WASHINGTON (AP) — Simeon Booker, a trailblazing African-American journalist and the first full-time black reporter at The Washington Post, died Sunday at the age of 99.

Booker died at an assisted-living community in Solomons, Maryland, according to a Post obituary, citing his wife Carol. He had recently been hospitalized for pneumonia.

Booker served for decades as the Washington bureau chief for the iconic African-American publications Jet, a weekly, and Ebony, a monthly. He is credited with bringing to national prominence the 1955 death of Emmett Till, the 14-year old African-American boy whose brutal murder in Mississippi became a galvanizing point for the nascent civil rights movement. Booker’s article included an open-casket picture of Till’s mangled face that shocked the nation.

In a 2013 video tribute upon Booker’s induction into the National Association for Black Journalists Hall of Fame, former Jet reporter Roy Betts said that Booker’s coverage of the civil rights movement, “catapulted the movement onto the world stage.”

His reporting from the Deep South placed him in near-constant danger.