new year, new job for Alice
Alice Dunnigan began her job as chief of the Washington Bureau for the Associated Negro Press (ANP) on the first day of January 1947.
I’m not surprised that New Year’s Day didn’t qualify as a holiday for the ever-hardworking Alice Dunnigan; I, on the other hand, slept for much of Jan. 1, 2026.
On the opening day of Congress, Jan. 3, 1947, Alice entered the Capitol with a visitors’ pass from whom she calls “my Kentucky senator.” I suspect she means Alben Barkley, the Democratic senator from Kentucky who would, a few years later, be President Truman’s vice president.
Alice, who was a part-time ANP correspondent for several years before starting the full-time job, waited in the visitors’ line — “which stretched for some distance through the long Capitol corridor” — and noticed newsmen going up a guarded stairway.
“The reporters would step up, show their passes and be admitted,” Alice wrote. “I saw no reason why I shouldn’t do that.”
The Capitol police who guarded the door saw several reasons why she couldn’t do that. “I don’t think you belong up there,” one officer said, but he let her through to try anyway.
Once in the Press Gallery, Alice learned that she needed to be an accredited Capitol reporter, a status that no other Black reporter had. She received a blank application, which she “filled and filed.”
Alice was originally notified that she didn’t qualify: She worked for a news service, and accredited reporters were required to work for daily papers. As many Black papers were weeklies that benefited from news services, this was almost certainly a coded way to keep out Black reporters.
As months passed, “the fight for membership continued,” Alice wrote. She fought, organizations fought, the newspaper guild fought. Eventually the Senate Rules Committee held hearings and changed the rules: Representatives of news agencies could be admitted.
Alice got her accreditation to the Capitol in June 1947, a personal accomplishment and national occasion six months and 158 years in the making.
After writing a few paragraphs, I planned to end this newsletter with a reference to the following subheading in Alice’s abridged autobiography, Alone atop the Hill: “ON TO THE NEXT GOAL.” I planned to encourage you and me to follow Alice’s example in always working toward the next accomplishment.
But then I thought of the 662 pages of Alice’s autobiography as originally published, A Black Woman’s Experience – From Schoolhouse to White House. The pages in my copy are faded from age and marked with my sticky notes in purple and pink and orange. And the pages are dense with text — so dense that I found myself doubting that Alice wrote subheadings at all.
My lap was full with Alone atop the Hill, my laptop and George. I asked Loui to fetch me my copy of A Black Woman’s Experience; soon after, Leo joined the nest, too. I flipped through the original edition’s pages and confirmed that “ON TO THE NEXT GOAL” and the other headings were added by Carol McCabe Booker, editor of Alone atop the Hill. And I began to study other changes she made, like adding Alice’s footnotes into the main text and changing the word “venture” to “goal.”
I wanted to write about Alice’s early days in her White House correspondent job today because the dates matched up well, but I almost changed my mind because I worried this was too basic a tale — anyone who knows anything about Alice will have heard this story before. But I ended up learning a lesson here: Don’t overlook the familiar. There may be something there you don’t know as well as you thought you did.
And now I have a new next goal: looking more deeply at the changes made in Alice’s abridged autobiography. Like the two cats currently in my lap, the two editions are similar but not the same.
So those are the New Year’s lessons I’m sharing with you at the beginning of 2026: Move toward the next goal. Revisit the familiar ready to learn something new. And, obviously, snuggle with cats.