In 1942 Alice Allison Dunnigan, a sharecropper’s daughter from Kentucky, made her option to the nation’s capitol and a occupation in journalism that at last led her to the White residence. With Alone atop the Hill, Carol McCabe Booker has condensed Dunnigan’s 1974 self-published autobiography to attract a common viewers and has additional scholarly annotations that supply ancient context. Dunnigan’s dynamic tale unearths her value to the fields of journalism, women’s background, and the civil rights flow and creates a compelling portrait of a groundbreaking American.

Dunnigan recounts her early life in rural Kentucky as she struggled for a residing, telling bluntly and easily what lifestyles used to be like in a Border country within the first half the 20 th century. Later she takes readers to Washington, D.C., the place we see her upward thrust from a typist in the course of international warfare II to a reporter. eventually she might develop into the 1st black woman reporter authorized to the White condominium; to go back and forth with a U.S. president; credentialed through the home and Senate Press Galleries; approved to the dep. of kingdom and the superb court docket; voted into the White residence Newswomen’s organization and the Women’s nationwide Press membership; and well-known as a Washington activities reporter.

a latest of Helen Thomas and a forerunner of Ethel Payne, Dunnigan traveled with President Truman on his coast-to-coast, whistle-stop journey; used to be the 1st reporter to question President Eisenhower approximately civil rights; and supplied front-page insurance for a couple of hundred black newspapers of almost each race factor sooner than the Congress, the federal courts, and the presidential management. right here she offers an uninhibited, unembellished, and unvarnished examine the terrain, the avid gamers, and the politics in a rough-and-tumble nationwide capital suffering to make its manner via a nascent, postwar racial revolution.