Washington: Simeon Booker, a trail-blazing African-American journalist and the first full-time black reporter at The Washington Post, died Sunday at the age of 99, reports news agency AP.
Booker died at an assisted- living community in Solomons, Maryland, according to a Post obituary, citing his wife Carol. He had recently been hospitalized for pneumonia. Booker served for decades as the Washington bureau chief for the iconic African-American publications Jet, a weekly, and Ebony, a monthly. He is credited with bringing to national prominence the 1955 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.