Only one politician has ever defeated Barack Obama in an election, and he began his public life by going AWOL from the US Army to co-found the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers. This deep dive traces the chronological arc of a Chicago South Side figure born in 1946 in Albany, Georgia, who came north with his mother in the Great Migration, dropped out of high school to join the Army in 1963, joined SNCC in 1966, and by 1968 was the Panthers' Illinois defense minister. After a fellow Panther leader was killed in a 1969 police raid, he pivoted the chapter toward community survival programs, including unprecedented sickle cell anemia screening.

The episode follows his six-month prison sentence in 1972 on a weapons charge, his 1974 departure from the Panthers, a religious awakening and academic run that produced a bachelor's, a master's in  ...