In 1961, Dorothy Butler Gilliam defied the odds by becoming the first Black woman reporter at The Washington Post.
At a time when Black people — let alone Black women — were not expected to have bylines in national papers, Gilliam was breaking down barriers, writing stories about the civil rights movement and the everyday lives of Black people.
While today we have Soledad O’Brien, Jemele Hill, April Ryan and Nikole Hannah-Jones, Gilliam’s career started when there weren’t many other Black women in mainstream media to look to for inspiration.
We met Gilliam in her Washington, D.C. home, where she still writes, this time telling her own story in a memoir called “Trailblazer: A Pioneering Journalist’s Fight to Make the Media Look More Like America.”
Source: Taxi cabs wouldn’t pick her up in the 1960s. She became an award-winning journalist anyways.
