Alice Dunnigan - Alone atop the Hill: The Autobiography of Alice Dunnigan, Pioneer of the National Black Press

ALONE ATOP THE HILL

The Autobiography of Alice Dunnigan, Pioneer of the National Black Press

Edited by Carol McCabe Booker

With a foreword by Simeon Booker

A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication

This publication is made possible in part through a grant from the Hodge Foundation in memory of its founder, Sarah Mills Hodge, who devoted her life to the relief and education of African Americans in Savannah, Georgia.

Published by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

2015 by Robert W. Dunnigan and Carol McCabe Booker

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2014957344

ISBN: 978-0-8203-4798-1 (hardcover: alk. paper)

ISBN: 978-0-8203-4860-5 (ebook)

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If I can so live to inspire others to strive to achieve,

I will not have lived my life in vain.

Alice Dunnigan, letter to Claude A. Barnett, January 20, 1948

I knew Alice Dunnigan for all the years I worked in Washington, first as a reporter for the Washington Post, and then as bureau chief for Jet and Ebony magazines, until her death in 1983. Quiet, unassuming, and plain-spoken, she had a passion for both journalism and politics, and she was successful at both.

Alice arrived in Washington, D.C., in 1942, almost a decade before I joined the Washington Post toward the close of 1951 for a two-year stint that almost killed me, so difficult was it to function as a reporter in a city where even the pet cemeteries were segregated. In 1956, when I returned from Chicago as bureau chief of John H. Johnsons growing magazine empire, I found that Alice was still making her rounds as chief of the Associated Negro Presss one-person bureau. Never having given up despite incredible obstacles, she was actually thrivingnot financially by any means, but in reputation and political access. Even without the backing of a daily newspaper, or the paycheck and connections that such employment guaranteed, Alice in 1947 had doggedly and successfully pursued the credentials to join both the White House press corps and the Capitol Press Galleries as the first black woman journalist accredited by either. When blocked from the latter because she did not represent a daily paper, she campaigned for a rule change so that a news agency and the weekly newspapers it serveda staple in the black communitywould no longer be denied access. She went right on to pursue the same access to the White House. Although encountering, as she later reported, more discrimination as a woman than as an African American, she managed within months to secure a berth on the Presidential Special carrying Harry S. Truman cross-country on a whistle-stop trip to the West Coastalbeit on her own dime when the newspapers she represented refused to pay her expenses.

Alices story did not begin in 1947, although from that point on her world was very different from the one she left. If, as she requests, we judge her not by what she achieved but by the depths from which she rose (paraphrasing Frederick Douglass), her journey from sharecroppers daughterand, in fact, a sharecropper herself as well as a laundress, cook, and nanny at points in her early lifeAlices journey from a red clay hill in rural Kentucky to the marble columns of the White House is an incredible success story.

Originally titled A Black Womans Experiencefrom Schoolhouse to White House, Alices description of her struggle to become and to sustain herself as a schoolteacher in rural Kentucky is as jaw-dropping as her later account of making it as a reporter in pre-civil-rights-era Washington. The original title did not reflect the steep slope of her early climb out of the rural poverty of her birth, and it was also ridiculed by detractors who substituted outhouse for schoolhouse.

Reading like a novel and told in her own words, painstakingly recorded in retirement after her successive careers as a rural schoolteacher, White House correspondent, and finally political activist, Alices story should give hope to anyone who has ever doubted his or her ability to make it through tough times or, much more painfully, his or her own worth. Alices experience offers a resounding, Yes, you can! as long as, in the words of the Negro spiritual, you keep-a inching along.

Simeon Booker, Jet/Ebony

Washington Bureau Chief, 1956-2007

It wasnt the poverty of a washerwomans life in rural Kentucky that drove young Alice Allison relentlessly to succeed as a professional. Poverty would be with her for most of her life, even as a national reporter for more than one hundred black weekly newspapers. What spurred her on was a keen intellect, immense determination, and a yearning for dignity and respect despite intractable racial and gender barriers. Alice so hungered for learning that nothingnot even her fathers tauntswould keep her from walking miles to the Negro schoolhouse, staying at the top of her class, and earning a teaching certificate in record time. But even with these accomplishments, she still had to confront a system in which, like her mother, she might spend her life either washing the clothes or caring for the children (or both) of white families. With too few Negro schools, teaching positions for blacks were scarce, and there were no other viable options for a woman in a state where Jim Crow still held sway. None of those realities stopped Alice Dunnigan from pursuing and achieving much more, including a long and impressive litany of historic firsts as a black female reporter:

accredited to the White House

traveled with a U.S. president (Truman)

credentialed by the House and Senate Press Galleries

accredited to the Department of State

accredited to the Supreme Court

voted into the White House Newswomens Association

voted into the Womens National Press Club

broke into the all-male bastion of Washington sports reporting

Despite all this, few people today know her story. Alice Dunnigans historic achievements during the 1940s and 1950s are largely forgotten, in large part due to the tsunami of civil rights battles and victories that swept over the nation during the 1960s. The exceptions are largely among the small cadre of surviving veterans of the 1950s and 1960s black press, the civil rights movement, and the administrations of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. They remember her with admiration and respect.

This historical breach was rectified to some degree at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., on January 17, 2013, when the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) inducted Alice Dunnigan posthumously into its hall of fame. Also among the honorees that evening was another legend of the black press, Simeon Booker (my husband), who at ninety-four was one of a handful of attendees (besides her family) who had actually known Dunnigan. I recalled seeing her only once, at one of the famous Christmas parties hosted by the Washington bureau of Johnson Publishing Companys popular