Seven young African American women who were educators founded Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority, Inc. on November 12, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana. On December 30, 1929, a charter was granted to the Alpha chapter at Butler University making the organization a national college sorority.
The sorority’s founders are Nannie Mae Gahn Johnson, Mary Lou Allison Little, Vivian White Marbury, Bessie M. Downey Martin, Cubena McClure, Hattie Mae Dulin Redford, and Dorothy Hanley Whiteside.
A statute of Alice Allison Dunnigan, a member of Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority, Inc., was permanently installed at the Seek Museum in her hometown of Russellville, Kentucky. It had been unveiled on September 21, 2018 at the Newseum in Washington, DC. The statue then went on a tour and was displayed at the Truman Presidential Library, Dunnigan’s alma mater Kentucky State University, and the University of Kentucky. Her sorority sisters celebrated these events.
In 1906, Alice Allison Dunnigan was born in Russellville, Kentucky. She was reading before she entered first grade and she began writing for the local newspaper when she was 13. It was the start of her career as a journalist.
She taught in Kentucky schools from 1924 to 1942. Dunnigan found that her students were unaware of the contributions made by African Americans. She began writing fact sheets to help her students learn about them. These fact sheets were compiled in 1939. They were later published as The Fascinating Story of Black Kentuckians: Their Heritage and Tradition in 1982.
In 1942, Dunnigan went to Washington, D.C., and worked for the U.S. Department of Labor from 1942 to 1946. She took night courses at Howard University and was a Washington correspondent for The Chicago Defender, a Black owned weekly newspaper.
Dunnigan then joined the Associated Negro Press service. At first, she was denied press credentials to cover Congress and the Senate because she wrote for a weekly, not a daily paper. When she was finally granted press clearance six months later, she became the first Black woman to be so accredited. Named Associated Negro Press bureau chief in 1947, she held that position for 14 years.
She paid her own way in 1948 to follow President Truman’s western campaign. Dunnigan became the first African American female correspondent in the White House. She was also the first Black woman elected to the Women’s National Press Club.
Dunnigan took a full-time job with Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign in 1960 and later worked for him when he was vice president. She also later worked in his Presidential administration.
In the 1962 book Portraits in Color: The Loves of Colorful Negro Women, Dunnigan is listed as an “Education Consultant, President’s Council on Equal Employment Opportunity.” Of Dunnigan’s career in journalism it was said:
Many honors were collected by Alice as a newspaper woman. She holds at least twenty-five citations from national organizations for outstanding work in journalism and in Federal service. Included among them is the ‘Award of Merit’ from the Haitian Government for ‘honest and unbiased reporting’ on conditions in that country. She was the first woman to receive the ‘Newsman’s Newsman’ trophy from the Capital Press Club as the most outstanding member of that organization.
Dunnigan retired in 1970 and her autobiography, A Black Woman’s Experience: From Schoolhouse to White House, was published in 1974. She died on May 6, 1983, at the age of 77.
