Shocking Conscience: A Reporter's Account of Civil Rights Movement Simeon Booker with Carol McCabe Booker. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013.One of most esteemed journalists of twentieth century gives his account of African American Civil Rights Movement in this rich memoir. Known as the man from to his longstanding affiliation with Johnson Publishing Company of Chicago and its figurehead black magazines Jet and Ebony, Simeon Booker offers a detailed recollection of his experience in documenting and participating in some of most important Civil Rights protests and incidents in American history.As title of his memoir suggests, Booker's narrative is a lucid and frequently harrowing portrayal of explicit racial discrimination and intimidation he both wrote about and experienced. This is clear from outset of text which begins with Booker's first assignment to document movement in Mississippi. The author stresses that Deep South under Jim Crow was like nothing I had ever seen. What [he] witnessed there was not only raw hatred, but state condoned terror (3). Through documenting brutal murders of activists including Reverend George W. Lee and arbitrary response of law enforcement officers such as Sheriff Ike Shelton, who immediately pronounced preacher's death due to concussion from a traffic accident (21), Booker highlights both pervasive and permissive nature of racist violence. Furthermore, his account of lengths he and Jet photographer David Jackson went to in their attempts to blend in, from renting beaten up automobiles to carrying a Bible in an attempt to pass for members of clergy, enforces what little protection their position as reporters afforded them. Whilst it is tempting to conceptualise contemporary journalists as immune from violence and turmoil of conflict, Booker illustrates how his role placed him and his colleagues firmly in firing line of racist white Southerners.Following a briskly moving and broadly chronological format, Booker outlines his early experiences as a journalist for publications including Baltimore Afro-American and The Washington Post which preceded his move to Johnson Publishing Company in early 1950s, before addressing murder of Emmitt Till and his coverage of trial which established his pre-eminence as a black journalist. From here Booker goes on to describe his coverage of many pivotal Civil Rights battles, including struggle to integrate Little Rock Central High School in 1957, Freedom Rides of 1961, and March on Washington in 1963. …