SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
A statue to honor a great journalist will soon stand at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. Alice Allison Dunnigan was head of the Washington bureau of the Associated Negro Press in the 1940s and '50s, which provided news to more than 100 African-American newspapers. Alice Allison Dunnigan was born in Kentucky in 1906. She came to D.C. to be a government typist during World War II. She became the first African-American woman to receive press credentials to cover the White House, Congress, State Department and Supreme Court. She received more than 50 journalism awards.
But in her 1974 autobiography "Alone Atop of the Hill," she saluted all members of the black press who covered the struggle for civil rights when the mainline U.S. press often didn't. Without black writers, Alice Allison Dunnigan wrote, the world would perhaps never have known the chicanery, shenanigans and buffoonery employed by those in high places to keep the black man in his proverbial place by relegating him to second-class citizenship.
(SOUNDBITE OF SINDRANDI'S "NUNA") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
