[New post] The Thrill (and the Heavy Emotional Burden) of Blazing a Trail for Black Women Journalists

Longreads posted: "Dorothy Butler Gilliam | an excerpt from Trailblazer: A Pioneering Journalist's Fight to Make the Media Look More Like America | Center Street | January 2019 | 17 minutes (4,927 words) When I arrived in Washington, D.C., in 1961, the city, the entire cou" New post on Longreads The Thrill (and the Heavy Emotional Burden) of Blazing a Trail for Black Women Journalists by Longreads Dorothy Butler Gilliam | an excerpt from Trailblazer: A Pioneering Journalist's Fight to Make the Media Look More Like America | Center Street | January 2019 | 17 minutes (4,927 words) When I arrived in Washington, D.C., in 1961, the city, the entire country, and the African continent were all on the threshold of change. The dashing, young John F. Kennedy had just begun his presidency promising "a new frontier." The Civil Rights Movement was kicking into high gear with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. now urging young people like me to pursue professions we'd been excluded from and to excel. It was thrilling to be in the nation's capital to begin my career as a daily newspaper journalist in the white press. I brought a pretty placid nature to that career. When I later looked back, I surprised myself. I was so conservative politically! For example, only six years earlier, when I wrote about school integration in the student newspaper while attending Lincoln University from 1955 to 1957 (the Negro college in Missouri that provided higher education for colored students, allowing the state to keep all its other colleges and universities white), I indicated reasons we should go slowly with integration. But reporting for The Tri-State Defender in Memphis as the Civil Rights Movement dawned had begun to change me. The bus boycott victories had begun to liberate my thinking. And added confidence came from my faith, strengthened my spirit, and pushed me to do things that other people in my family didn't do. Read more of this post Longreads | January 8, 2019 at 7:00 am | Tags: black history, Books, Dorothy Butler Gilliam, integration, journalism, The Washington Post | Categories: Books, History, Nonfiction, Story, Unapologetic Women | URL: https://wp.me/p4KhvY-uUU Like Unsubscribe to no longer receive posts from Longreads. Change your email settings at Manage Subscriptions. Trouble clicking? Copy and paste this URL into your browser: http://longreads.com/2019/01/08/the-thrill-and-the-heavy-emotional-burden-of-blazing-a-trail-for-black-women-journalists/ Thanks for flying with WordPress.com