Shocking The Conscience
A Reporter's Account of the Civil Rights Movement
by Simeon Booker with Carol McCabe Booker
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Pub Date Apr 02 2013 | Archive Date Sep 25 2013
Description
An unforgettable chronicle by the first full-time African American reporter for the Washington Post, and Jet magazine’s White House correspondent for a half-century
Within a few years of its first issue in 1951, Jet, a pocket-size 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 U.S. history. His coverage of Emmett Till’s death lit a fire that would galvanize the movement, while a succession of U.S. 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 Booker, Washington, D.C., is an award-winning journalist. He was the first black staff reporter for the Washington Post and served as Jet’s Washington bureau chief for fifty-one years, retiring in 2007 at the age of eighty-eight. Carol McCabe Booker, Washington, D.C., an attorney and former journalist, is his wife.
Advance Praise
“He was so revered that when young black
reporters came out of college in the 1950s, they looked him up. Like English
department grads trekking off to Havana
to find Hemingway.” “The Man from Jet,”
by Wil Haygood, The Washington Post
“Booker covered every Presidential election since the Eisenhower Administration
in his fifty-three years with Johnson Publishing until he retired in 2007. . . [and in 1982] received one of the most
prestigious awards in journalism, the National Press Club’s Fourth Estate
Award.” The History Makers, Aug. 1,
2007
“As a reporter for Ebony and Jet magazines, Simeon Booker chronicled some of the biggest social
and political events of the twentieth century. For fifty years, Booker’s
coverage of the civil rights movement was a fixture in many homes.” NPR, July
16, 2007
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781617037894 |
| PRICE | $30.00 (USD) |
