The first black female White House reporter had to pawn her watch every week just to eat

It was rare to be a woman or African American covering the White House in the 1940s, and Alice Dunnigan was both.

The Kentucky-born journalist was the first African American woman to be granted access to cover the White House, as well as Congress, the Supreme Court and the State Department.

Yet even at the height of her career in Washington, she had to pawn her watch every Saturday night so that she would have enough money to eat until her paycheck arrived Monday morning.

It was a “humiliating practice,” she wrote in her 1974 autobiography, “A Black Woman’s Experience — From Schoolhouse to White House.” “I was never allowed more than five dollars on it, just enough for Sunday dinner,” she wrote. After pawning it, Dunnigan headed home to her one-room basement apartment in Washington D.C.’s Brookland neighborhood, where she shoveled coal for the furnace to get a break on rent.