Women in the News

Crisis, The, Mar/Apr 2004 by Valentine, Victoria L

Journalist Dorothy Gilliam was recently honored at the Library of Congress. The event was a lunch marking the launch of the Voices of Civil Rights Project, a collaborative effort of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, AARP and the Library of Congress to gather ordinary people's stories of the Civil Rights Movement.

A portion of the program highlighted the work of journalists who covered the movement. Gilliam, the first Black woman hired as a full-time reporter at The Washington Post, covered the 1957 integration of Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas and James Meredith's attempt to integrate the University of Mississippi in 1962.

That afternoon, Leah Y. Latimer, a former Post reporter and the editor of the narrative project, told me that she felt as though she had come full circle. Gilliam, her mentor, was being honored, while Latimer, whom I regard as a mentor, and I looked on.

As March, Women's History Month, rolls by, the deep-rooted circle of Black women journalists is growing wider.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) was an early pioneer in journalism. Known for the 1892 anti-lynching editorials she wrote in The Free Speech in Memphis, Wells-Barnett worked for several church publications and Black newspapers.

In 2002, Ethel L. Pay ne (1911-1991) was commemorated on a U.S. Postage stamp as part of the "Women in Journalism" series. Payne covered the Civil Rights Movement for the Chicago Defender, and eventually reported from Africa and Vietnam, and covered seven U.S. presidents.

Gilliam and countless other Black women journalists continue their legacy.

Charlayne Hunter-Gault, the first African American woman to graduate from the University of Georgia in 1962, spent 10 years at The New York Times and 20 years at PBS where she was a national correspondent for what is now The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. After a stint at National Public Radio, where she was the network's chief Africa correspondent, she became CNN's Johannesburg bureau chief.

Isabel Wilkerson was the first Black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize when she was recognized in 1994 for three New York Times stories: a profile of a fourth-grader on Chicago's South Side and two stories on the 1993 flood in the Midwest.

Many other women are at the forefront of national political news and serving as foreign correspondents.

Sonya Ross was covering the White House for the Associated Press, for what, at the outset, seemed to be a routine presidential appearance in Florida. It was Sept. 11, 2001. Ross found herself on Air Force One, traveling with President Bush, when the second airplane hit the Twin Towers in New York. On one of the most significant days in the nation's recent history, Ross was one of a small pool of reporters, who traversed the country at 30,000 feet while the White House figured out how to respond to the terrorist attacks.

Finally, our cover story on Iraq was written by Theola Labbe. She covered the U.S.-occupied territory for The Washington Post in 2003. Labbe is one of the few African American print journalists to report from Iraq. Her interviews with American troops serving in Iraq offer candid accounts of life in the line of fire, around Saddam Hussein's palaces, in a war hospital and away from loved ones. Labbe also spent time with dark-skinned Iraqis, descendants of African slaves, and details the story of their history in these pages.

It is because of the doors opened by Wells-Barnett, Payne and Gilliam, that Latimer, Wilkerson, Ross and Labbé have had choice opportunities to demonstrate their journalistic talents and that I am able to do what we do each month here at The Crisis.

Victoria L. Valentine

Editor in Chief