1. “Pioneering no ‘bed of roses,’ Mrs. Dunnigan tells Iotas,” ANP release, dateline Washington, D.C. (undated), Dunnigan Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University (hereafter Dunnigan Papers), box 186.
2. ANP correspondents were usually stringers or part-time contributors, but the Washington, D.C., bureau chief position was an exception. Lawrence D. Hogan, A Black National News Service: The Associated Negro Press and Claude Barnett (Haworth, N.J.: St. Johann Press, 2002), 93.
3. Barnett was not unique among editors in his gender bias. In 1949, Mademoiselle magazine surveyed twenty-seven daily papers and fifteen university journalism schools to learn who had gotten jobs the preceding year. The answer was that twice as many men had been hired (and fewer than one “girl” per paper); few of the women were offered the same type of assignments as men, and their average starting salary was 20 percent less than a man's. “Getting on a paper: 1949,” Mademoiselle, August 1949, 308-12. Barnett, who also had offered higher starting salaries to men than to Dunnigan, was not at all out of step with the industry. Barnett correspondence with James Baker (mentioning a salary offer of $250 per month), December 1946, Barnett Papers, Chicago Historical Society (hereafter Barnett Papers), boxes 136, 137.
4. Frank Marshall Davis letters to Dunnigan, April 29 and May 20, 1947, Barnett Papers, box 136.
5. Alvin White, ANP’S Washington, D.C., correspondent from 1939 to 1942, described Barnett’s unsuccessful efforts to get him accredited to the Congressional Press Galleries in a letter (November 19, 1976) to Lawrence D. Hogan. Hogan, A Black National News Service, 99. Barnett had arranged for White to represent the Atlanta Daily World in order to satisfy the galleries’ requirement that members represent a daily paper, but the application was denied anyway.
6. Barnett letters to Dunnigan, September 8, 1959, and August 8, 1960, respectively. Dunnigan Papers, box 182.
7. Pittsburgh Courier letters from P. L. Prattis and George F. Brown to Dunnigan, December 13, June 5, and December 23, 1957, Dunnigan Papers, box 182.
8. Dunnigan would likely agree, having told an interviewer in 1977 that of her several careers, journalism was the most important, as she believed she had done the most in that field to help people and to bring about better race relations. Black Women Oral History Project Interviews (hereafter Oral History Project), April 8, 1977, OH-31, T-32/Dunnigan, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/45168261?n=44&printThumbnails=no.
9. “‘From Schoolhouse to White House,’ Alice Dunnigan's Story” (undated).
10. Oral History Project, http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/45168261?n=44&printThumbnails=no.
1. The White House press corps grew during the Truman administration to the point that it became too large for press conferences in the Oval Office, where some reporters were jammed against the back wall and couldn’t hear and where ink from reporters’ fountain pens sometimes spoiled the carpet. Conferences were moved to the Indian Treaty Room at the State Department, then housed next to the White House in what later was called the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. That room was used until President Kennedy’s administration, when again the press corps grew too large and presidential news conferences moved to the auditorium of the new State Department building. Oral history interview, Edward T. Folliard, August 20, 1970, 69, Truman Library, http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/folliard.htm.
1. Change came slowly in Kentucky, as elsewhere in the South, after the U.S. Supreme Court declared racial segregation in schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Statewide school desegregation in Kentucky reportedly did not occur until September 1975. For an excellent overview of African American education in Kentucky during this period, see Alicestyne Turley-Adams, Rosenwald Schools in Kentucky: 1917–1932, prepared for the Kentucky Heritage Council, State Historic Preservation Office, and the Kentucky African American Heritage Council, January 1997, http://heritage.ky.gov/NR/rdonlyres/ACF24D83-59B1-4C83-AC25-8o173291C4B8/o/RosenwaldSchoolsinKY.pdf.
2. Federally assisted school lunch programs were unheard of at this time. Congress passed Public Law No. 320 in 1935, authorizing a certain amount of money for the development of new outlets for farm products. Much of this food supplied by the Department of Agriculture was used to expand school lunch programs. Such programs did not become widespread, however, until President Truman signed into law the National School Lunch Act on June 6, 1946. Tuskegee Negro Year Book, 1952, 208. —AD (Editor’s note: The Negro Year Book, compiled by Tuskegee’s Department of Records and Research and published by the Tuskegee Institute for forty years beginning in 1912, was used extensively as a reference by agencies, educational institutions, and individuals.)
1. The Rosenwald school in New Hope, completed in 1924, was one of thirty-three African American schools built in Kentucky between 1917 and 1920 with support from Chicago philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, the Tuskegee Institute, and the General Education Board. Turley-Adams, Rosenwald Schools in Kentucky, http://heritage.ky.gov/NR/rdonlyres/ACF24D83-59B1-4C83-AC25-8o173291C4B8/o/RosenwaldSchoolsinKY.pdf. Stephanie Deutsch, You Need a Schoolhouse (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011) is an excellent history of the collaboration between Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington that led to these and other projects, including the building of Negro YMCA branches.
1. While Dunnigan knew of no law applicable to this particular situation, there were a number of Jim Crow laws on the books in Kentucky prohibiting miscegenation, integration in schools, public carriers or accommodations, and so on.
2. Called the Logan County Tobacco and Heritage Festival, it continues to this day as the county’s largest annual event.
3. Much has been written about the WPA, which was the largest and most famous of President Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. Dunnigan’s experience illustrates how both sexism and Jim Crow distorted its goals in terms of both women and blacks. Only 13.5 percent of WPA employees were women in the peak year of 1938, and contrary to original policy, in practice women were consigned to lower-paying activities such as those described by Dunnigan. “The Works Progress Administration,” Public Broadcasting Service website, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/dustbowl-wpa/.
4. The county attorney, John A. Whittaker, was later elected to the U.S. Congress while I was working on Capitol Hill as a newspaper reporter. He was always courteous, polite, and respectful of my new status in life when our paths crossed in the Capitol building. —AD
1. Chicken thieves were considered the lowest of crooks, as a family often depended on its barn fowl for meat and eggs for daily sustenance, and as a commodity that could be sold to buy other necessities. Harsh penalties for chicken theft applied well beyond Kentucky. See more at Lawrence P. Gooley, “Adirondack History: Dannemora Prison’s Chicken Thieves,” Adirondack Almanack, April 22, 2013, http://www.adirondackalmanack.com/2013/04/adirondack-history-dannemora-prisons-chicken-thieves.html#sthash.j5HDbF4U.dpuf.
2. Cole founded the Leader in 1917, and by the 1930s, the weekly reportedly employed twenty people and had a circulation of twenty thousand.
3. Woodson founded the Association in 1915 in response to the lack of information on the accomplishments of African Americans. He is also credited with establishing Negro History Week in 1926, which fifty years later grew into a month-long observance every February. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the organization is now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. It continues its mission to “promote, research, preserve, interpret, and disseminate information about Black life, history, and culture to the global community.”
4. According to the Old Time Radio Catalog, “Many of the applicants were poor black men from the south, hoping to tap dance, sing or harmonica their way to fame and fortune. Most were turned away, as only 500–700 were auditioned and only 20 appeared on the show. Even after making the cut-throat audition and appearing live on the show, many were gonged off before finishing their act, a cruel practice that made the audience roar with laughter.” A few contestants went on to great careers, including Frank Sinatra, Beverly Sills, and Robert Merrill. See Old Time Radio Catalog website, http://www.otrcat.com/major-bowes-p-1575.html.
5. Described in a brochure for the event as “the first real NEGRO WORLD’S FAIR in all history,” the exposition was held at the Chicago Coliseum, July 4–September 2, 1940. The “Official Program and Guide Book” states that the Exposition would “promote racial understanding and good will[,] enlighten the world on the contributions of the Negro to civilization[,] and make the Negro conscious of his dramatic progress since emancipation” while also “substantiat[ing] the black man’s claim that he has made large and valuable contributions to both American and world history.” The Internet Archive website, http://archive.org/stream/americannegroexpooamer/americannegroexpooamer_djvu.txt. (Dunnigan’s future boss, Claude Barnett, is listed as a member of the exposition authority.)
6. Located halfway between Memphis and Vicksburg in Bolivar County, Mississippi, Mound Bayou was established in 1887 by former slaves as a place where blacks might work for themselves instead of for whites. The origin of its fame as “the Jewel of the Delta” as well as the town’s important role in the birth of the modern civil rights movement are described by Simeon Booker in Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter’s Account of the Civil Rights Movement (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), 3–17.
1. The gracious, four-story Phyllis Wheatley YWCA still stands at the corner of Ninth Street and Rhode Island Avenue NW, where it was dedicated on December 19, 1920, as the first “colored” YWCA in the United States. Named for an acclaimed black poet, a woman brought to America from Senegal as a slave in 1761, the YWCA still provides housing to women regardless of race, creed, or color. It is not currently affiliated with the national YWCA.
2. Formed in 1937, the militancy of the union’s leadership and its association with “leftist” ideals led to accusations that it was Communist controlled, in turn leading to legislation to restrict its political activities. One of those measures was the Hatch Act of 1939. In 1946, the State, County, and Municipal Workers of America merged with the much smaller UFWA to form the United Public Workers of America.
3. The ANP’S membership included most of the national and regional papers, many smaller black weeklies, and by the 1950s over seventy-five African newspapers, for which weekly releases were prepared in French as well as English. Hogan, A Black National News Service, 9, 66.
1. When the Senate convened in January 1947, it had two reports to consider on Mississippi senator Bilbo. One concerned an investigation of his campaign activities, and the other addressed charges of illegal conversion of campaign contributions to personal use. Senate action on both reports was tabled while Bilbo returned home for treatment of oral cancer, from which he never recovered, dying on August 21 of that year. United States Senate website, http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Members_Death_Ends_a_Senate_Predicament.htm.
2. The SCHW grew out of a study of the economic conditions of the South that caused President Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue a statement to the effect that poverty in the South was America’s public enemy number one. Southern liberals got together to do something to help improve this situation.
3. Ross, a highly trained newspaperman who for many years had been Washington correspondent of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was considered a first-rate press secretary. He also had gone to school with Mr. Truman in Independence, and they were very dear friends. Oral history interview, Edward T. Folliard, August 20, 1970, 4, Truman Library, http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/folliard.htm.
4. Although Dunnigan reports no difficulty, two other black reporters had applied for admission with mixed results. Harry S. McAlpin, the first African American reporter credentialed to the White House, where he covered Presidents Roosevelt and Truman for fifty-one black newspapers, was refused membership in the association. The NNPA continued the fight, and in 1951, its correspondent, Louis Lautier, was admitted to the WHCA. In 1962, the organization finally allowed its female members to attend its annual dinner, frequently attended by the president and vice president, after United Press International’s Helen Thomas raised this issue of blatant discrimination with Kennedy press secretary Pierre Salinger. The White House News Photographers Association’s refusal to admit black photographers accredited to the White House also ended under the Kennedy administration, when the organization finally admitted Maurice Sorrell of the Afro-American newspapers after Jet/Ebony Washington bureau chief Simeon Booker raised the issue at a presidential news conference. President John F. Kennedy news conference, April 12, 1961, http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKPOF-054-011.aspx.
1. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election in 1932 saw the beginning of a shift in the black vote, which continued into 1936, when black support for the Democratic ticket was tallied at 71 percent. The change in party affiliation was indisputable when Harry Truman garnered 77 percent of the black vote in 1948. David A. Bositis, “Blacks and the 2008 Democratic National Convention,” (Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, 2008), 8, http://jointcenter.org/sites/default/files/Dem%20guide.pdf.
2. Judge Hueston, also a native Kentuckian, was, among many other notable achievements, for many years grand commissioner of education of the Elks.
3. Dunnigan doesn’t identify the aide by name, but he may have been David K. Niles, who worked as administrative assistant to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman from 1942 to 1951 with responsibility for Jewish affairs, the Democratic Party, and civil rights. Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, David K. Niles Papers, https://www.trumanlibrary.org/hstpaper/niles.htm.
4. Young later ran unsuccessfully against Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. in the Democratic congressional primaries in 1968 and 1970. —AD
5. Considered a trailblazer for women journalists, Fleeson was the first nationally syndicated female political columnist. —AD
6. The MV Kalakala was a luxurious ferry that operated from 1935 until its retirement in 1967, for most of those years carrying passengers across Puget Sound from Bremerton, the largest city on Washington’s Kitsap Peninsula, to Seattle, about a fifty-five-minute ride. Kalakala website, http://www.kalakala.org/history/history_WA-ST-Ferry.html.
7. Seventeen blacks were among the 1,234 delegates to the Democratic Convention in 1948, or 1.3 percent of the total, as compared with 14.6 percent in 1972 (seven years after the Voting Rights Act of 1965) and 24.3 percent in 2008, when Barack Obama received the presidential nomination. Bositis, “Blacks and the 2008 Democratic Convention,” 13.
8. Founded as Lincoln Institute in 1866 by members of the Sixty-Second and Sixty-Fifth United States Colored Infantry for the benefit of freed African Americans, the school was designated a university by the state of Missouri in 1921.
9. Founded as a two-page church bulletin in 1897, the paper reported on both local and national events, eventually becoming one of the top African American papers in the nation. Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, www.ulib.iupui.edu/digitalscholarship/collections/IRecorder.
10. After the trip, Dunnigan wrote a very touching letter to her son, Robert, then a fifteen-year-old high-school student still living with her parents in Russellville. She explained that she had not sent him spending money over the summer because of her debt for the trip but that she would make it up to him during the school year. She also revealed that she felt other black newspeople in D.C. were “mad and jealous” of her because she had accomplished something none of them ever had, and in so short a time, as a journalist. To keep them from saying she was “foolish” or worse for paying her own way, she told people Barnett had paid for the trip, which, she wrote, had paid off in experience and was worth “all that I put in to it and more.” Dunnigan Papers, box 136.
1. Thurmond left the Democratic Party permanently in 1964 in opposition to the Civil Rights Act and was reelected to the Senate as a Republican.
2. In spite of Mr. Wallace’s supposed stronghold in California, President Truman received almost two million votes in that state. This was a margin of nearly eighteen thousand over his leading opponent (Dewey) and more than 1.5 million over Wallace. Nearly thirty-one thousand of Truman’s Los Angeles votes came from Negroes. Less than six thousand Negro votes went to Dewey and four thousand to Wallace. Truman’s twenty-one thousand margin of black votes could have been attributed to his strong civil rights commitment in Los Angeles, which was widely publicized through the nation’s black press. Report of a Survey on Negro Votes of 1948 compiled by the NAACP, released January 1949. The World Almanac 1972, 722. Tuskegee Negro Year Book, 1952, 298. —AD
3. Henry Wallace was badly defeated in his bid for the presidency in 1948. He had served as agriculture secretary under President Roosevelt (1933–40) before being elected vice president on the Roosevelt slate in 1940, serving one term before being replaced in the 1944 election by Senator Harry S. Truman. At the time of Roosevelt’s death (1945), when Truman became president, Wallace was serving as secretary of commerce, a position he held until fired in 1946 by Truman—the man he ran against for the presidency two years later. At the time of Wallace’s death in 1965, the name of this seventy-seven-year-old New Dealer had practically been wiped from political history, but his fame as a plant geneticist lingered on. After returning to the soil, the former Iowa agriculturist distinguished himself as a developer of a new hybrid corn and was working on a theory to improve the yield of chicken eggs. —AD
4. Pollsters and many others were so sure of a Republican victory that the Chicago Daily Tribune hit the street with the front-page banner headline “Dewey Defeats Truman” even before the final vote count. Iconic photos show the victorious and broadly smiling President Truman holding the newspaper high.
5. Some years later (prior to the 1952 campaign), Congressman Dawson recommended newspaperwoman Venice Spraggs, chief of the Chicago Defender’s Washington Bureau, to a newly created position with the DNC similar to the one I had proposed but with the additional duties of organizing black Democratic women around the country, a job that she handled extremely well. She remained with the DNC until her death soon after the 1956 campaign. —AD
6. William Houston’s son, Charles, also an attorney, was very active in civil rights and was the subject of a petition bearing the signatures of thousands of D.C. residents urging that Truman appoint him city commissioner. While the effort failed, it was the seed of a movement that eventually saw a black man, John B. Duncan, appointed to Washington’s three-man governing body during the Kennedy administration. —AD
7. Founded in 1934, the council connected black churches nationally on common social issues. For more, see Mary R. Sawyer, “Black Ecumenical Movements: Proponents of Social Change,” Review of Religious Research 30 (1988): 151–61.
8. President Roosevelt created a Fair Employment Practices Committee by executive order in 1941 to prohibit discrimination based on race, creed, or national origin in defense industries and the government. While the FEPC had success enforcing the president’s order in the North, it took a hands-off position in the South and had mixed results in border states. President Truman’s support for a permanent FEPC, as well as antilynching legislation and the abolition of the poll tax, were blocked in the Congress in 1948. In 1950, a filibuster by southern senators again blocked passage of a bill to create a permanent FEPC. —AD
1. This description is from the second of a series of articles on the visit to the Ingram family in Georgia by a delegation from the National Committee to Free the Ingram Family: “Mrs. Ingram Receives Guests,” Baltimore Afro-American, April 23, 1949, 11. Accessed from ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
2. Marcantonio served six terms in Congress between 1935 and 1951, distinguishing himself as a champion of civil rights legislation, including antilynching and anti–poll tax bills, and a federal watchdog to ensure fair employment practices. He also supported independence for Puerto Rico. —AD
3. The Civil Rights Congress (CRC) was founded in Detroit in 1946 with the merger of three left-wing organizations that focused on legal defense strategies and political action on behalf of victims, particularly blacks and political dissidents, of questionable prosecutions. It folded during the height of anticommunism and the Cold War. —AD
4. The concept of an antilynching law was not new. Tuskegee Institute, through its Department of Records and Research, had carried on an educational antilynching program since 1913. The NAACP made investigations of lynching and sponsored federal antilynching legislation as early as 1921. Tuskegee Negro Year Book, 1952, 275. —AD
5. President Harry S. Truman, Special Message to the Congress, February 2, 1948, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=13006.
6. Each of these legislative proposals presented by President Truman in 1948 eventually became law but not for several years. The first civil rights act in eighty-two years, e.g., was enacted in 1957, another in 1960, and the most comprehensive in 1964. A temporary Commission on Civil Rights was established in 1957. The Voting Rights Act proposed by Truman seventeen years earlier was adopted in 1965. A permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission was created as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Alaska and Hawaii were both finally awarded statehood in 1959. Some measure of home rule for D.C.—by no means complete—was passed by both houses of Congress in 1973. —AD
1. The Industrial Bank of Washington was the district’s only black-owned bank when it was founded in 1913 by laborer and entrepreneur John Whitelaw Lewis as the Industrial Savings Bank. Like many other banks during the Depression, it was forced to close in 1932, but it reopened in 1934. —AD
2. President Harry S. Truman, Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union, January 5, 1949, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=13293.
3. Davis served in Congress from January 3, 1947, to January 3, 1963, and in 1956 was a signatory to the “Southern Manifesto” opposing integration. —AD
4. Born in Itawamba County, Miss., in 1882, Congressman John Rankin (D-Miss.) was openly racist, anti-Semitic, and a supporter of the Ku Klux Klan. He served sixteen terms in Congress between 1921 and 1953, during which one fellow member, New York Democrat Emanuel Celler, described listening to his harangues on the House floor as “agony.” Once I found myself standing next to Rankin as we ate from an elaborate buffet set up at the Veterans Administration for some special occasion. I couldn’t resist telling him, “Congressman, now you cannot say again that you have never eaten with a Negro.” He looked at me strangely, made no comment, and kept eating, making no attempt to move. He died in Tupelo, Miss., November 26, 1960. Theodore G. Bilbo (born in Pearl River County, Miss., in 1887) served twice as governor of his home state and in 1934 was elected to the first of successive terms in the U.S. Senate, where he served until the Eightieth Congress in 1947, when having been diagnosed with cancer and facing a Senate investigation of his conduct, he died without taking the oath of office. Like Rankin, he was a symbol and defender of white supremacy and peppered his speeches with racist diatribes. —AD
5. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 established a permanent Equal Employment Opportunity Commission with limited powers. It was not until eight years later that some extra “teeth” (enforcement powers) were put into the measure. On March 24, President Nixon signed into law the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, giving the EEOC power to go into court to obtain enforcement through its own general counsel. Prior to this act, it could only obtain redress by private suits. —AD
1. In the late 1970s, all were released or pardoned and returned to Puerto Rico.
2. President Truman supported a plebiscite in Puerto Rico to determine its future relationship to the United States. The result was an overwhelming vote in favor of commonwealth status under a new constitution. —AD
3. When his passport was finally returned, Dr. DuBois left this country for Ghana, where he became a citizen and where he died on August 27, 1963, at the age of ninety-five. —AD
4. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, News Conference, March 19, 1953, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=9798-title=Eisenhower.
5. In downtown Washington, the flagship of this large, family-owned department store chain wasn’t entirely committed to racial equality two decades earlier. Dunnigan had reported on black and white demonstrators picketing outside the Hecht Co. store in 1951 against racial segregation in its cafeteria, which had become an international embarrassment. Under the headline “Dark-Skinned Foreigners Find D.C. Doesn’t Care Who They Are,” Dunnigan’s article for ANP papers described how a lunch counter waitress, supported by the manager, had repeatedly refused to serve dark-skinned women despite their protests that they were not Negro but foreigners. After demanding and receiving proof of their national origin, the manager apologized and offered to serve the first woman himself, but she declined, irate, and left the store. He served the second woman, from India, himself, after the waitress still refused, saying she’d been instructed not to serve colored people and would quit before doing so. The embassy of India had declined to comment for the article. Philadelphia Tribune, July 31, 1951.
6. Evermont Robinson was the first black man appointed Senate doorkeeper (as far as could be determined). This appointment was made during the Eighty-First Congress (1949) upon recommendation of Senator Taft. William Belcher became the first known black doorkeeper for the House of Representatives around 1954. —AD
7. Charles Vernon Bush, the first Negro page on the Hill, was appointed in October 1954 to serve the U.S. Supreme Court. Upon graduation from the Capitol High School for Pages, he was appointed to the U.S. Air Force Academy, graduating in 1963. —AD
8. The economic squeeze against black would-be voters was a tool promulgated by White Citizens’ Councils throughout the South, where it typically included everything from firing to refusing credit, calling in existing loans, refusing to gin the cotton, and even evicting or refusing to rent to anyone who defied the whites-only voting tradition. Soon after the practice began in the Mississippi Delta in the mid-1950s, the NAACP established a “war chest” to help blacks denied loans or credit by white institutions.
9. Just eight minutes into the news conference, Dunnigan was the first female, as well as the first black, reporter recognized by President Kennedy. Her question was also the only one regarding civil rights. Audio of the conference can be heard on the JFK Presidential Library website: http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKWHA-004.aspx.
10. A quarter of a century later, much ado would be made when other women joined the ranks of sportswriters, but I received no special attention in the general press when I was the first to break through this gender barrier. —AD
11. Built in 1911 between Georgia Avenue and Fifth Street NW, with Florida Avenue and W Street to its south and north, respectively, Griffith Stadium was home to the American League’s Washington Senators and hosted three World Series. It was also home to the Negro League’s Homestead Grays in the 1940s. The stadium was torn down in 1965 and is now the site of Howard University Hospital. —AD
1. Founded in 1806 as the Washington Infirmary and renamed D.C. General Hospital in 1953, Gallinger was the district’s first public hospital. —AD
2. Founded in 1862, Freedmen’s was the first D.C. hospital to treat former slaves, and for years it was the major hospital for the Washington Negro community. After the Civil War, it became the teaching hospital for the Howard University Medical School. —AD
3. The suit to abolish discrimination in D.C. public facilities was filed in the courts in 1950, before twhe Eisenhower administration. It was three years later, in June 1953, that the final decision was handed down by the Supreme Court. District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co., Inc., 346 U.S. 100 (1953). —AD
4. Until Ethel Payne joined the White House press corps in 1954, Alice Dunnigan was the only reporter who asked Eisenhower about racial or civil rights issues.
5. Eisenhower didn’t call on Dunnigan again until almost a year later, January 19, 1955. That was the first Eisenhower press conference that was filmed for later distribution to television stations, which the president referred to as an “experiment.” According to press secretary James Hagerty’s personal diary entry for that day, the president told him “that he deliberately recognized Alice Dunnigan toward the end of the conference so that a Negro reporter would have a chance to ask a question.” Hagerty Papers, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, box 1a.
6. President Eisenhower news conference July 7, 1954. The American Presidency Project website, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php.
7. The date was July 8, 1959, and the reporter was William H. Lawrence of the New York Times.
8. Transcripts of the Eisenhower news conferences reveal that after his February 8, 1956, conference, Eisenhower did not call on Dunnigan again until August 20, 1958, when she asked him to comment on news stories that had (correctly) reported that Assistant Secretary of Labor J. Ernest Wilkins, the only black person at the subcabinet level, had been asked for his resignation so that the position could be given to George Lodge (son of U.N. Rep. Henry Cabot Lodge). Eisenhower claimed it wasn’t true but that Wilkins had been talking about resigning. He also ridiculed, “I never heard of any contemplated replacement for someone whose resignation I have not yet accepted.”
9. June 16, 1957.
10. June 6, 1957.
11. Barnett wrote Alice about this again in July 1957, confiding, “We are entirely in sympathy with your portrayal of what seems to be President Eisenhower’s weakness in dealing with the South.” However, he repeated his warning that Dunnigan be careful about her reputation for impartiality as a reporter since there was no telling what Eisenhower’s “people” “may have told the man in warning about your Fleeson like pen.” Barnett Letter to Dunnigan, July 16, 1957, Dunnigan Papers, box 182.
12. Through all of this, Rabb and I remained friends until he left the White House, at which time he sent Claude Barnett a letter stating, “Mrs. Dunnigan has been in constant touch with me and I have always found her to be both capable and friendly.” —AD
13. Jet, February 9, 1961, 6–7.
1. Alice Allison Dunnigan, A Black Woman’s Experience—from Schoolhouse to White House (Philadelphia: Dorrance & Co., 1974), 569.
2. Dunnigan, Black Woman’s Experience, 662.