Source: NYTimes.com

Simeon S. Booker Jr., an award-winning journalist and author who provided pioneering coverage of racial injustice and the civil rights struggle for readers of Jet and Ebony magazines and was The Washington Post’s first black reporter, died on Sunday in Solomons, Md. He was 99. As the escalating battle between civil rights activists and die-hard segregationists became the nation’s most gripping domestic story in the 1950s and ’60s, Mr. Booker traveled dangerous roads with Freedom Riders, marched with protesters and covered the major racial crises and personalities of the era. He began in the 1940s with black newspapers in Baltimore and Cleveland, and was The Post’s first full-time black reporter from 1952 to 1954, covering general news. But he quit to be Jet’s chief columnist and the Washington bureau chief of its parent, Johnson Publishing, for access to corridors of power and the freedom to write about civil rights with an analytical voice. Mr. Booker, who retired in 2007 after 65 years in journalism, was inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame in 2013 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.