Dunnigan, Alice Allison

Impact on the world

As Washington bureau chief of the Associated Negro Press starting in 1947 — a role she won only after the wire service's publisher admitted “for years we have tried to get a man accredited... and have not succeeded” — Dunnigan broke into the previously all-white, mostly-male Senate and House press galleries and, in 1948, became the first Black woman granted White House press credentials, that same year becoming the first Black journalist to travel with a sitting president when she paid her own way to join Harry Truman's western campaign train, over her employer's objection. She spent years asking pointed civil-rights questions that President Eisenhower avoided by refusing to call on her for two and a half years and later demanding her questions be submitted in advance — a requirement she refused — while President Kennedy, by contrast, welcomed her direct style; she was barred from a whites-only Eisenhower event and forced to sit in a servants' section to cover Senator Robert Taft's funeral. The White House Correspondents' Association created the Dunnigan-Payne Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022 and named its press briefing lectern for Dunnigan and Ethel Payne, already profiled in this collection, in 2023.

Life & background

Born April 27, 1906, near Russellville, Kentucky, to sharecropper Willie Allison and laundress Lena Pitman Allison, Dunnigan began writing one-sentence news items for the Black-owned Owensboro Enterprise at age 13 and completed the only ten years of schooling available to Black children in segregated Russellville. She taught in Kentucky's Todd County school system for eighteen years, never earning more than $800 annually, while creating “Kentucky Fact Sheets” documenting Black Kentuckians' overlooked contributions to state history and taking journalism courses at Tennessee A&I State University; she moved to Washington, D.C., in 1942 for federal civil-service work during the wartime labor shortage, freelancing for the Associated Negro Press before her full-time hire. Twice divorced, she raised her son largely through her parents to pursue her career, retired from journalism in 1961 to serve as an education consultant for President Kennedy's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, published her autobiography, A Black Woman's Experience: From Schoolhouse to White House, in 1974, and died in Washington, D.C., on May 6, 1983.

Sources

1. BlackPast.org; Mental Floss; Boundary Stones (WETA)