First Black Ladies to Cowl the White Home Are Honored within the Briefing Room

On her first day protecting the White Home, Alice Dunnigan had each cause to face out.

She was the primary Black girl to be credentialed to affix the White Home press corps, and he or she had even arrived an hour early to cowl her first information convention with President Harry S. Truman. However as she sat within the foyer of the West Wing, she might as effectively have been invisible.

“I sat there alone and apparently unnoticed, taking in all the activity while glancing now and then at my newspaper,” she wrote in her autobiography, “Alone Atop the Hill.” “If anyone wondered who I was or why I was there, they made no effort to find out.”

Greater than 75 years later, Ms. Dunnigan’s reminiscence is being honored in the identical setting the place her colleagues as soon as ignored her.

Karine Jean-Pierre, the White Home press secretary, in November named a new lectern within the White Home briefing room for Ms. Dunnigan of The Related Negro Press and Ethel L. Payne, who joined her on the beat just a few years later for The Chicago Defender.

“The White House lectern is a powerful symbol of freedom and democracy beamed around the world on a regular basis,” stated Ms. Jean-Pierre, who’s the primary Black girl to function White Home press secretary. “I can’t think of two better people to be associated with that symbol than Alice and Ethel.”

Through the years, the briefing room lectern has turn into as a lot a cultural artifact as a political one, anchoring a room accessible to a privileged few.

April Ryan, the Washington bureau chief and senior White Home correspondent for The Grio, and the longest-serving Black girl within the White Home press corps, stated the choice to honor Ms. Dunnigan and Ms. Payne made her really feel “seen.”

“There are still crescendo moments in Black America, and we are the only ones who are asking those questions, or writing those stories, and asking Black questions that no one else dares, or wants, or thinks are important enough to ask,” she stated.

Ms. Ryan, who has been attacked by former President Donald Trump and conservative media for asking questions that pertain to Black Individuals, stated the selection of those two girls was notably poignant.

Each girls had been chastised by White Home officers and later ignored by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was typically flustered by their questions on civil rights.

Ms. Dunnigan, who needed to pawn her jewelry to make it between paychecks, stated that white reporters took with no consideration that they’d be allowed to cowl the White Home.

“To them it was nothing unusual because white reporters with reputation and status had always been accredited to the White House,” Ms. Dunnigan wrote of her colleagues, who ultimately prolonged what she referred to as “casual congratulations” for acquiring her credentials.

“I appreciated and cherished this honor even though I felt that I had actually earned it the hard way,” she wrote, “through strenuous preparation, perseverance, hard work, acceptable qualifications, persistence, a heroic fight, and proven ability.”

She recalled how she managed to scoop her colleagues throughout a cross-country practice journey with Mr. Truman. When the practice stopped in Missoula, Mont., in the course of the evening, many different reporters had been asleep as Mr. Truman emerged in his bathrobe and spoke to a ready crowd of scholars about civil rights.

She was nonetheless awake, and reporters who missed the second pressured her to not publish the ensuing story for worry that it might make them look unhealthy. However she printed anyway, with a headline declaring: “Pajama Clad President Defends Civil Rights at Midnight.”

It took three months for Ms. Payne to ask her first query at one among Mr. Eisenhower’s information conferences, according to an excerpt from her biography, “Eye on the Struggle.” The day got here in February 1954, when she requested him concerning the Howard College choir being blocked from acting at a celebration the president attended — a element that had been not noted in different protection of the occasion.

“The white press was so busy asking questions on other issues that the blacks and their problems were completely ignored,” Ms. Payne stated of her time on the White Home.

A query about whether or not Mr. Eisenhower would take motion on banning segregation in interstate journey after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Training Supreme Court docket resolution was the one which bought her shunned. Not solely did Mr. Eisenhower cease calling on her, according to her biographer, however the White Home press secretary tried to revoke her press credentials.

Ms. Payne went on to turn into often called the “first lady of the Black press,” and her protection of the civil rights motion was so instrumental that President Lyndon B. Johnson invited her to the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and gave her one of many pens he used to signal the landmark laws.

Martha Joynt Kumar, a presidency scholar who has documented the connection between the press and the White Home for many years, stated the Dunnigan-Payne lectern was a uncommon exhibiting of solidarity between the White Home and the press corps.

“It seems fluffy,” Ms. Kumar stated, “but it isn’t.”

The naming of the lectern was impressed by the White Home Correspondents’ Affiliation making a lifetime achievement award in honor of the 2 girls in 2022. Ms. Kumar stated the Dunnigan-Payne lectern joins others of significance, together with Blue Goose, which is used for formal presidential speeches, and Toast, which is used for toasts at occasions like state dinners.

Judy Smith, who served as a deputy press secretary for President George H.W. Bush, and was the first Black woman to lead a White House press briefing, stated the load of the White Home briefing room is felt by those that sit on each side of the lectern.

“Speaking from the podium, addressing critical issues that affect the country, and every single word you say is taken very seriously, and sliced and parsed in so many different ways — it’s a tremendous responsibility,” Ms. Smith, who was the inspiration for the character Olivia Pope on the hit present “Scandal,” stated in an interview.

“I also think that it’s important to acknowledge and recognize these women,” she added, “and the weight of the responsibility they felt as well.”

Alicia Dunnigan, Ms. Dunnigan’s granddaughter, stated her grandmother can be “overcome” by the information of the lectern, which was formally devoted in November.

“She wanted to inspire future generations,” Ms. Dunnigan stated of her grandmother, who died in 1983. “The significance of that podium — I’m sure she never could’ve conceived of something so prominent and permanent, to stand as a beacon in that room, in her name.”