Meet the first black woman reporter in White House
EVEN THOUGH PEOPLE IN WASHINGTON DID NOT ACCEPT HER, DUNNIGAN PERSISTED NO MATTER WHAT BECAUSE ‘SHE KNEW SHE WAS FIGHTING BATTLES FOR HER ENTIRE RACE’
It was rare to be a woman or African-American covering the White House in the 1940s, and Alice Dunnigan was both.
The Kentucky-born journalist was the first African-American woman to be granted access to cover the White House, as well as Congress, the Supreme Court and the State Department.
Yet even at the height of her career in Washington, she had to pawn her watch every Saturday night so that she would have enough money to eat until her pay cheque arrived on Monday morning. It was a “humiliating practice,” she wrote in her 1974
autobiography, A Black Woman’s Experience — From Schoolhouse
to White House. “I was never allowed more than five dollars on it, just enough for Sunday dinner,” she wrote.
After pawning it, Dunnigan headed home to her one-room basement apartment in Washington, District of Columbia’s Brookland neighbourhood, where she shovelled coal for the furnace to get a break on rent. Dunnigan was Washington bureau chief for the Associated Negro Press for 14 years, beginning in 1947.
“For black readers of the era, the Associated Negro Press was a combination of CNN, MSNBC and the Washington Post,” says Gerald Horne, a professor at the University of Houston and one of the country’s foremost historians on racism. “It generated protest and energised organisations in the ongoing struggle against Jim Crow.”
By 1940, the circulation of the black press was 1.27 million readers, and that didn’t take into account every newspaper issue had multiple readers, according to a book by Horne.
“Nobody in the white press was covering the issues important to black Americans in the 1940s and 1950s. Alice stood up to three presidents, and sometimes they didn’t like what she said,” said Carol McCabe Booker, who edited Dunnigan’s book and republished it in 2015.
Terror of lynching
Dunnigan was born in 1906 in Russellville, Kentucky — two years before the lynching of four black men in her hometown. Historian Michael Morrow says the terror of the lynching hung over the small town for decades. “I think this community put a lot of fight in Alice,” Morrow said. “You almost had to jump out the womb fighting here if you hoped to make it. She understood young enough that she would have to chart her own course.”
The historian said that even though people in Washington did not accept her, Dunnigan persisted no matter what because “she knew she was fighting battles for her entire race.” Morrow has spent three decades attempting to make her as well-known as other civil rights figures, and those efforts are paying off.
“It is my fondest hope,” Dunnigan wrote in a preface to her autobiography, “that the story of my life and work will encourage more young writers to use their talents as a moving force in the forward march of progress and that their efforts will soon result in giving Americans the kind of nation those of my generation so long hoped and worked for.”