The story of my life is an account of the struggle and accomplishments of an ambitious country girl who began life with the determination to reach a definite goal and worked hard to achieve it.
The first part of my story tells bluntly and simply what life was like in most backwoods communities of the South in the first half of the twentieth century. Based on raw facts, it is uninhibited, unembellished, and unvarnished. It may read at times more like a novel than an autobiography, but this is the way it was. While it relies exclusively on my own recollections of my early years, in the end it is a portrayal of a lifestyle pattern of the old rural South.
The second part of the book, beginning with my departure from “my old Kentucky home,” draws initially upon the diary of memory, but my account of later years, including the civil rights movement; increased participation of minorities in America’s political, economic, and social activities; and other contemporary issues, is based almost entirely upon clippings of my own newspaper stories, as well as unpublished material from my personal confidential or correspondence files and other sources as necessary to verify important facts. My scrapbooks demonstrate the role the Negro press has played in a people’s upward struggle. The clippings prove that the black press of my generation had just as important a role in recording facts relating to the battle for equality of opportunity for minority citizens as it had in 1827, when John B. Russwurm and Samuel Eli Cornish put out the first black newspaper—Freedom’s Journal—as an organ of protest against man’s inhumanity to man.
While the role of the black press, like other newspapers, is that of objectively reporting the news as it happens, it has had another function equally as important—that of fighting oppression. Without black reporters constantly on the national scene to record contemporary history of the Negro’s role in the fight for civil rights, equality, and justice, and without black authors and historians to compile these facts into permanent record, the deeds, efforts, and struggles of the black man in his progressive fight for security and recognition would forever be lost to history.
Without black writers, the world would perhaps never have known of the chicanery, shenanigans, and buffoonery employed by those in high places to keep the black man in his (proverbial) place by relegating him to second-class citizenship through the denial of social, economic, and political rights and forcing him into poverty, shame, and disgrace.
More historical than autobiographical, the latter chapters of this book might well serve as a guide to the social revolution of the forties. It should be especially useful in answering those who contend that no advancement toward civil and human rights was evident in this country until the sixties.
It is my fondest hope that the story of my life and work will, by interpretation, investigation, information, and inspiration, encourage more young writers to use their talents as a moving force in the forward march of progress and that their efforts will soon result in giving Americans the kind of nation that those of my generation so long hoped and worked for.
Alice A. Dunnigan, 1974