In Cove Point on the Chesapeake: The Beacon, the Bay, and the Dream, Carol Booker tells the story of how nature and human desire define a singular place along storied waters. Booker writes of heroes, scoundrels and the families who populated a tiny waterfront community, once known mainly for shipwrecks and treacherous riptides, that became a World War II training ground, the locale for hunting buried treasure, and later a cog in the global energy trade with a natural gas plant. In its pages are tales of exploration and heroism, sports and tragedies including a riptide referred to as the devil's grasp by a man who survived. Cove Point on the Chesapeake tells of the resolve of a displaced Russian princess to rebuild her culture along the the nation's largest estuary. With solid reporting and interviews, Booker writes of the cunning of the developer who mapped the marshy shores and lured Washingtonians to a little-known stretch of shoreline for extraordinary fishing and easy living. A resilient lighthouse illuminates this rare spot on earth and a century of its inhabitants, much as does the fetching prose of veteran journalist Booker.
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 fifty-three 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.
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