journalism might drop in for a drink, some buffet – or the latest scuttlebutt. Dunnigan was seated next to her longtime friend and colleague, Ethel Payne of the Chicago Defender, at the front of a long row of chairs lining one wall of the conference room, where the center table supported a sumptuous buffet running the length of the room. It was a decade or more after she’d left journalism for a political post in the Kennedy administration, but her eyes followed the VIP comings and goings as if she were still on the beat.
I decided to look for her book to fill in the gaps in the fascinating career highlighted on the screen by the NABJ. I discovered, however, that it was difficult to find, except in the reference sections of a few research libraries or, for a premium of hundreds of dollars, from Internet booksellers. Since I live close to the Library of Congress in Washington, I decided to read the nearly 700-page self-published memoir there beneath the dome of the Main Reading Room over several visits. Each time I put the book down, I looked forward to returning to it, so captivated was I by Dunnigan’s story.
She began her account by asking not to be judged by the heights to which she had risen, but by the depths from which she’d come. She set out from there describing the “raw facts” of her youth in rural, racially-segregated Kentucky, acknowledging that this first part of her story “reads more like a novel, but that’s the way it was.” In Russellville, seat of Logan County, the only daughter of a sharecropper and a laundress very early set her sights on becoming a schoolteacher, rather than accepting the usual role of domestic service in white homes. She also had another dream: to write for a newspaper, "to tell people things they needed to know to improve their lives.” She couldn’t recall the inspiration for that dream, since there were no black newspapers – and certainly no black presence in the white press – in Logan County.
With each step forward, she “inched along,” often without her parents’ encouragement. Even as a small child, she insisted on making the two-mile trek to school regardless of the weather and despite her father’s ridicule. She not only kept up her attendance, but she excelled as head of the class. Despite her determination that it would not be her future, she worked as a domestic while going to school, never complaining as long as it was a means and not the end. Her graduation from the Russellville school, therefore, should have been one of the happiest moments of her life; but, instead, she was devastated by her parents’ announcement that they could not afford to send her on to teacher training. Unable to find student employment at one of the distant black colleges, and with no source of scholarships or financial aid, Dunnigan sank into a summer of depression.
When she returned to her duties as Sunday school secretary in early September, she encountered the superintendent, the town’s only black dentist, who asked where she’d be going to school that fall. Fully aware of Alice’s academic accomplishments, he was stunned when she told him she would not be continuing her education. He talked to her parents, admonishing them that it would be “a crime” not to send Alice to college. With his promise to finance her education with a loan, repayable by her rather than her parents, the dentist shamed her parents into sending Dunnigan to Kentucky Normal and Industrial Institute (now Kentucky State University) the following day.
Dunnigan taught school for almost 20 years in a Jim Crow system that ranged from the one-room shacks for the lower grades to the poorly-financed vocational training schools. Teaching in black schools was never more than a seven-month assignment, and Dunnigan spent the other months washing clothes and working in the fields. It wasn’t the poverty, the short school season, or any particular challenge to her livelihood, however, that finally drove Dunnigan to seek a way out of rural Kentucky. It was the oppressiveness of a Jim Crow system that sapped her spirit as it perversely worked to strip away her dignity. Even more discouraging was the lack of support she found among other blacks to challenge any aspect of an unjust social system.
Then came World War II and the federal government began recruiting to fill jobs in wartime.
She began her account by asking not to be judged by the heights to which she had risen, but by the depths from which she’d come.
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