Before the Bullet: Target: Black Messiah

Fred Hampton was twenty-one years old when he was killed during a pre-dawn police raid in Chicago on December 4, 1969. But the documentary record begins long before the gunfire.

Before the Bullet: Target: Black Messiah reconstructs Hampton's rise from Maywood organizer to chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, his coalition-building across racial and neighborhood lines, the surveillance surrounding him, the infiltration of the Chicago Panthers, and the tightening machinery of federal and local attention before the raid.

Built from FBI records, COINTELPRO files, court records, archival sources, and contemporaneous reporting, this is documentary narrative nonfiction: no invented conversations, no invented motives, and no certainty where the record does not support it. Where sources conflict, the conflict remains visible. Where the record is silent, the book does not pretend otherwise.

The facts are the canon. The story is how we carry them.