Simeon Booker, who brought Emmett Till death to the nation, dies at 99

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Journalist Simeon Booker (center) is presented with a Phoenix Award at the 2010 Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual Legislative Conference Phoenix Awards Dinner in Washington, D.C. | AP

Simeon Booker, a trail-blazing journalist credited with helping bring to national prominence the 1955 death of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old African-American boy from Chicago whose brutal murder in Mississippi became a galvanizing point for the nascent civil rights movement, has died at 99.

For decades, he was the Washington bureau chief of the iconic African-American publications Jet, a weekly, and Ebony, a monthly. His story in Jet on Till’s killing included an open-casket picture of the teenager’s mangled face that shocked the nation.

Mr. Booker, who was also the first full-time black reporter for The Washington Post, died Sunday at an assisted-living community in Solomons, Maryland, according to a Post obituary that cited his wife Carol. He had recently been hospitalized for pneumonia.

In a 2013 video tribute upon Mr. Booker’s induction into the National Association for Black Journalists Hall of Fame, former Jet reporter Roy Betts said that Mr. Booker’s coverage of the civil rights movement, “catapulted the movement onto the world stage.”

His reporting from the Deep South placed him in near-constant danger. Tributes to him mention that he sometimes dressed as a minister (complete with Bible) or a farmer to escape detection and one frequently told tale had Mr. Booker escaping from an angry mob in the back of a hearse. He rode in one of the buses to cover the 1961 Freedom Rides, when black activists rode from Washington to New Orleans to challenge a ban on segregated interstate transportation facilities.

Mr. Booker was born in Baltimore and raised in Youngstown, Ohio. He started his journalistic career working for a string of African-American publications. He joined the Post in 1952 but moved on two years later to found the Washington bureau for Johnson Publishing, the parent company of Jet and Ebony.

He served in that position for more than 50 years, authoring the widely read Ticker Tape column, chronicling Washington’s inner workings for a national black readership before retiring in 2007. He covered 10 presidents, traveled abroad to report on the Vietnam War and helped bring Till’s death to a national audience.

After hearing in Chicago that the teenager had disappeared in Money, Mississippi, while visiting relatives, he went to the boy’s mother Mamie Till-Mobley’s home and was with her later when she insisted at the funeral home on an open casket to show the world how her son had been mutilated, it was said, for whistling at a white woman in the Deep South.

In Jet, Booker wrote: “Her face wet with tears, she leaned over the body, just removed from a rubber bag in a Chicago funeral home, and cried out, ‘Darling, you have not died in vain. Your life has been sacrificed for something.’ ”

Though most news organizations did not publish the photo of the boy in the open casket, the image captured by Jet’s David Jackson appeared in the magazine and in other African-American publications.

Mr. Booker authored or co-authored four books, including a 2013 memoir co-written with his wife Carol McCabe Booker, “Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter’s Account of the Civil Rights Movement.”

Mr. Booker was inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists’ Hall of Fame in 2013 and received a career George Polk Award for lifetime achievements in journalism and the National Press Club’s Fourth Estate Award.

He is survived by the wife Carol and three children.

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