Kent cigarettes, Count Basie and bigotry
From The Washington Post: Simeon Booker was at Ole Miss (the year James Meredith was admitted to the university as its first black student). He knew the dark, kaleidoscopic danger of the place. He had been in Mississippi — at that courthouse in Sumner to cover the Emmett Till murder trial. Till — a 14-year-old black youth murdered by two white men in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a woman who was married to one of the men — was Booker’s damn story, and he knew it, his fingerprints on the reporting of it from the very beginning. They all knew it, every one of the reporters, the ones from the white press and certainly the ones from the Negro press.