Simeon Booker, a trail-blazing journalist and the first full-time African-American reporter at The Washington Post, has died at the age of 99.
Booker died Sunday in Solomons, Maryland, according to a Post obituary, citing his wife Carol.
Booker served for decades as the Washington bureau chief for the African-American publications Jet weekly and Ebony monthly. He is credited with bringing to national prominence the death of Emmett Till, the 14-year old African-American boy whose brutal murder in Mississippi became a galvanizing point for the nascent civil rights movement.
Booker was born in Baltimore and raised in Youngstown, Ohio. He joined the Post in 1952, but moved on two years later to found the Washington bureau for Jet and Ebony.
In 2016, he received a career George Polk Award in journalism.
