MGJR Volume 5 2015 | Page 36

She lost no time boarding a train for the nation’s capital. There, her success at figuring out the pathways and pitfalls of federal employment might have led to a long government career had her job and thousands of others not been eliminated at war’s end.

Dunnigan had done some freelancing as a reporter for five years for The Associated Negro Press, the news service founded in 1919 by Claude Barnett. The ANP served 112 black weekly newspapers in the United States and dozens more in the emerging nations of West Africa. Dunnigan convinced Barnett to give her a chance as ANP’s Washington bureau chief after several men had turned down the job. Barnett, strapped for cash, offered Dunnigan a tryout – not at the weekly salary he’d offered the men, but at half-a-cent per word. With little or no support from her boss, Dunnigan quickly secured accreditation to press enclaves no black woman had ever entered before. After the Truman trip, the front pages of ANP’S member newspapers rarely lacked her byline.

President Truman welcomed Dunnigan's questions at his press conferences, but his successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, showed his irritation at her civil rights focus, (Some headlines: “District Jim Crow threatening GOP plans to make good party pledges”; “Ike ‘s curt replies to questions reveal lack of knowledge of minority problem” and “Civil rights ‘extraneous’ says Ike cabinet member”), and refused to call on her. That led to headlines like: “Why does Ike snub colored reporters?” Eisenhower called on Dunnigan five times in 1953, his first year in office, but only twice in 1954. Years passed before he gave her a nod, finally ignoring her from 1958 until he left office in 1961. When Chicago’s Ethel Payne, who joined the White House press corps in 1954, began getting the same treatment, she stopped attending the press conferences rather than waste her time. But Dunnigan kept trying until a new administration took office in 1961, when President John F. Kennedy recognized her only eight minutes into his first news conference, on Jan. 25, 1961. She asked about administration assistance for black farmers evicted from their homes in Tennessee for daring to vote in previously “white” primaries. Hers was the only question on civil rights, and JFK answered without hesitation that he was “extremely interested in making sure that every American is given the right to cast his vote without prejudice to his rights as a citizen,” and that his administration would “pursue the problem of providing that protection with all vigor.”

(The exchange can be heard on the Kennedy Library website: http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKWHA-004.aspx)

As I read on in her memoir, her words screamed for republication for a modern audience. Dunnigan’s son Robert gave me permission to edit the volume and to seek a publisher. An outline of the proposed manuscript brought three contract offers. We chose the University of Georgia Press, which immediately recognized the appeal of Dunnigan’s autobiography to a mass audience, as well as to students of American history, civil rights, journalism, and women’s rights. UGa also agreed that to ensure its wide availability, the book should be published in paperback and electronic formats, as well as in cloth, and would be reasonably priced. The result is a new, edited and annotated edition, renamed Alone atop the Hill: the Autobiography of Alice Dunnigan (February 2015). My husband, who knew her well, contributed the foreword, in which he remembers Dunnigan as having a passion for politics as well as journalism – and succeeding at both. All that she accomplished as ANP’s Washington bureau chief, he emphasizes, she did single-handedly, without an office or staff, much less access to a major wire service.

“Pioneering in any field is no easy job,” she told the National Council of Women in 1955 after the Women’s National Press Club had made her its first black member. “Sometimes the going gets so tough that the pioneer feels like tossing aside his ax of hope and once again turning back to the beaten path of the status quo.”

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