier — in Maywood, Illinois, where Frederick Allen Hampton was born in 1948 — and follows the arc through the Proviso East NAACP youth chapter, the Chicago Black Panthers, the Rainbow Coalition with the Young Lords and the Young Patriots, the FBI informant William O'Neal, the COINTELPRO documents that surfaced in 1971, and the 1982 civil settlement that distributed $1.85 million among nine plaintiffs.
What emerges is a portrait of a twenty-one-year-old organiser whose Chicago multi-ethnic working-class coalition was the most threatening political project the FBI's domestic-counterintelligence program encountered in its full decade of operations — a coalition the state killed him in his sleep to prevent.
At a glance
- Subject
- Frederick Allen Hampton Sr.
- Shelf
- Movements · Civil Rights
- Written by
- Solomon Treadway
- Chapters
- 19 across 209 pages
- Narrated by
- Edmund Hartley
- Editions
- Paperback · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
Contents · 19 chapters
- 01MaywoodRead free
- 02The Youth Council3,432 words
- 03The Black Panther Party3,185 words
- 04The Chicago Chapter3,036 words
- 05Chairman Fred3,241 words
- 06Free Breakfast, Free Clinic3,368 words
- 07The Rainbow Coalition3,801 words
- 08Political Education3,029 words
- 09COINTELPRO3,066 words
- 10Hoover's Directives3,023 words
- 11William O'Neal3,411 words
- 12The Intelligence3,110 words
- 13December Fourth3,263 words
- 14Eighty-Two Shots3,211 words
- 15Mark Clark3,745 words
- 16The Cover-Up3,400 words
- 17Thirteen Years2,789 words
- 18The Legacy4,016 words
- 19The Son3,599 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- Paperback · $19.99
- 6 × 9 in · 209 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback
- EPUB · $3.99
- EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books
ISBN 979-8-90623-060-7 - Audiobook · $5.99
- Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Edmund Hartley
ISBN 979-8-90623-205-2
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who is The Chairman about?
Frederick Allen Hampton Sr.. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Chairman — and the name goes on the line underneath.
02Is 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.
03Can 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 4,184 words of the book.
04How long is it?
About 63,500 words, 19 chapters, 209 pages in the paperback.
05What 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.
