Alice Allison Dunnigan

Alice Allison Dunnigan (April 27, 1906 – May 6, 1983) was an American journalist, civil rights activist and author.

Dunnigan was the first African-American female correspondent to receive White House credentials, and the first black female member of the Senate and House of Representatives press galleries.

She wrote an autobiography entitled Alice A. Dunnigan: A Black Woman's Experience.

She is commemorated by an official Kentucky Historical Society marker.

Alice Dunnigan was born April 27, 1906, near Russellville, Kentucky, to Willie and Lena Pittman Allison.

Dunnigan was of black, Native American, and white descent, with connections to both slave and slave-owning families.

Though her father was a sharecropper and her mother took in laundry for a living, Dunnigan's family was unusually "well-off" compared to other black families in the area; they owned their own land and had a larger home they expanded on over the years.

She and her older half-brother, Russell, were raised in a strict household with an emphasis on and an expectation for a strong work ethic.

She had few friends as a child, and as a teenager was prohibited from having boyfriends.

She started attending school one day a week when she was four years old, and learned to read before entering the first grade.

At the age of 13, she began writing for the Owensboro Enterprise.

Her dream was to experience the world through the life of a newspaper reporter.

Alice graduated from Knob City High School and upon completing a teaching course at Kentucky Normal and Industrial Institute, she taught Kentucky History in the Todd County School System, which was segregated at the time.

Noticing that her class was not aware of the African American contributions to the Commonwealth, she started to prepare Kentucky Fact Sheets as supplements to required text.

Dunnigan was a teacher in Kentucky public schools from 1924 to 1942.

A four-year marriage to Walter Dickenson of Mount Pisgeh ended in divorce in 1930.

She married Charles Dunnigan, a childhood friend, on January 8, 1932.

They were collected and formed into a manuscript in 1939, and finally published in 1982 with the title The Fascinating Story of Black Kentuckians: Their Heritage and Tradition.

These papers were collected for publication in 1939, but no publisher was willing to take them to press.

Alice chronicled the decline of Jim Crow during the 1940s and 1950s, which influenced her to become a civil rights activist.

From 1947 to 1961, she served as chief of the Washington bureau of the Associated Negro Press.

In 1947 she was a member of the Senate and House of Representatives press galleries, and in 1948 she became a White House correspondent.

Dunnigan was the first black female member of the Senate and House of Representatives press galleries (1947), and the first black female White House correspondent in 1948.

Dunnigan reported on Congressional hearings where blacks were referred to as "niggers," was barred from covering a speech by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in a whites-only theater, and was not allowed to sit with the press to cover Senator Robert A. Taft's funeral — she covered the event from a seat in the servant's section.

Dunnigan was known for her straight-shooting reporting style.

Politicians routinely avoided answering her difficult questions, which often involved race issues.

Dunnigan's career in journalism began at the age of 13, when she started writing one-sentence news items for the local Owensboro Enterprise newspaper.

She completed the ten years available to blacks in the segregated Russellville school system, but her parents saw no benefit in allowing their daughter to continue her education.

A Sunday school teacher intervened, and Dunnigan was allowed to attend college.

By the time she had reached college, Dunnigan had set her sights on becoming a teacher, and completed the teaching course at what is now Kentucky State University.

During her time as a reporter, she became the first black journalist to accompany a president while traveling, covering Harry S. Truman's 1948 campaign trip.

In 2022, the White House Correspondents' Association created the Dunnigan-Payne Lifetime Achievement Award in memory of Dunnigan and fellow White House reporter Ethel Payne.

The couple had one child, Robert William, and separated in 1953.

As a young teacher in the segregated Todd County School system, Dunnigan taught courses in Kentucky history.

She quickly learned that her students were almost completely ignorant of the historic contributions of African Americans to the state of Kentucky.

She started preparing "Kentucky Fact Sheets" and handing them out to her students as supplements to the required text.

In 1961 she was named education consultant to the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity.

Dunnigan was named education consultant to the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity in 1961 and was an associate editor with the President's Commission on Youth Opportunity from 1967 to 1970.

From 1967 to 1970 she was as an associate editor with the President's Commission on Youth Opportunity.

She was inducted into the Kentucky Hall of Fame in 1982.