Book rap highlights triumph of black female journalists over discrimination

The double discrimination faced by female African-American journalists in the Civil Rights years was the subject of a February 25 Book Rap at the National Press Club.

The panel featured Carol Booker, editor of Alone Atop the Hill: The Autobiography of Alice Dunnigan, Pioneer of the National Black Press, and James McGrath Morris, author of Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press.

“The Washington press corps was lily white,'' McGrath Morris said. ``Politicians refused to speak to Ethel. Every door that she wanted opened was slammed in her face.”

“For two years Eisenhower refused to recognize her at press conferences,” Booker said of Dunnigan. “At one news conference she jumped to her feet and tried to ask a question fifteen times."

McGrath Morris said that Dunnigan (1906-1983) and Payne (1911-1991) felt isolated in their environment and worked together, often planning questions at White House press conferences to force the president to address the tough issue of race. Both women were raised in communities where the majority of African-American women worked as domestic servants in white homes, and both sought a ticket out of that environment into a wider world.

In 1942, Dunnigan left a teaching job in her home state of Kentucky to become a typist for the federal government, and in 1947, she became D.C. bureau chief of the Associated Negro Press. She was the first African-American woman White House correspondent and the first to receive media credentials for the Senate and Congress.

When President Harry Truman took an 18-state train tour in 1948, Dunnigan became the first black female journalist to accompany a U.S. president on an official tour, although she was the only reporter forced to pay her own way.

“She scooped the men left, right, and center throughout the trip because they looked on it more as a vacation,” Booker said, “and she didn’t.”

Payne left Chicago in 1948 to work as a hostess at the Army Special Services Club in Japan, where she wrote explosive stories about black U.S. soldiers, their Japanese girlfriends, and abandoned mixed race children.

By the time she returned to the U.S. in 1951, the Civil Rights movement was ramping up, and Payne covered it as D.C. bureau chief for the Defender, a Chicago-based weekly newspaper primarily for African-American readers. She became the first female African-American journalist to cover international stories.

“These two women were tough and unwilling to accept the conditions,” McGrath Morris said. “The White House press had no interest in asking the questions about civil rights these women wanted to ask. But when the president answered their questions, the white press had to report what the president said.”

The book event was introduced by former NPC President Larry Lipman, who pointed out that the Club didn’t admit African-American men until 1955 and women of any race until 1971.

The panel discussion was moderated by Book & Author Committee member Gloria Browne-Marshall, who covers the U.S. Supreme Court for AANIC (African-American News & Information Consortium), a syndication of newspapers and online media.

Browne-Marshall said, “Ethel Payne, Alice Dunnigan and the black press paved the way for me to be a journalist on the national stage.”