Civil rights chronicler Simeon Booker dies at 99

Greg Toppo | USA TODAY

Journalist Simeon Booker, a longtime chronicler of the civil rights movement and the first full-time African-American reporter for The Washington Post, died Sunday, The Post reported. He was 99.

As a writer for Jet and Ebony magazines in 1955, Booker helped deliver the story of 14-year-old Emmett Till's murder to a national audience. Till was killed in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman, and Booker’s coverage of his death — as well as the acquittal of two white killers — helped galvanized the civil rights movement.

Images of Till’s mutilated, disfigured body, published in Jet and other African-American publications, helped make Till's murder “the first great media event of the civil rights movement,” historian David Halberstam later wrote.

Booker also covered the Montgomery bus boycott and, in 1965, the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala.

One of the few black reporters in Washington at the time, Booker wrote a column for Jet and led its government coverage, at a time when black reporters were largely excluded from news events, The Post noted.

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Previously: Justice Department may reopen Emmett Till case

In all, he covered 10 presidents and traveled to Southeast Asia to report on the Vietnam War.

Returning to the South to cover the civil rights movement, he sometimes posed as a minister, carrying a Bible under his arm. He also occasionally wore overalls to resemble a sharecropper. In one incident, he said upon being inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists’ Hall of Fame in 2013, he escaped a mob by riding in the back of a hearse.

Booker wrote that he was “never prouder of Jet’s role in any story” than when he helped cover a Freedom Ride from Washington to New Orleans in 1961. The ride was an interracial effort to test compliance with a ban on segregated interstate transit.

Born in Baltimore in 1918, Booker earned an English degree in 1942 from Virginia Union University, an historically black college in Richmond. He began his career at the Baltimore Afro-American and in 1950 was a Nieman journalism fellow at Harvard University.

After the Nieman, he applied to several newspapers but received only one answer, from Phil Graham, publisher of The Post.

Working in the segregated capital was trying — at The Post, he was advised to use an editorial restroom on the fourth floor.

In 1954, he joined Johnson Publishing Co., which published Jet, a weekly, and Ebony, a monthly. He remained with the company until his retirement, around his 90th birthday.

Booker wrote several books, including Black Man’s America and Shocking the Conscience, a memoir co-written with his second wife, Carol McCabe.

“I had a compelling ambition to fight segregation on the front line,” he said in 1982, upon receiving the National Press Club’s Fourth Estate Award for lifetime achievement, according to The New York Times. “I stayed on the road covering civil rights day and night. We ducked into funeral homes at night to photograph the battered bodies of civil rights victims. The names, the places and the events became history.”

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