The Legacy of Simeon Booker, a Pioneer of Civil Rights Journalism

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The African-American journalist Simeon S. Booker Jr., who died this week at the age of 99, sensed an important story when Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old from Chicago, was lynched and mutilated during a summer visit to Mississippi in 1955 for supposedly flirting with a white woman.

Mr. Booker was then a reporter for the black-owned Johnson Publishing company. When Till’s mother decided to hold an open-coffin funeral to reveal her son’s almost unrecognizable face, he persuaded her to allow Johnson Publishing to photograph the corpse.

That image appeared in Jet magazine alongside an article by Mr. Booker and an earlier photograph of Till. It highlighted the savage brutality of American racism around the globe. The journalist and historian David Halberstam called it “the first great media event of the civil rights movement.”

Jet was the country’s only national newsmagazine for blacks, and it became a kind of social media for African-Americans in an era well before the internet. It was small in size, and therefore easily pocketable, circulating among family, friends and work mates. It carried word of black achievement, including news of independence sweeping across African countries, along with coverage of music, culture and beauty. The magazine celebrated black women in a way that would be incorrect today but provided relief from the suffocating omnipresence of white ideals. It would also carry an influential column by Mr. Booker from Washington on politics from a black perspective, called Ticker Tape U.S.A.

Over the next few years after the murder, Mr. Booker covered the sham trial and acquittal of Till’s killers, the Birmingham bus boycotts, and then the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., achieved only through the presence of more than 1,000 Army paratroopers protecting nine black students from attack by howling white mobs. Based on this period alone, it would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that this singular figure founded civil rights reporting in American journalism. Yet his career covered six decades.

Simeon was the beloved nephew of my grandmother Dorothy W. Howard, or Nana, as I knew her and in whose house I grew up in northwest Washington. Civil rights activism ran in the family. A grandfather of hers, William Waring, was a freedman who worked in the Underground Railroad in Ohio and Michigan. Later, Nana would run a private integrated school in Washington, rare for its time, while Simeon’s father ran a Y.M.C.A. that became a cornerstone of the black community in Baltimore. Simeon’s second son, my cousin James Booker, who died in 1991, joined the Nation of Islam and changed his name to Abdul Wali Muhammad. He became editor in chief of the Nation’s newspaper, The Final Call.

I guess I would have to say that journalism also ran in the family. Both Uncle Simeon and my older sister, Mary Ann, worked at The Washington Post. He worked there in the early 1950s and was their first African-American hire on the reporting staff. In my earliest days as a freelance reporter for that paper in Africa in the 1980s, I can remember Nana’s excitement over my bylines, which she would share with Simeon, a legendary figure in Washington journalism by that point.

The story that I associate most vividly with this man comes from the 1960s. In my memories I see the bespectacled, often bow-tied Simeon shaking his head in living room conversations among elders, speaking gravely one moment and looking almost bemused the next as he recounted the terror that he experienced after entering Alabama aboard a Trailways bus as a reporter covering the Freedom Riders in 1961.

By that time, Simeon had become adept at all manner of survival tactics covering anti-black violence in the Deep South, whether it was moving by night to avoid detection, or carrying a well-worn Bible to pass himself off as a minister, or casting off his dapper bow ties and suits to dress as a sharecropper so as not to be seen as an “outside agitator.” He escaped one angry white mob by stowing himself in the back of a hearse.

The Freedom Riders were protesting to oblige the government to enforce federal laws that prohibited segregation in interstate transport. Uncle Simeon was the only reporter to cover them, and that meant getting onto buses with the courageous black and white riders, all volunteers from the Congress of Racial Equality, and witnessing what happened as they purposely ignored the signs that indicated separate accommodations for whites and “colored.”

In our household, in the Washington of the 1960s, civil rights were always the central topic of conversation. My father, a physician, had provided medical care during the historic 1965 civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., and the following year both of my parents had done the same during the March Against Fear, from Memphis to Jackson, Miss.

It was Simeon who usually had the best stories, though, and his Freedom Riders experience has always chilled me deepest. At an Alabama rest stop, their driver returned to the bus, ashen faced, to announce that the other vehicle, which was slightly ahead of them, had been set on fire by a mob. Minutes later, seven rough-looking white men boarded Simeon’s bus and began savagely beating the Freedom Riders. Simeon sat near the back, in the nominally black section, watching the scene through a hole he’d punched in a newspaper, trying amid the bloody frenzy to get a fix on some of the attackers so that he could describe them to the F.B.I.

The bus soon proceeded to Birmingham with the thugs aboard, whereupon its occupants were badly beaten once again. Somehow Simeon got away. “I had recently interviewed the attorney general about the Kennedy administration’s plans for enforcing civil rights in the South,” my uncle told Southern Quarterly in a 2014 interview. “When I mentioned that I would be accompanying the Freedom Riders and that they expected trouble in the South, he had casually invited me to call him if any problems arose. When we finally reached Birmingham, I didn’t hesitate to make that call. Within hours it became very clear the only way we would make it out was with federal help, which Robert Kennedy provided.”

It would be easy for the physical courage and heroism of this period to obscure other kinds of valor, and it would be wrong, too. As the Washington bureau chief for Jet, Simeon had an opera box seat on the slow march of progress in the politics of race in America. He attended high-level news conferences and powerful Washington parties, and conducted numerous interviews with presidents. He often used his long-running column as a forum for unvarnished coverage of discrimination. He felt it was his duty as an African-American reporter not to allow the white establishment any opportunity to proclaim ignorance about the true state of affairs in the nation.

In his 1964 book, “Black Man’s America,” he described an interview with Dwight Eisenhower shortly after he left office: “As I prepared to leave, Ike flashed his famous smile, extended his hand, then said: ‘Tell me. You’ve been here 45 minutes and all you’ve asked me are questions about civil rights. Is that all you’re interested in?’ I answered, ‘Well, Mr. President, you spoke out on other issues while you were president, but no one knew how you really felt about the major civil rights issues.”