Before the Bullet: Target: Black Messiah – Hardcover

Description

Author(s): Eric J. Finkley
Publisher: Consonance Publishing
Publisher Imprint: Consonance Publishing
BISAC: General

Fred Hampton was twenty-one years old when he was killed.

But the story did not begin with the gunfire.

Before the Bullet: Target: Black Messiah reconstructs the documented record of Hampton’s rise, political organizing, coalition-building, surveillance, infiltration, and the institutional machinery already moving around him before December 4, 1969.

Drawing from FBI files, COINTELPRO records, government documents, contemporaneous reporting, and other primary-source material, the book follows Hampton from Maywood to the Illinois Black Panther Party, through the formation of the Rainbow Coalition, the expansion of community programs, increasing federal attention, and the presence of informants inside the movement.

This is not a fictionalized retelling and not a predetermined conspiracy argument.

It is documentary narrative nonfiction.

The facts are the canon.

Where the record agrees, the narrative follows it. Where accounts conflict, the conflict remains visible. Where the surviving record is silent, the book does not invent an answer.

The result is a story about a young political organizer becoming increasingly visible to both his community and the institutions watching him-and about what was already in motion before the bullet.

Before the Bullet begins where conventional assassination histories often do not:

Before the raid.

Before the explanations.

Before the aftermath.

Before the bullet.