MLK Day 2024: 1960s Civil Rights and the Media

In 1942 Alice Allison Dunnigan, a sharecropper's daughter from Kentucky, made her way to the nation's capitol and a career in journalism that eventually led her to the White House. Alone Atop the Hill, Carol McCabe Booker has condensed Dunnigan's 1974 self-published autobiography to appeal to a general audience and has added scholarly annotations that provide historical context. Dunnigan's dynamic story reveals her importance to the fields of journalism, women's history, and the civil rights movement and creates a compelling portrait of a groundbreaking American. Dunnigan recounts her formative years in rural Kentucky as she struggled for a living, telling bluntly and simply what life was like in a Border State in the first half of the twentieth century. Later she takes readers to Washington, D.C., where we see her rise from a typist during World War II to a reporter. Ultimately she would become the first black female reporter accredited to the White House; to travel with a U.S. president; credentialed by the House and Senate Press Galleries; accredited to the Department of State and the Supreme Court; voted into the White House Newswomen's Association and the Women's National Press Club; and recognized as a Washington sports reporter.

Each chapter is a biographical sketch of a black woman who has written for American newspapers or television news, and thereby changed history. Using his subject own words--from their journalistic work, oral histories, and interviews--along with public documents and personal papers, Streitmatter illuminates a group of remarkable women that history has too long ignored.

In a Choice of Weapons, Gordon Parks tells how hemanaged to escape the poverty and bigotry around him and to launch his distinguished career by choosing the weapons given him by "a mother who placed love, dignity, and hard work over hatred." Parks, the first African American to work at Life magazine and the first to write, direct, and score a Hollywood film, told an interviewer in 1999, "I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs. I knew at that point I had to have a camera."