“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.”
These are the words of Alice (Allison) Dunnigan—born near Russellville, Kentucky on April 27, 1906. This quote appears in her autobiography (1974), which tells the story of a journalist who defied the odds, both as a woman and as a Black American, and who played an important role in amplifying the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement.
Dunnigan achieved several important “firsts” that cumulatively make it hard to believe that she is not better known as a trailblazer in our country’s history: First Black woman to gain press credentials to the White House; first Black reporter (male or female) to travel with a U.S. President (Truman) on a press tour; first Black reporter (male or female) to get press access to the House and Senate galleries; and the first Black female reporter to be admitted to the National Press Club.
Dunnigan’s grandparents were former enslaved people, her father was a sharecropper, and her mother took in people’s laundry—she came from modest beginnings. While the family had more than some Black families, with their own land and home, Dunnigan was nevertheless expected to work and contribute from an early age. She attended a segregated schoolhouse only one day each week but learned quickly and was at the top of her class. At age 13, she had already written for a small newspaper and had dreams of becoming a journalist.
Historian Michael Morrow wrote of Dunnigan, “I think this community put a lot of fight in Alice. You almost had to jump out the womb fighting here if you hoped to make it. She understood young enough that she would have to chart her own course.”
And chart a course, she did. Graduating high school in the mid-1920s, Dunnigan found that opportunities for continuing education for a Black woman were rather limited. When she saw an opportunity to attend a teaching program at the Kentucky Normal and Industrial Institute, she embraced it. Dunnigan would then teach for several years in the segregated Todd County district, and she made it her particular mission to elevate the stories of Black Kentuckians. She wrote and published a series of pamphlets on this topic and made them required reading.
Not yet a reporter but already thinking like one.
The second world war created job opportunities, particularly for women, and Dunnigan jumped on an opportunity to work as a typist in Washington, D.C., knowing this could lead to other opportunities. She almost did not get the job because the administrator balked at her race. But she stood her ground and used this job as a jumping-off point to reach out to the Associated Negro Press (ANP). She started as a freelancer and worked her way up to an employee as the ANP Washington Bureau Chief. Although he had taken a chance on her, her boss, Claude Barnett, did not pay her fairly or seem to trust her capabilities as a woman.
Dunnigan was so poorly paid that she had to pawn her pocket watch every Saturday in order to eat over the weekend—“just enough for Sunday dinner”—and then buy it back every Monday once she was paid. Although her job was covering federal politics, when she applied for a press pass, she was denied. Her boss did not go to batt for her, asking how could a Black woman get a pass when a Black man had never done so?
True to form, Dunnigan pushed ahead, prevailed, and gained her access to the White House. “Race and sex were twin strikes against me,” Dunnigan says. “I’m not sure which was the hardest to break down.”
Once she’d broken into the White House press pool, she was allowed to accompany Harry Truman on his “Whistle Stop” campaign tour. (She had to borrow $1,000, a fortune at that time, from a friend’s bank to pay her way, as the ANP would not help.)
The investment was worth it, as Dunnigan got her first major story. When Truman’s train stopped at midnight in Missoula, Montana, a man asked Truman if civil rights would be a part of his presidential platform. Truman responded, “I’ll say that civil rights is as old as the Constitution of the United States and as new as the Democratic platform of 1944.” The next morning, Dunnigan’s headline read, “Pajama Clad President Defends Civil Rights at Midnight.”
While she earned respect from Truman, Dunnigan got thinly veiled hostility from President Eisenhower, who apparently did not appreciate her very direct questions about civil rights and integration policy. For two and a half years, Dunnigan raised her hand and stood as tall as she could during press briefings—and Eisenhower completely ignored her.
“She was iced,” said Carol McCabe Booker, editor of Dunnigan’s autobiography. “But she kept going. She didn’t just give up. She went to every news conference.”
As for Dunnigan, she felt it was her mission and her responsibility to ask the hard questions. “I always felt a journalist should be a crusader,” said Dunnigan. “I went to every press conference with a loaded question. And if I got an answer or a no comment or nothing, I had a story.”
As for the next President, John. F. Kennedy, at his very first press conference on January 25, 1961, he pointedly gave Dunnigan the first question. She asked about a voting rights conflict in Tennessee. Kennedy assured her (and the nation) that Black voters would have protections under the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Kennedy subsequently appointed Dunnigan to his President’s Committee on Equal Opportunity, at which point she hung up her journalist’s badge to focus on advocacy work within the government.
This intrepid journalist wrote about civil rights issues for over 100 Black newspapers and garnered over 50 citations and awards for outstanding work in the field. She served on a few different federal committees before she retired in 1970. A couple of years after her 1983 death, Dunnigan was inducted into the Black Journalist Hall of Fame. A statue of her resides in her hometown of Russellville, Kentucky.
This country has never needed honest, hard-working journalists more than it does today. Dunnigan writes in her autobiography, Alone Atop the Hill, the following hope for the future: “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 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.”
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