By Askia Muhammad

Since President Obama’s election, the mainstream media has taken significant notice of the fact that black journalists, too, cover national affairs and that now more than ever, they’re being assigned to cover both the President and the First Lady. But, typically, that notice has omitted much, if not all of the “back story” – the history of black journalists among the White House press. Askia Muhammad, who covered Presidents from 1977 to 2007, fills in the gaps.

Askia Muhammad

Long before Jet Magazine’s Kevin Chappell popped his question during one of Presiden Brack Obama’s first press conferences, journalist and civil rights activist William Monroe Trotter was banned from the White House by President Woodrow Wilson.

During the Eisenhower Administration, the legendary Ethel Payne, one of the first black woman investigative reporters to cover Washington, DC, and known as “The First Lady of the Black Press,” irked the president when she asked why he didn’t ban segregation on interstate bus travel.

Chappell’s predecessor at the White House for the Johnson Publishing Company (JPC), the award winning veteran black journalist Simeon Booker, had to convince the Nixon Administration’s communications director Herb Klein he deserved a seat in the room and to be chosen to ask a question.

Such is just part of the rich legacy of black press in the White House.

Looking around the White House Briefing Room today, there’s something very obvious: You can literally count the number of black journalists present on one hand. President Barack Obama has made an obvious effort to allow at least one token question from a black journalist—which means in that regard he’s no different that past presidents.

Black press with White House credentials have always been few and far between. But few people even knew these journalists existed because so few were thrust into the national spotlight. In fact, it’s hard to get an accurate count of how many black press members have been credentialed—outside of anecdotal evidence—because they operated in such obscurity.

The first accredited black voice in the White House Press Corps was Alice Dunnigan, who represented the Chicago Defender and the Associated Negro Press (ANP). She fought and secured her credential in 1948 during the term of President Harry Truman.

Of course, Frederick Douglass, editor of The North Star in Washington, D.C., and William Monroe Trotter, editor of the Boston Guardian, went to the White House during the terms of Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson, respectively. But Dunnigan was the first African- American correspondent to win permanent accreditation—what has since become known as a “hard pass”—which permits virtually unlimited access to the White House grounds and the Press Room adjacent to the West Wing from 6:00 a.m. until 10 p.m., 365 days a year.

The most acclaimed African-American White House correspondent was Ethel L. Payne, a reporter for The Chicago Daily Defender from 1950-1970 (Payne was honored with a stamp by the U.S. Postal Service in 2002.)

Like Trotter, Payne was also a thorn in the side of presidents. Trotter was banned on Nov. 12, 1914 from returning to the White House during Wilson’s term because the President did not like “his manner” and tone of complaint about the decision to segregate the federal workforce. Payne incurred a milder wrath than Trotter from President Eisenhower when she demanded to know why he would not simply issue an executive order banning segregation on interstate bus travel, which was his prerogative, over the Interstate Commerce Commission.

Payne also reported a story, which helped hasten the final undoing of red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.), who claimed to have identified “207 known Communists” working in the State Department. Payne discovered a black janitor on that list, whose only “crime” was that her husband once attended a rally where his name was added to the Communist Party’s Daily Worker newspaper free subscription list. On the back porch of their home, Payne reported, sat hundreds of unwrapped copies of the newspaper, which no one in the household had ever read.

Some may not know that Chappell, a senior editor at Ebony magazine, was not the first Ebony reporter invited to question a president at a prime-time news conference. While the claim may be technically accurate, it’s only because back in the day when black reporters broke the glass ceiling in the White House Press Corps, there were very few prime time news conferences at all.

When I came to Washington in 1977 for the Chicago Daily Defender during the Carter administration, Simeon Booker was writing his “Ticker Tape USA” column in JET magazine and had long been an accredited White House correspondent.

President Barack Obama talking to Michael Cottman of BlackAmericaWeb.com (photo credit Robert Gibbs).

Booker said he agreed to work for John H. Johnson’s Johnson Publishing Company Washington news bureau but only if it were going to be a “Top Shelf First Class” operation just like all the other well respected news operations in town. That office was, and is, located in the 1700 block of Pennsylvania Ave., just one block from the White House. Booker’s colleague Roy Betts and the late E. Fannie Granton were also White House “hard pass” holders, as was the late JPC photographer Maurice Sorrell.

With my own White House hard pass, Roy and I attended most presidential press conferences during the Carter administration, but most by Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and even George H.W. Bush, were not held in “prime time.” Black reporters from the black-owned press were rarely called on in those days.

In the 1970s, we also had Don Agurs representing Mutual Black Network, Tamu White of Howard University Radio, and Glen Ford of Sheridan Radio, attending press conferences, but none of us were ever called on. Eventually, Don Agurs got an exclusive one-on-one interview with President Carter. I managed to ask him a question at two press conferences, and participated once in a high level briefing with just seven other reporters.

Then came Phyllis Crockett from National Public Radio (NPR) and David Ruffin representing Black Enterprise magazine. And, of course, there was Bob Ellison, of the America Urban Radio Network. Ellison was such a respected member of the press pool that he was elected President of the White House Correspondents Association. His successor for American Urban Radio Network was April Ryan, one half, along with Sonya Ross, of Associated Press, of what we called the Twin Divas. Both were (and April still is a) fixtures of the White House Press Corps, traveling with the president on Air Force One, and frequently called on by presidents and by press secretaries at daily White House press briefings.

In other words, black journalists have a long, albeit obscured, history at the White House. However, whether President Obama will give any heightened visibility to the black press is yet to be definitively answered.

Askia Muhammad is Editor of National Scene News Bureau, which provides editorial, audio and photographic content for broadcast and print clients, including The Final Call, National Public Radio, Soundprint, WPFW-FM and The Washington Informer newspaper. He held a White House “hard pass” from 1977 until 2007. a2kia@verizon.net