Knoxville Celebrates Black History Month

Pictured left to right; Mr. Booker, Mary Wilson, Director CPD, Terry Carroll CPD, and Mark Brezina, Field Office Director

Mr. Robert Booker (pictured) was the guest speaker at the Knoxville Field Office's Black History Month Celebration on February 12, 2004.

Bob Booker is a former community organizing specialist for Knoxville's federally funded Empowerment Zone, a former lawmaker, mayoral aide and executive director of the Beck Cultural Center. He is also an author, historian and bon vivant. One of Knoxville's more versatile citizens, he wrote a series of recollections of growing up in the near-East Knoxville neighborhood, now mostly cleared by urban renewal, that was then known as "The Bottom." Published in the old daily version of The Knoxville Journal in the late 1980s, they have been excerpted and edited by Barry Henderson, Booker's original editor on those Journal columns. Booker, whose previous books include Two Hundred Years of Black Culture in Knoxville, Tennessee and And There Was Light!-The 120-year History of Knoxville College, has a new book, entitled, The Heat of a Red Summer-Race Mixing, Race Rioting in 1919 Knoxville, due from Rutledge Books this summer.