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. Johnson’s growing magazine empire, I found that Alice was still making her rounds as chief of the Associated Negro Press’s one-person bureau. Never having given up despite incredible obstacles, she was actually thriving—not 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 served—a staple in the black community—would 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 Coast—albeit on her own dime when the newspapers she represented refused to pay her expenses.
Alice’s 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 sharecropper’s daughter—and, in fact, a sharecropper herself as well as a laundress, cook, and nanny at points in her early life—Alice’s 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 Woman’s Experience—from Schoolhouse to White House, Alice’s 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, Alice’s 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. Alice’s 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