MGJR Volume 5 2015 | Page 34

How I Rediscovered Alice Dunnigan: Pioneer of the National Black Press

When the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) inducted two pioneers of the national black press into its Hall of Fame in 2013, the audience had a glimpse into the two decades before the modern civil rights movement swelled into a tsunami in the 1960s.

My husband, Simeon Booker, Jet and Ebony magazines’ D.C. bureau chief for more than half a century, was cited for his highly acclaimed chronicle of the decades between 1955 and 1975, Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter’s Account of the Civil Rights Movement (University Press of Mississippi, 2013). Reaching back even further into the movement’s history, the NABJ also honored the late Alice A. Dunnigan (1906-1983), Washington correspondent for the Associated Negro Press (ANP) news service from 1947 to 1961. During those years, Dunnigan did more to inform black Americans about the death throes of Jim Crow than any other journalist, while also chalking up important “firsts”: She was the first black woman journalist admitted to the press galleries for reporters covering both houses of Congress, to the White House press corps, to the State Department and to the United States Supreme Court press pools. When her boss at the ANP and its member newspapers refused to cover her expenses, she paid her own way to travel on President Harry S. Truman’s coast-to-coast, whistle-stop train tour, becoming the first black woman journalist to make such a presidential journey.

Nominating Dunnigan for the NABJ honor, Sonya Ross of The Associated Press credited her with paving the way “for every black woman who has ever covered the U.S. presidency.” The video tribute reminded the audience that Dunnigan had recounted her experiences as a pioneer of the black press in a 1974 autobiography, A Black Woman’s Experience: from Schoolhouse to the White House.

I remembered meeting Dunnigan at one of Johnson Publishing Company’s famous Christmas parties in the Washington bureau, where anybody and everybody in politics, government or

By carol m. booker

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