Dorothy Butler Gilliam Honored With The Anne O'Hare McCormick Trailblazer Award

Maynard board member Dorothy Gilliam will be honored by the Anne O'Hare McCormick Memorial Fund as the recipient of the organization's first Anne O'Hare McCormick Trailblazer award. Gilliam will receive the award at an April 18 reception in Washington DC. - MIJE Staff

Dorothy Butler Gilliam will receive our first Anne O'Hare McCormick Trailblazer Award. She was the first African-american female reporter hired by the Washington Post, joining the paper's City Desk staff in October 1961. She was an Anne O'Hare McCormick Scholar at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism for 1960-1961. During her long career with The Washington Post, she wrote an influential column on education, race and politics for the Metro section. Beyond her byline, she became known as an activist. Gilliam helped to organize protests against the New York Daily News after it fired two-thirds of its African-American staff. She was the president of the National Association of Black Journalists from 1993 to 1995. In 1997, she created the Young Journalists Development Program at The Washington Post. She is a co-founder of The Maynard Institute in Oakland, California, which has trained over 2,000 journalists of color since the 1970s. In 2003-2004, she joined The George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs as the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Fellow. She also launched Prime Movers Media, the nation's first mentorship program for underserved students at urban schools.

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The AOM Memorial Fund as established in 1954 as a posthumous tribute to Anne O'Hare McCormick of The New York Times by her colleagues in the Newswomen's Club of New York.