Jennifer Gunter King, associate university librarian for special collections, works with some of Dorothy Gilliam’s papers.

Journalism & Media

Groundbreaking Journalist Dorothy Gilliam Gives BU a Gift of History

The mother of Boston University’s president, and the first Black woman journalist at the Washington Post, donates her papers to Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center

Dorothy Butler Gilliam’s 2019 memoir was titled Trailblazer for good reason.

As the first Black woman reporter for the Washington Post, in 1961, she helped open a path for many journalists to follow. At the Post, she went from a young reporter covering the civil rights dramas of the early 1960s to a respected Metro columnist who often focused on stories in Washington’s Black community. She pushed in many ways to, as the subtitle of her book states, “make the media look more like America.” 

Now she has given her papers to the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University—where the second of her three daughters is BU President Melissa L. Gilliam.

“I was quite surprised when I was asked to do this, but it does give me a particular kind of pleasure,” Dorothy Gilliam tells BU Today of the gift, which went through last summer.

President Gilliam says that when she heard BU had asked her mother about housing her papers, it made perfect sense to her. “This University has a long history of championing an array of people committed to free expression, serious inquiry, humanity, and civil rights,” Gilliam says. “My mother dedicated her life to developing the next generation of journalists. Our College of Communication is home to one of the country’s premier schools of journalism. Throughout her life she has strived to see the best in people and help them realize their potential. I have learned so much from her and I am glad that others will too.”

The gift to BU comprises 40 boxes of personal and professional material primarily documenting her career as a journalist and a mentor to up-and-coming journalists of color, says Jennifer Gunter King, associate university librarian for special collections, who oversees the Gotlieb Center of the BU LIbraries.

The handwritten notes, draft typescripts, clippings of published articles, correspondence, photos, and other documents are now being surveyed at the Gotlieb Center, after which they will be indexed, arranged, and preserved as needed; some will be digitized. When that is completed, by early 2026, the collection will be made available to all researchers, including BU students and faculty, as well as outside scholars, whose work with the archive can include research papers, exhibitions, documentaries, articles, and books. There’s already a small display of Black media pioneers’ materials at the Howard Thurman Center for Common Ground—organized last fall in connection with the Black Media: Pioneers Then and Now symposium hosted by the College of Communication—which will remain up through this spring semester.

Dorothy Gilliam says she knows the focus will be on her 33 years (in two stints) at the Post.

“I was fortunate enough not only to be the first African American woman [reporter], but also [be there] at a time when very few women—period—were holding jobs in journalism,” she says. “Even when I graduated from Columbia, one of my professors said, ‘You have so many handicaps’—talking about my race and my gender—‘that you will probably make it.’

“Being a woman was seen as a handicap. Certainly, being a Black woman was seen as a double handicap. It really did test one’s ability to stand tall and strong against the odds,” she says. “Because you really can’t go through what I went through and survive, even thrive, without bringing a lot to it.”

“What has me most excited about Dorothy Butler Gilliam’s papers is that she recognized that advancing human rights in America is accomplished in the everyday small steps and the big steps,” King says. “Boston University holds the papers of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS’55, Hon.’59), and King’s papers themselves teach us that a movement happens in these very small decisions—like, am I going to stay at the church tonight to hold a gathering when I really need to be home and take care of my newborn child?”

At the Gotlieb, King says, Gilliam’s papers will also be “in conversation with” the papers of William Monroe Trotter, who founded the Boston Guardian, and the archives of the Bay State Banner, both Black newspapers here in Boston, as well as the papers of Alex Poinsett, former editor of Ebony and cofounder of the National Association of Black Journalists.

Dorothy Gilliam began her career at Black newspapers, including Tri-State Defender, a Memphis-based weekly where she covered the integration of Little Rock Central High School. She worked at the Post as a reporter in the 1960s, left for a few years, then returned in the early 1970s as an editor of the groundbreaking “Style” section. Her column ran for 19 years in the Post, where she retired in 2003. She was also president of the National Association of Black Journalists (1993-1995). 

“The collection includes handwritten reporter notes taken on site,” says King, “as well as correspondence back and forth with Dorothy and her support network—her mother, her then-boyfriend—so you really get a sense of Dorothy as a person, leaving her community and going out to gather stories and report back through the various newspapers where she worked.”

Despite the many travails of being a pioneer in the newsroom—from colleagues’ snubs to not being able to hail a cab to get to a story—Gilliam says she and her colleagues were journalists first, loyal to the old newsroom adage, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

“We saw ourselves, first of all, as people who were highly trained, dedicated to truth and fact,” says Gilliam, who earned a master’s at Columbia before joining the Post.

“We had just extraordinary editors, like Ben Bradlee Jr., people whom your work had to pass in order to hit the front page. So I think there was a general feeling for everybody that their reporting had to be first-rate,” she says. Women and African American writers “were under perhaps a tighter scrutiny, but there was a feeling throughout the Post, and I’m sure many other good newspapers, that we had then about the urgency of accuracy.”

The comparison to where we are today, with a changed media landscape and politicians charging “fake news,” “does not make me happy,” she says.

“The collection also includes responses to her work,” King says, “some of which are incredibly positive, and some of which are incredibly vile. Love mail and hate mail. But you can see from the response that she’s pursuing a different kind of reporting than folks were used to.

“There are also some beautiful personal materials in the collection,” King says. “It’s obvious that [husband-to-be] Sam Gilliam was smitten, and so is she. You can see both her development as a journalist and as a person, becoming a mother and parenting three beautiful daughters and making the very hard decision to step away from her job as a columnist and be primarily the parent while her husband’s art career was soaring.” (The couple divorced in the 1980s; Sam Gilliam died in 2022.)

The gift came about from conversations last summer, when King talked about the work of the Gotlieb Center with the newly arrived President Gilliam.

“Knowing that her mother, Dorothy Butler Gilliam, and her father, [painter] Sam Gilliam, both played important roles in advancing civil rights and human rights in America, I was excited to share a bit about Boston University’s role in that struggle,” King says. “Over the course of our conversation, I learned that Dorothy Butler Gilliam was in the process of moving. She was downsizing and didn’t have a plan for her archive, and the opportunity to bring her papers to Boston University worked for all of us.”

Through Gilliam’s papers, “as students and scholars, we develop a fuller understanding of what makes a movement,” King says, “and we have the opportunity to translate that understanding into our own daily lives, as we ourselves make decisions about what we choose to say and choose not to say, what to do and what not to do.”