Simeon Booker, Journalist Who Broke Emmett Till's Story, Dies At 99

Photo Credit: Fred Sweets for The Washington Post

Simeon Booker, the journalist credited with bringing national attention to the death of Emmett Till back in 1955, died at the age of 99 at an assisted-living community in Solomons, Maryland, on Sunday.

READ: Emmett Till Accuser Finally Admits She Lied About Her Claims

Booker had recently been hospitalized for pneumonia according to a report from The Washington Post.

As the first full-time black reporter for The Washington Post, Booker served on the newspaper's staff for two years before joining Johnson Publishing Co. to write for Jet and Ebony magazine in 1954. It was during his time there that he ended up writing about the death of 14 year old Till for the former, with the story gaining national spotlight upon its publication. Booker, along with photographer David Jackson, documented Till's funeral, where his mother Mamie Till-Mobley requested that her son's casket remain open for all to see.

"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,'" Booker recounted in his report. Prior to his death Booker was inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists' Hall of Fame and had received two prestigious awards for his reporting: the George Polk Award in journalism and the National Press Club's Fourth Estate Award.

"I wanted to fight segregation on the front lines," he said at the awards ceremony for the latter. "I wanted to dedicate my writing skills to the cause. Segregation was beating down my people. I volunteered for every assignment and suggested more. I stayed on the road, covering civil rights day and night. The names, the places and the events became history."