Booker, Simeon Saunders Jr.
1918-2017 · Contribution: 1952-2007
Became the first Black staff reporter at the Washington Post in 1952, then spent 51 years as Jet magazine's Washington bureau chief, most notably delivering the 1955 Emmett Till murder trial to a national audience
Portraits are AI-generated interpretations, not photographs.
Impact on the world
After becoming the Washington Post's first Black staff reporter in 1952 — enduring, as former publisher Donald Graham later put it, “insults from supposed colleagues and from the people he was covering” — Booker joined Jet and Ebony magazines, where a small AP wire item about a missing Chicago boy vacationing in Mississippi led him to Emmett Till's 1955 murder case; he stood beside Till's mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, at the funeral home when she insisted on an open casket, and his coverage of both the funeral and the subsequent trial of Till's acquitted killers is widely credited with galvanizing the national civil rights movement. In 1961 he personally arranged with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to evacuate Freedom Riders after their bus was firebombed in Anniston, Alabama, went on to cover ten U.S. presidents and the Vietnam War over his 53 years with Johnson Publishing Company, and in 1982 became the first African American journalist to win the National Press Club's Fourth Estate Award for lifetime achievement.
Life & background
Born August 27, 1918, in Baltimore, Maryland, and raised from age five in Youngstown, Ohio, where his father opened a YMCA for African Americans, Booker had stories published in the Baltimore Afro-American while still a high school student and went on to graduate from Virginia Union University with a degree in English, writing about Negro League baseball for the Youngstown Vindicator during summer breaks. He worked for the Afro-American and the Cleveland Call and Post before a 1950-51 Nieman Fellowship at Harvard led to his 1952 hire at the Washington Post and, soon after, his 51-year tenure directing Jet's Washington bureau, where he refused a 1960 Kennedy campaign attempt to ghostwrite his column to court Black voters. He married twice, retired in 2007 at age 88, published the memoir Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter's Account of the Civil Rights Movement (2013) with his wife and fellow journalist Carol McCabe Booker, and died of pneumonia-related complications in Solomons, Maryland, on December 10, 2017, at age 99.
Sources
- Washington Post (obituary); Nieman Foundation; Zinn Education Project
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