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Shocking the Conscience

A Reporter's Account of the Civil Rights Movement

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Shocking the Conscience

By: Simeon Booker, Carol Mcabe Booker
Narrated by: Ronald Clarkson
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About this listen

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 53 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.

©2013 Simeon Booker and Carol McCabe Booker (P)2014 Redwood Audiobooks
Black & African American Cultural & Regional Freedom & Security Journalists, Editors & Publishers Social Sciences State & Local United States Civil rights Mississippi Social Movement Martin Luther King Black power movement Equality
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Critic reviews

"Simeon Booker has immersed himself in a history that many researchers have missed; he keeps opening up doors that other historians seem to have walked past. If history is a tapestry of stories, then the bright new thread running through accepted civil rights history and giving it new dimension is Simeon Booker's fresh narrative." (Hank Klibanoff, coauthor, Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Race Beat)
"During his fifty-three years as Washington, D.C., bureau chief for Jet magazine, [Booker] earned the distinction of being called 'the dean of Black journalists in the Nation's Capital.'" ( Jet)

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Till to Obama

Truly heart wrenching story of the civil rights movement,from the grotesque slaying of Emmitt till to the triumphant inauguration of the first coloured president,simeone bookers story is unique and inspiring.

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