1. Findings Congress finds the following: (1) Simeon Saunders Booker, Jr., was born on August 27, 1918, in Baltimore, Maryland, to Reberta Waring and Simeon Saunders Booker, Sr., a YMCA director and minister. (2) After his family moved to Youngstown, Ohio, Booker became interested in journalism. (3) Booker promoted and wrote about Negro League baseball teams in Youngstown’s local newspaper, The Vindicator. (4) In 1945, he moved back to Ohio to work for the Call and Post, where he became the first African-American reporter to win a Newspaper Guild Award for his series on Cleveland, Ohio, slum housing, and a Willkie Award for reporting on racial inequities in the public schools. (5) In 1950, Booker was the recipient of the Nieman Fellowship from Harvard University to study journalism and develop his talent as a reporter. (6) After leaving Harvard in 1951, Booker became the first full-time African-American reporter at The Washington Post. (7) In 1955, he helped to advance the civil rights movement with his famous coverage of the Emmett Till murder and trial, turning a common occurrence in the Deep South into a national tragedy that united the Black community. (8) He remained at the forefront of the civil rights movement, reporting on the 1957 integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. (9) In 1961, he rode with the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) Freedom Riders through the Deep South. (10) When the Freedom Riders were firebombed and beaten in Anniston, Alabama, in a Ku Klux Klan ambush, Booker arranged for their rescue by calling U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. (11) In two wartime tours of Vietnam in the 1960s, he interviewed Black troops on the front lines, and took enemy fire in a helicopter with United States Army General William Westmoreland for reports for Jet and Ebony magazines. (12) He has chronicled the most tumultuous period in American history in two highly acclaimed books, Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter’s Account of the Civil Rights Movement (University Press of