A life-sized bronze statue of Alice Dunnigan, the first African Aemrican woman to hold White House Press Credentials under several presidential administrations, is scheduled to be unveiled next month at Newseum, an interactive news museum based in Washington, D.C.
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Newseum celebrates news history and is dedicated to underscoring the importance of a free press and the First Amendment.
Dunnigan, born in 1906, was a pioneering journalist who rose to the top of her profession despite racist policies that segregated black journalists and despite sexist attitudes that severely limited opportunities for women in a male-dominated workplace, according to the Newseum Press Release.
She landed her first writing gig at just 13 years old at a local newspaper where she wrote one-sentence news items. Her career trajectory shifted over time when she attended what is now known as Kentucky State University.
She taught school from 1924 to 1942 and then relocated to Washington DC to begin work as a federal employee and attending night school at Howard University.
In 1946, she was offered and accepted a job with the Chicago Defender as a DC correspondent. The Defender was a black-owned weekly publication that paid her substantially less than her male counterparts. She supplemented her income with other writing gigs, including the Associated Negro Press, where she was eventually named as the outlet’s Washington Bureau chief.
In 1948, she became the first African American female White House correspondent, covering presidential press conferences, Congress, the Supreme Court and the State Department. She was the first African American woman to go on a presidential tour and the only black reporter to cover President Harry S. Truman’s famous whistle-stop train tour.
Barred from white-only establishments and forced to sit with servants while covering her beat, she developed a reputation as a woman who would ask the "hard" questions about racism and misogyny.
“Race and sex were twin strikes against me. I’m not sure which was the hardest to break down,” she once stated, according to the press release.
By 1960, she campaigned for Lyndon B. Johnson and then went on to become an education consultant of the Presidential Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity. She continued to work in other high-level political and government roles up until the presidential election of Richard M. Nixon.
Her autobiography, A Black Woman’s Experience: From Schoolhouse to White House, was published in 1974 and in 1983, she died at the age of 77.
Kentucky-based sculptor Amanda Matthews is responsible for the monument, which will be on display at the Newseum from Sept. 21 through Dec. 16 and then moved to Dunnigan’s home state at the West Kentucky African American Heritage Center.
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