Fierce Femme Friday: Alice Allison Dunnigan

Today’s Fierce Femme Friday is brought to us by Michele Leivas. Many of you know her from our podcast, Wine, Women and Words but what you probably don’t know is that she is a great journalist.

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Russellville is a small town in Logan County, Kentucky. Its population hovers just around 7,000 residents and it is just over two hours north of the Tennessee-Kentucky state line. If one were to wander into Carrico Park Square in the town’s historic district, one would notice a historical marker standing tall in the square. Engraved on this historical marker is a name you’ve probably never heard of: Alice Allison Dunnigan.
Hers is not a household name, but it should be. She lived in a time when women were valued not for their skills in the professional world or their expertise in various fields but for their skills as a mother, homemaker – and not much else. African American women were valued for even less by society. Yet Alice Allison Dunnigan defied boundaries and social norms by becoming the nation’s first African American female journalist. Before she died, she would go on to become the first African American female White House correspondent and member of the House and Senate press galleries.
Born in 1906, Dunnigan was the daughter of a sharecropper and a washwoman and the granddaughter to slaves. She was born in Logan County and found a passion for the written word early in life. She attended school one day a week beginning at four years old and by the time she was thirteen, she began writing one-sentence news pieces for a local black newspaper, the “Owensboro Enterprises.” She pursued the highest level of education available to a black girl in Russellville’s school system – tenth grade.
She spent a handful of years teaching in Russellville while taking journalism classes at Tennessee A&I University. During this time, she also tried her hand at the married life by marrying a tobacco farmer, however, she found the farming life uninspiring and left the marriage soon after that. By the onset of World War II, Dunnigan had relocated to Chicago and wrote for the Chicago branch of the American Negro Press (ANP), balancing her freelance writing assignments with teaching night courses in statistics and economics at Howard University.
In 1936, she was granted a press pass to the capital, where she covered breaking news from the Congress – a beat that was previously unavailable to women and African Americans and whose news generally went unreported to the public. Dunnigan became the first African American to receive a Congressional press pass.

Two years later, Dunnigan was one of two women (and three African Americans) reporters assigned to cover President Harry S. Truman on the campaign trail. While blazing a trail of her own – one that would be followed by countless other black women dreaming of a world and a life beyond what society would grant them – Dunnigan continuously fought against open discrimination and racism in the bullpen: She was banned from a speech by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, which was held in a whites-only theater. Another time, she was forced to sit with the servants while covering the funeral of Senator Robert A. Taft.

Over the course of Dunnigan’s career, she was the recipient of more than 50 journalism awards and authored a book on the history of black Kentuckians as well as an autobiography titled “”A Black Woman’s Experience -From Schoolhouse to White House.” She became the first black woman elected to the Women’s National Press Club and was a member of the State Department Correspondents Association.
Dunnigan passed away in May 1983 from complications of ischemic bowel disease in Providence Hospital in Washington.