Searchby Ellen Creane
Determination. Hard work. Courage. Perseverance. These words describe the first African American woman to work as a reporter for the Washington Post. Her name was Dorothy Butler Gilliam. Forced to attend a segregated school in Kentucky, Dorothy eventually graduated from Columbia University, a top college that includes a School of Journalism.
Introduce the children in your circulation area to this remarkable woman who blazed a trail for more minority women as journalists on newspapers and in broadcast journalism.
Kid Scoop knows that young children are fascinated with stories about reporters. Reading about people like Gilliam can inspire the next generation of reporters.
When I was a student teacher in an inner-city junior high school in San Francisco, I was assigned a class of students who struggled in regular classrooms. They had been gathered for a special program, but it wasn’t working. Finally, one day I stood before them and announced: “Today, you are going to learn how to be reporters.” Silence. All the students stared at me with amazement in their eyes. Quickly I introduced the basics: who, what, when, where, why, and how. I told them to go home and write about a place in their neighborhood for our class newspaper.
To my delight, they all came back with remarkable descriptions of the grocery store, the bank, and other places. The most haunting was the 12-year-old girl who wrote about the local movie theater, “where you can stay all night.” I didn’t have the heart to ask why she wanted to stay away from home all night.
Kid Scoop suggests your readers would enjoy reading about how the journalists on your newspaper got interested in being reporters. Ask them to write about their path into journalism. Publish their stories for your readers. We suspect you’ll find many reporters began their interest in writing about news with a local newspaper in their own homes.
