By OSWALD T. BROWN
WASHINGTON, D.C. — I don’t know what the occasion was that brought them together, but Helen Compton-Harris posted a photo on Facebook with her and two other ladies with the following caption: “So grateful to be with my SHEROES, journalist icons, Dorothy Butler Gilliam and Denise Rolark Barnes today.”
The fact that “my sister” Denise Rolark Barnes, Publisher of the Washington Informer, was one of the three persons in the photo was what initially arrested my attention; however, although I can’t recall ever meeting Dorothy Butler Gilliam, I have been an ardent admirer of her journalistic excellence from the years I previously lived in Washington, D.C. for 21 years.
As the first African-American female reporter hired by The Washington Post in 1961, Gilliam was a seasoned veteran journalist with The Post when I relocated to Washington from The Bahamas in 1975. Having been a well-established journalist in The Bahamas from the early 1960s, I vaguely remember speaking with her on the phone shortly after I arrived in D.C. in January of 1975 about possible job opportunities at The Post.
There is also a possibility that we may have met years later when we were both members of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) in the early 1990s, given the fact that she was President of NABJ from 1993 to 1995. I was a member of NABJ for several years when I was News Editor of the Washington Informer prior to returning to The Bahamas to live in 1993, and I attended NABJ’s annual convention held in Jamaica in either 1990 or 1991.
I had been a frequent visitor to Jamaica – two or three times a year in the 1960s– after covering Jamaica’s independence for The Nassau Tribune in 1962, and attending the NABJ convention in Jamaica became a top priority. Truth be told, however, I spent more time checking out my “old haunts” in Kingston than I did at the convention center, but I do recall how impressed I was with a session that was chaired by Charlayne Hunter-Gault, a very prominent African-American journalist.
One of the really great things about the advancements that have been made in Internet technology is that the encyclopedia has been consigned to the archives of fact-checking and you can now quickly find out whatever it is you want to know by doing quick Google search. So when I saw the photo posted by Helen Compton-Harris, I decided to do a Google search to see what the connection was between Compton-Harris and her two “SHEROES.”
The connection is that all three are journalists. Mrs. Compton-Harris currently is an Outreach, Planning and Development Coordinator at Richard Wright Public Charter School for Journalism and Media Arts, located at 770 M Street, S.E., Washington, D.C.
In the photo, she is holding a copy of Gillam’s most recent book, her memoir “Trailblazer,” so I suspect that the occasion was a book-signing by Gilliam.
“Trailblazer” has received rave reviews, including an excellent review written by Wayne Dawkins, an associate professor at Morgan State University School of Global Journalism and Communication, which was published in the Washington Informer earlier this year under the headline, “DOROTHY BUTLER GILLIAM TELLS HER TRAILBLAZIG STORY.”
Dawkins begins his review of with this gripping opening paragraph: “Dorothy Butler Gilliam has lived to be a sage octogenarian. She has also lived a remarkable life: daughter of the segregated South, front-line chronicler of the dismantling of Jim Crow and ascension of the civil rights movement and most of all, ‘Trailblazer,’ the title of her memoir.”
Continuing, Dawkins adds: “Indeed, Gilliam in 1961 became the first Black woman journalist at the Washington Post, joining two African-American men, Luther P. Jackson, Jr. and Wallace Terry.
“The value of Gilliam’s memoir is that it is written from an African-American woman’s perspective. She paints searing pictures of early 1960s racially-segregated District of Columbia. I’ve read good accounts by David Brinkley and Stewart Alsop, yet Gilliam’s brims with soul.
“For 20ish Millennials or 40ish Gen-Xers, these pictures of Washington could seem surreal. The District couldn’t have been that way, right? Baby Boomers, who are now 60- or 70ish, retired or about to retire, remember the oppressive Washington of their youth, the “Chocolate City” that lacked home rule and was treated sadistically by openly-racist Southern U.S. Senators who usually were tasked to mismanage the budgets.”
Noting that Dorothy Butler was a 23-year-old single woman when she began working at the Post, Dawkins adds: “She endured taxi drivers who refused to pick her up, which meant she was perilously close to missing reporting assignments and blowing writing deadlines. Restaurants were segregated, and she was limited to eat at a particular cafeteria where she sometimes dined with a white female colleague or Luther Jackson. White male co-workers, she said, would acknowledge her in the office, but not on the street. That courtesy would have offended other whites.
“D.C. was so segregated before the mid-1960s civil rights laws, even the district’s pet cemeteries were segregated, Simeon Booker, the Washington Post’s first Black journalist, told Gilliam. Booker, 99, worked briefly at the Post in the 1950s then had a remarkable five-decade career as Ebony/Jet’s Washington editor, publishing his memoirs a few years before his death in 2017.”
However, Dawkins writes: “There is no hint of complaint in Gilliam’s ‘Trailblazer.’ In fact, she calmly recounts the racism she and other Blacks endured. However, she had reason to feel fear or rage, like in 1957 when she traveled to Little Rock to cover the desegregation of Central High School. Butler, then 20, was ordered by her editor, the Tri-State Defender’s L. Alexis Wilson, to stay behind in Memphis because the assignment was too dangerous. Indeed. The editor had been beaten and stoned by a white mob, yet he refused to run. The Marine defiantly walked away. Butler went to Little Rock to finish the reporting.
“After a year of reporting at the Post, Butler was dispatched to Oxford, Mississippi in 1962 to cover James Meredith’s effort to desegregate “Ole Miss,” the University of Mississippi. Butler interviewed Black service workers whose voices were rarely heard in white daily newspapers.”
Dawkins goes on to point out that during her early years at the Post, Butler covered “so-called serious news; she was not a journalist toiling in the women’s pages, aka features, which existed until 1969.”
Then he adds: “She married Sam Gilliam, Jr., a fine artist, in 1962 and after starting a family she left the paper. Nearly a decade later she was encouraged to return to the Post. Executive Editor Ben Bradlee and his team hired Gilliam as an assistant editor for Style, the former women’s pages, transformed into an edgy features section about women and men, suburbanites and city dwellers.”
Gilliam saw this an opportunity, Dawkins notes, and she is quoted in her memoir as saying, “I knew the vast and complex Black cultural world, which was unknown to white readers, was largely missing from the section and I longed to help unveil what some called a secret world and make the marvelous culture of Black America better known and understood by all races.”
“Gilliam’s platform expanded when she became a columnist,” Dawkins writes. “Ever the changemaker, Gilliam co-founded the Institute for Journalism Education, a training ground for hundreds of women and men of color who entered mainstream journalism in the last quarter of the 20th century and early part of this one.
“When she retired from the Post at the end of the century she did not retire from empowering others. George Washington University supported her Prime Movers Media Program that promoted media training for high school students.”
Dawkins had already convinced me to log on to Amazon and order by copy of “Trailblazer” when he concluded his brilliantly written review by declaring that it “is an essential read about the lives of mainstream media Black journalists, told by an earnest and elegant revolutionary who led the charge.”
