Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter's Account of the Civil Rights Movement

Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter’s Account of the Civil Rights Movement

Book — Non-fiction. By Simeon Booker with Carol McCabe Booker. 2013. 334 pages.
Chronicle by Simeon Booker, the first full-time African American reporter for the Washington Post and Jet magazine’s White House correspondent, covering half a century of major events that transformed the United States.

Time Periods: 20th Century

Themes: African American, Civil Rights Movements, Media

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 in U.S. history during that time.

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 was 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., was 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 88. In 2013 the National Association of Black Journalists inducted Booker into its hall of fame. Carol McCabe Booker, Washington, D.C., an attorney and former journalist, is his wife. [Publisher’s description.]

ISBN: 9781617037894 | University Press of Mississippi