First Black women to report from White House honored

WASHINGTON — On her first day covering the White House, Alice Dunnigan had every reason to stand out.

She was the first Black woman to be credentialed to join the White House press corps, and she had even arrived an hour early to cover her first news conference with President Harry Truman.

But as she sat in the lobby of the West Wing, she may as well have been invisible.

“I sat there alone and apparently unnoticed, taking in all the activity while glancing now and then at my newspaper,” she wrote in her 1974 autobiography, Alone Atop the Hill. “If anyone wondered who I was or why I was there, they made no effort to find out.”

More than 75 years later, Dunnigan’s memory is being honored in the same setting where her colleagues once ignored her.

Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, in November named a new lectern in the White House briefing room for Dunnigan of The Associated Negro Press and Ethel L. Payne, who joined her on the beat a few years later for The Chicago Defender.

Over the years, the briefing room lectern has become as much a cultural artifact as a political one, anchoring a room accessible to a privileged few.

April Ryan, Washington bureau chief and senior White House correspondent for The Grio — the longest-serving Black woman in the White House press corps — said the decision to honor Dunnigan and Payne made her feel “seen.”

Ryan, who has been attacked by former President Donald Trump and conservative media for asking questions that pertain to Black Americans, said the choice of the two women was particularly poignant.

Both women were chastised by White House officials and later ignored by President Dwight Eisenhower, who was often flustered by their questions about civil rights.