Black reporter Simeon Booker had been with Jet magazine only a year. Almost everything history books tell you about the killing of Emmett Till is known because Booker reported it. He got to the story first, sitting with Mamie Till in a South Side Chicago funeral home, taking notes about her tears and her resolve. When she looked down at her son’s body and tried to find a part of him to recognize, Booker was there, recording her words. He wrote: “Her face wet with tears, she leaned over the body, just removed from a rubber bag in a Chicago funeral home, and cried out, ‘Darling, you have not
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