Dorothy Butler Gilliam Biography
Dorothy Pearl Butler Gilliam is an American journalist who was the Washington Post’s first African-American female reporter. Gilliam began her work at The Washington Post as a reporter on the City Desk in October 1961. In 1979, she began writing a popular column for the Post about education, politics, and race, which lasted for 19 years in the Metro section.
Dorothy Butler Gilliam Age
She was born Dorothy Pearl Butler Gilliam on 24 November 1936, in Memphis, Tennessee, United States of America. Dorothy is 87 years old as of November 2023.
Dorothy Butler Gilliam Education
She attended Bellarmine University before transferring to a historically black college with a journalism school, Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism. She earned her master’s degree at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Dorothy Butler Gilliam Husband
Gilliam was married to the well-known abstract artist Sam Gilliam. They divorced in the 1980s, but their three daughters (Stephanie, Melissa, and Leah) and three grandkids survive.
Dorothy Butler Gilliam Career
She went on to work as a reporter for the Memphis Tri-State Defender, which is part of the Chicago Defender group. She worked for editor L. Alex Wilson there. Wilson was battered by a white mob during the 1957 Little Rock Nine school desegregation crisis, which she witnessed on television at the Defender’s offices. Despite Wilson’s prior warning that Little Rock was not a place for “a girl,” she went as a correspondent for the Johnson Publishing Company’s news magazine.She continued to work for Jet and its sister publication, Ebony, but realized she needed more schooling to acquire a reporter’s job at a daily newspaper and was hired by The Washington Post when she was 24, the paper’s first African-American woman reporter.
Gilliam began her work at The Washington Post as a reporter on the City Desk in October 1961. In 1979, she began writing a popular column for the Post about education, politics, and race, which lasted for 19 years in the Metro section. Butler published “Paul Robeson, All American,” a biography of the iconoclastic athlete, artist, and political activist, in 1976. From her days organizing protests against the New York Daily News after it fired two-thirds of its African-American workforce to her presidency of the National Association of Black Journalists from 1993 to 1995, she has been an activist dedicated to public service. She taught journalism at American University and Howard University for a short time.
In 1997, Gilliam founded The Washington Post’s Young Journalists Development Program, which aimed to recruit more young people into the world of journalism. Journalists from the Post work with students at local high schools, and in some cases, the Post prints the high schools’ publications. Gilliam launched Prime Movers Media, the nation’s first journalistic mentorship program for impoverished kids in urban schools, in 2004, while serving as the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Fellow at The George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs. Veteran journalists and university interns are sent to coach high school student journalists in Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia as part of the initiative.
In 2010, Gilliam received the Washington Press Club’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Wilberforce University bestowed an Honorary Doctorate on her in 2023 for not just being a trailblazer, but also for her passion and commitment to the school. To honor her father, she founded the Adee Butler Writing Center at Wilberforce University in 2022. Gilliam received the Foremothers Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Center for Health Research in 2019. She is a member of the sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha.
Dorothy Butler Gilliam Net Worth
Gilliam has an estimated net worth of 1 million dollars.