By Reginald Stuart

Simeon S. Booker Jr. never lived in Richmond during his nearly 100 years on Earth. Still, at the height of his career, it seemed he was always in town somewhere.

Mr. Booker’s presence could be felt from the former Branch’s Barber Shop and Oatmeal Grocery Store on Mosby Street to Springer Drug Store on Venable Street to Antoinette’s Beauty Shop on 3rd Street to the parlors of Chiles, Scott’s and Mimms funeral homes. He was at the airport, the bus stations and the train station.

Mr. Booker was the journalist who chronicled African-American life in America — its ups and downs, exhilarating and disgusting moments and all points in between — as a reporter for JET and Ebony magazines for 50 years.

Mr. Booker died Sunday, Dec. 10, 2017, at a hospice in Solomons, Md., according to his wife, Carol. He was 99, dying a legend in his own time, according to those who knew him and those who knew his work.

A 1942 graduate of Virginia Union University from Baltimore, Mr. Booker was the reporter who, in 1955, helped bring national attention to the racial atrocities taking place in the South with his story about the brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Miss., where he had been visiting relatives.

The Illinois teen had been beaten to a pulp then shot in the head before his body was dumped in the Tallahatchie River, weighted down with a 70-pound cotton gin fan tied to his neck. Two white men reportedly were set on punishing the young man for allegedly whistling at a white woman at a neighborhood grocery store.

Mr. Booker also covered the subsequent trial of the men who were acquitted by an all-white jury.

Mr. Till’s mother insisted on showing his mutilated body in an open-coffin funeral in Chicago, and Mr. Booker’s story and the accompanying photos by JET photographer David Jackson were seen around the nation.

Dr. Brenda Williams Jones, a Richmond native who described herself as a reader of JET from her childhood until it ceased publication in June 2014, recalled seeing Mr. Booker’s story, one which had been ignored by the white-owned media across the nation until the publication in JET.

“It was the saddest thing I ever saw,” Dr. Jones said.

Like scores of Richmonders and people across the country, Dr. Jones said she depended on the weekly JET and its monthly sister, Ebony, “to know what’s happening” in black America.

Mr. Booker’s reporting and weekly column, “Ticker Tape,” were staples of the pocket-sized magazine that was a treasure trove of news nuggets. Mr. Booker’s reporting about the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1970s persuaded major media organizations that coverage of civil rights activities was unavoidable and necessary.

Mr. Booker became JET’s Washington bureau chief shortly after the Mississippi trial until his retirement in 2007 at age 83. He became known as the “dean of black journalists,” his work helping JET’s circulation soar past the estimated 700,000 copies sold weekly at its peak.

During his tenure, Mr. Booker covered 10 U.S. presidents, scores of members of Congress and nearly every higher education executive in Washington. He wrote about historically black colleges and universities long before they were more than back page mentions in local daily papers.

He witnessed and wrote about a plethora of historic events, including the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott in the 1950s launched by Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat, the 1963 March on Washington and the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. He chronicled the work of civil rights activists including Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, A. Philip Randolph, James Farmer and Dorothy Height.

“You want to talk about icons, Simeon was a real-live, legitimate one, an unflappable journalist, an example for all of us back in the day and a lesson I wish those in today’s new media were guided by,” said Paul Delaney, a veteran New York Times reporter and editor. “He was a hard-nosed, hard-edged, take-no-prisoners type of guy.”

Dorothy Gilliam, a JET reporter in Chicago when Mr. Booker was hired, stayed in touch with him when she moved to The Washington Post as its first black female reporter. She said Mr. Booker deserved the recognition he received. She characterized him simply as “amazing.”

Mr. Booker got his start at the Baltimore Afro-American and the Cleveland Call and Post during the 1940s. He later was the first African-American hired full time at The Washington Post from 1951 to 1953 before joining Johnson Publications Inc. in Chicago, the parent company of JET and Ebony.

DeWayne Wickham, dean of the School of Global Journalism and Communication at Morgan State University, said Mr. Booker would be remembered as one of life’s bridge builders.

“He was the bridge over which so many of us traveled to get into mainstream media,” said Mr. Wickham, a journalist who eventually became a columnist for USA Today. “Although he worked in D.C. (the nation’s capitol), he gave legitimacy to journalism wherever journalism was done.”

The author of three books, Mr. Booker won numerous awards and honors throughout his career. He was the first African-American journalist to win the National Press Club’s Fourth Estate Award, was the winner of the Newspaper Guild Award and a Wilkie Award and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

In 2013, he was inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists’ Hall of Fame, and was honored in January 2015 with the Martin Luther King Jr. Lifetime of Service Award at Virginia Union University.

As the Richmond Free Press Personality following his 2015 award from VUU, Mr. Booker was asked about his legacy. He responded: “I’m the son of a Baptist minister who always tried to report the truth and advance the cause of my people.”

Funeral arrangements were incomplete at Free Press publication deadline.

Survivors include his wife, Carol McCabe Booker; two sons, Simeon Booker III and Theodore Booker; a daughter, Theresa Booker; and several grandchildren. His son, Abdul Wali Muhammad, also known as James Booker, the former editor-in-chief of The Final Call, died in 1991.