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

335 Pages·2013·5.509 MB·English

by  Booker, Carol McCabe, Booker, Simeon

Shocking the conScience
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Leave room for two pages of blurbs
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Shocking the
conScience
A Reporter’s Account of the Civil Rights Movement
Simeon Booker
with Carol McCabe Booker
University Press of Mississippi / Jackson
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www.upress.state.ms.us
The University Press of Mississippi is a member
of the Association of American University Presses.
Copyright © 2013 by Simeon Booker and Carol McCabe Booker
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2013
∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data to come
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
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“I tell you that the Negro will never rest until he gets his rights. . . . Why this discrimination against
us when we enter public conveyances or places of public amusement? Why is a discrimination made
against us in the churches; and why in the cemeteries when we go to pay that last debt of nature
that brings us all upon a level? Gentlemen, I say to you this discrimination must cease.”
—Hon. Joseph Hayne Rainey (R-SC), the United States House of Representatives, Dec. 19, 1873.
“No one shocked the conscience of the nation and the world like Jet.”
—Dick Gregory, civil rights activist/entertainer, 1996.
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Contents
Introduction xi
1. The Sleeping Giant 3
2. “Time Is Running Out” 14
3. The Rally Ends; The Killing Begins 18
4. Born to Dream 26
5. “Let Them See What I’ve Seen” 49
6. The Trial 63
7. “The Little Magazine That Could” Comes to Washington 84
8. “A Communist under Every Bed” 94
9. Ike’s First Term 108
10. The Battle of Little Rock 112
11. Eisenhower Redux 131
12. Baltimore, My Baltimore 154
13. A Tale of Two Campaigns 162
14. A New Day Dawning 174
15. The Freedom Rides 180
16. No Ordinary Football Game 205
17. Camelot, The Final Act 211
18. A Southern President 232
19. “All the Way with LBJ” 248
20. Fighting On 265
21. A Familiar Face 282
22. The End of the Beginning 295
Acknowledgments 311
Notes 313
Selected Bibliography 321
Index 323
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