09/24/2021
Alice Allison Dunnigan was the first African American female correspondent at the White House and the first black female member of the Senate and House of Representatives press galleries.
Dunnigan was born April 27, 1906, in Russellville, Kentucky, to Willie and Lena Pitman Allison. Her father worked as a to***co sharecropper, and her mother took in laundry for a living. At the age of four, she began attending school one day a week and learned to read before entering the first grade. She started writing one-sentence news items for the local Owensboro Enterprise newspaper at age thirteen and completed the ten years of education available to blacks in the segregated Russellville school system.
She began teaching in the Todd County School System in Russellville while taking courses in journalism at Tennessee A&I University.
In 1960, Dunnigan officially left the American Negro Press galleries for a full-time position on Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign for the Democratic nomination. She worked for Johnson when he served as vice president and later in the Johnson Administration. Between 1966 and 1967, for example, she was an information specialist for the Department of Labor. Dunnigan also served as an associate editor with the President’s Commission on Youth Opportunity in 1967. She retired from government service in 1970.
After retirement, Dunnigan wrote her autobiography, A Black Woman’s Experience: From Schoolhouse to White House, which was published in 1974. She published The Fascinating Story of Black Kentuckians in 1982…swipe for more!
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