If Simeon Booker could brave lynch mobs, todays reporters can withstand Trumps tweets.
The great Simeon Booker, one of the bravest journalists of our time, faced dangers far worse than a petulant president’s social media feed. Booker refused to be cowed — and ultimately helped change the nation. His life’s work should be a lesson to us all about the power of truth to vanquish evil.
Booker died Sunday at 99. At the height of his career, few could have imagined he would live so long.
As Washington bureau chief for the Chicago-based Johnson Publications, publisher of the newsweekly Jet and the monthly magazine Ebony, Booker went to the Deep South to cover the most tumultuous events of the civil rights movement — life-threatening work for an African-American journalist.
In 1961, he accompanied the Freedom Riders on a bus journey from Washington to New Orleans, testing whether Southern states would comply with a federal mandate against segregated interstate travel. In Alabama, the protesters were firebombed once and beaten twice by white mobs before federal officials, acting on orders from attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, flew them to safety.
Booker covered the seminal 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery. He was there when Alabama state troopers savagely attacked demonstrators with billy clubs and police dogs — images that shocked the nation and helped shift public opinion outside of the South from indifference to outrage.
As The Washington Post reported in its obituary, Booker returned many times to the South to report on the struggle: “For his safety, he sometimes posed as a minister, carrying a Bible under his arm. Other times, he discarded his usual suit and bow tie for overalls to look the part of a sharecropper. Once, in an incident retold when Mr. Booker was inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists’ Hall of Fame in 2013, he escaped a mob by riding in the back of a hearse.”
http://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/robinson-black-reporter-of-civil-rights-era-an-inspiration/?utm_source=DAILY+HERALD&utm_campaign=4d6594cc67-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d81d073bb4-4d6594cc67-228635337
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