|
| Shocking the Conscience
ISBN: 9781621039495
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / University Press of Mississippi
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: African American journalists; Journalists; Journalism; Civil rights movements; Civil rights movements;
Within a few years of its first issue in 1951, Jet , a pocket-sized magazine, became the "bible" for news of the civil rights movement. It was said, only half-jokingly, "If it wasn't in Jet , it didn't happen." Writing for the magazine and its glossy, big sister Ebony , for fifty-three years, longer than any other journalist, Washington bureau chief Simeon Booker was on the front lines of virtually every major event of the revolution that transformed America.
Rather than tracking the freedom struggle from the usually cited ignition points, Shocking the Conscience begins with a massive voting rights rally in the Mississippi Delta town of Mound Bayou in 1955. It's the first rally since the Supreme Court's Brown decision struck fear in the hearts of segregationists across the former Confederacy. It was also Booker's first assignment in the Deep South, and before the next run of the weekly magazine, the killings would begin.
Booker vowed that lynchings would no longer be ignored beyond the black press. Jet was reaching into households across America, and he was determined to cover the next murder like none before. He had only a few weeks to wait. A small item on the AP wire reported that a Chicago boy vacationing in Mississippi was missing. Booker was on it, and stayed on it, through one of the most infamous murder trials in US history. His coverage of Emmett Till's death lit a fire that would galvanize the movement, while a succession of US presidents wished it would go away.
This is the story of the century that changed everything about journalism, politics, and more in America, as only Simeon Booker, the dean of the black press, could tell it.
Simeon Saunders Booker Jr. was born in Baltimore, Maryland on August 27, 1918. He received a degree in English from Virginia Union University in 1942 and became a reporter for The Baltimore Afro-American. He later worked for The Call and Post in Cleveland, for The Washington Post, as its first black reporter, and for Jet and Ebony magazines. He covered the civil rights movement. He retired from journalism in 2007. He was a syndicated radio commentator for Westinghouse Broadcasting from 1959 to 1978. He wrote several books including Black Man's America, Susie King Taylor: Civil War Nurse, and Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter's Account of the Civil Rights Movement. He was inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame in 2013 and received the George Polk career award for lifetime achievement in 2016. He died on December 10, 2017 at the age of 99. (Bowker Author Biography) |
