Complete Story
12/15/2017
Pioneering African American journalist Simeon Booker passes at 99
Simeon Booker, a trailblazing Black journalist, who covered the Civil Rights Movement for the iconic African American magazines EBONY and Jet and who was the first Black person to work as a full-time Washington Post reporter, has died.
Booker, who’s credited with playing an integral role in delivering the story of Emmett Till’s murder, was 99.
“As Chairman of the NNPA, I know that we honored Simeon Booker during Black Press Week for his overall excellence of journalism and certainly he is someone that has been very, very important to our industry,” said Dorothy Leavell, the national chairman of the NNPA and publisher of the Crusader Newspapers in Chicago, Ill., and Gary, Indiana.
“His presence will be deeply missed. Even though he lived a long life, we still mourn and we send our sympathies to his family and want them to know that he was highly-appreciated at the NNPA and the Black Press around the country,” Leavell said.
Simeon Saunders Booker, Jr. was born on August 27, 1918, in Baltimore, Maryland to Roberta Waring and Simeon Saunders Booker, Sr., a YMCA director and minister, according to his biography published by The HistoryMakers.
After his family moved to Youngstown, Ohio, Booker became interested in journalism through a family friend, Carl Murphy, the owner and operator of “The Afro-American” newspapers, also known as “The Afro,” in Baltimore, Md.
In 1942, after receiving his bachelor’s degree in English from Virginia Union University in Richmond, Booker took a job at the The Afro-American as a young reporter.
In 1945, he moved back to Ohio to work for the “Call and Post.”
Five years later, Booker was the recipient of the Nieman Fellowship from Harvard University to study journalism and develop his talent as a reporter. After leaving Harvard in 1951, Booker became the first full-time Black reporter at “The Washington Post.”
