Two trailblazing Black ladies journalists shall be posthumously honored for his or her journalism achievements Saturday by the White Home Correspondents’ Affiliation.
Kentucky-born Alice Dunnigan and Ethel Payne of Chicago, each granddaughters of slaves, have been the primary Black ladies to be members of the White Home press corps in the course of Twentieth-century segregation. Tinheritor households will obtain the inaugural Dunnigan-Payne Prize for Lifetime Profession Achievement on their behalf, reported CBS Information.
By the point Dunnigan had reached her thirties, she wrote an everyday column for a neighborhood paper, however felt that she may do extra to voice the reality in such a tumultuous time.
“She mentioned the 2 strikes out in opposition to her was that she was Black and that she was feminine,” her granddaughter, Alicia Dunnigan, instructed CBS NEWS.
That motivated Dunnigan to pursue a broader platform to report, finally incomes her a job writing for the Related Negro Press in Washington, D.C. In 1947, she grew to become the primary Black lady reporter certified to cowl the White Home.
For Payne, the gas she wanted to proceed her dream of being a journalist got here after she was denied admission to regulation college due to her pores and skin coloration. In 1951, she grew to become a Washington reporter for the Chicago Defender, a number one Black newspaper within the nation.
Payne got here to be often called the First Woman of the Black Press and made her mark in historical past by asking the laborious questions. She and Dunnigan would recurrently attend press conferences held by President Dwight Eisenhower; that by no means stopped her from difficult the president with questions that made headlines.
“You couldn’t management your alternatives, so that you needed to be ready for no matter alternative got here alongside. Writing, for her, was a pure, one thing she preferred to do,” mentioned Payne’s nephew, James Johnson Jr.
Payne later grew to become the first Black lady commentator at CBS Information. She died in 1991. Dunnigan died in 1983.
“I’ve nice love and feeling for the way she impressed us as the following era,” Johnson mentioned of his aunt.
“She knocked the door down,” Alicia Dunnigan mentioned of her grandmother. “I marvel in any respect that she did, all that she was, and all that she fought for.”
