NPC Fourth Estate Winner, Golden Owl Booker receives Phoenix Award

This Week in National Press Club History:

Sept. 18, 2010: NPC Golden Owl and 1982 Fourth Estate Award winner Simeon Booker receives the Phoenix Award from the Congressional Black Caucus in recognition of his more than 55 years as Washington bureau chief of Ebony and Jet Magazines. In April 2013, in a sold-out Book Rap for the Club’s Journalism Institute, Booker talks of his experiences covering the Emmett Till murder trial in Mississippi, the Freedom Rides and the administrations of 10 American presidents. He wrote about all of this in his memoir Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter’s Account of the Civil Rights Movement.

The first black reporter for the Washington Post, and the second African-American to become a Club member in 1956, Booker was inducted in 2013 into the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame.

This Week in National Press Club History is brought to you by the NPC History & Heritage Committee, which preserves and revitalizes the Club’s century-old history with lobby displays, panel discussions, an extensive oral-history project and events such as NPC Centennial Spelling Bee on Sept. 18. The spelling bee is a competition between lawmakers and reporters for the title ”Best Speller in the United States.”

For more information on the History & Heritage Committee, or to join it, contact Gilbert Klein at [email protected].