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50 Years of Walking History: Jet Magazine’s Simeon Booker Retires at 86 (Richard Prince - Maynard Institute)
January 20, 2007 9:56 PM
(This guy, I’m honored to say, is my uncle. HF)
January 19, 2007
After a career of more than 50 years in which he chronicled the civil rights movement, became the first full-time black reporter at the Washington Post, and opened Johnson Publishing Co.’s Washington bureau, Simeon Booker is retiring.
A retirement reception is scheduled for Booker, 86, on Wednesday at Washington’s National Press Club.
Among those expected are Linda Johnson Rice, CEO of Johnson Publishing Co., publishers of Ebony and Jet magazines; retired Ebony editor Lerone Bennett; Bryan Monroe, editorial director of Ebony and Jet; retired CNN anchor Bernard Shaw; and Eleanor Clift, Newsweek Washington correspondent.
Simeon Booker
Booker’s office said the veteran journalist was not up to sharing his story again for this column, but in 1982, the Washington Post’s Jacqueline Trescott put it this way:
“After 27 years in Washington, Booker is a mini-institution. The second black reporter to win a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, he became The Washington Post’s first full-time black reporter in 1952. His coverage of the murder of Emmett Till, a young black who allegedly whistled at a white woman in Mississippi, in Jet during 1955 is credited with mobilizing support of the southern civil rights movement. His column is the only weekly news-gossip column about black politicians and professionals, and he has a special personality, all the rough edges of the old-fashioned movie reporter and the charm of a Runyonesque character. His office is an-office-away-from-the-office for a lot of black Washington bureaucrats, who periodically stop by for some scotch, some often raucous talk and, occasionally, a fast poker game.”
Booker is obviously walking history. Hired at the Post after stints at the Baltimore Afro-American and the Cleveland Call & Post, organs of the black press, and a Nieman fellowship, he described his two Post years as “almost as a nightmare.”
“One men’s room was open to him in the Post building,” on the newsroom floor, Howard Bray wrote in his 1980 book, “The Pillars of the Post.” “He avoided the inhospitable company cafeteria; many other eating places were closed to him. Booker’s editors kept him in the office for a long spell, but when they finally sent him out to cover a robbery the police nearly arrested him as a suspect. He had trouble getting white cabbies to take him back to his office in time to write his stories before the deadline. Booker’s copy was sometimes scrawled with racial epithets.”
Moreover, some of the stories he wanted to write about black grievances conflicted with the political priorities of publisher Philip Graham, and those were buried or spiked.
It is the Till case for which Booker’s name will forever be linked, however. Twenty-first century journalists will have a difficult time imagining a courtroom ruled by a Southern sheriff where black reporters were shunted to a less desirable part of the courtroom, denied access to the washrooms and drinking fountains, and greeted by “Mornin,’ niggahs,” as Mamie Till-Mobley, Emmett Till’s mother, wrote with Christopher Benson in the 2003 book “Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America.”
A big part of the trial drama was finding � and persuading � justifiably frightened black witnesses to testify, as Booker recounted in a piece he wrote for the January 1956 issue of Nieman Report. The black reporters � 12 of them covered the trial � became part of the backstage story.
After the all-white jury failed to convict the perpetrators, it fell to Booker to help keep Till’s story alive. The FBI reopened the case in 2005, but decided that the five-year statute of limitations on federal civil rights violations had expired.
Booker made a different kind of history in Washington, where he opened Johnson Publishing Co.’s Washington bureau in 1955 and has remained there ever since, writing his familiar Jet “Ticker Tape” column.
“In his office Booker is never still. Tall and husky, he moves rapidly. His thick hair is almost white, and his plain shirts are brightened with bow ties. He turns down his hearing aid if he doesn’t want to be bothered. His voice, a rumble like a vacuum cleaner, reverberates through the office. As he talks, he never finishes what he starts, and that’s the style of his column, always punchy, leaving the end dangling,” Trescott wrote in 1982.
No successor has been named, a Johnson spokeswoman said.
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Posted at 9:56 PM