Heart & Soul

Evelyn Cunningham with Mamie Eisenhower.

Benjamin Hooks, Dorothy Height and now Evelyn Cunningham—I guess deaths really do come in threes. What a triumvirate of leaders in human, women’s and civil rights. While services for Height are in the second of three days here in Washington, Cunningham died peacefully this morning in New York, according to her niece, Gigi Freeman.

I brought her pink roses on my last trip to her beloved Harlem. I was just thinking the other day that I was overdue for a visit and kicking myself for not interviewing Height about Cunningham’s life as a “connector” and journalist.

At 94, Cunningham has spent a lot of time connecting and encouraging lots of people like me. At 94, she’s seen a lot and chronicled much of it as a reporter and columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier during its heyday. At 94, she was a witness to history. Gracious and socially conscious, outspoken with a wicked sense of humor, she also made some of her own history personally and professionally in journalism, politics and other arenas.

Cunningham was among the few women who covered the hot spots of the Civil Rights Movement. She begged for such assignments and came to be known as the “lynching editor.” Rather than take her notepad and pen to teas, fashion shows, debutante balls, and club meetings, she preferred not only to go where the male reporters went, but also in their stead since black men faced a greater risk of being lynched. She was in the thick of protests, lynchings and bombings, including the blast that struck the Alabama home of a young Martin Luther King Jr. Cunningham chronicled King’s emergence as a leader in a multi-part series and other articles. They developed a mutual respect, she said, and would often joke around.

“When he had to introduce me to somebody, he would always say, ‘This is Sister Cunningham, and she’s from the Pittsburgh Courier—but she’s a New Yorker and she is not nonviolent.”

Cunningham documented an important chapter in U.S. history, not only as a correspondent for the black press but also as a stringer for the New York Times, the New York Daily News and the New York Post. She shrugged off the lack of credit or compensation for the stories and tips she provided. And the dailies wouldn’t have been able to lure her from the black press even if they had really tried.

She loved her job. She loved giving voice to the voiceless, holding the powerful accountable and even confronting scoundrels like Bull Connors. She wrote about barriers broken by everyone from tennis and golf legend Althea Gibson to the rising lawyer Thurgood Marshall, whom she described as one of the first feminists.

In her columns for the Pittsburgh Courier, Cunningham injected more of her wit, spurred on by the likes of Langston Hughes, who said that the black press needed to lighten up.

“They told me I could write about anything I wanted, and so I did,” Cunningham said. “Nothing was sacred. They let me just run amok and make fun of black people sometimes and make fun of myself.”

In addition to working at the Pittsburgh Courier from 1943 to 1962, she started hosting a radio program for WLIB-AM during her lunch break. During her five years at the microphone, she interviewed newsmakers ranging from Malcolm X to Sammy Davis Jr.

One of her last interviews was with Nelson Rockefeller and resulted in a job offer to work with the New York governor and baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson. That began a deeper shift into politics, women’s rights and civic activism with key appointments at the local, state and federal levels that extended into her 80s and 90s. She was also active in numerous organizations, especially the Coalition of 100 Black Women. In fact, Cunningham is to the Coalition as Height is to the National Council of Negro Women and Delta Sigma Theta.

“The government thing was fabulous for me,” Cunningham said, but the board seats became too numerous. “One day I looked up and I was on 12 boards, and that’s when I started saying, ‘this is ridiculous.’”

Her five-year stint on the board of the Apollo Theatre Foundation was one of her most contentious appointments. The then 83-year-old resigned in late January 1999 after she locked horns with U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., when she supported the state attorney general’s effort to remove the board as part of an investigation of financial irregularities. The investigation involved dealings with Inner City Broadcasting, producer of “It’s Showtime at the Apollo.”

The incident put her at odds not only with Rangel, the board chairman, but also with Inner City founder Percy Sutton, with whom she traveled to a sit-in at a Maryland diner for a first-person story in November 1961. But Cunningham didn’t care. In both her pre- and post-journalistic lives, she was consistent in her commitment to calling a spade, a spade—even if it meant wrecking a friendship.

The recipient of a 1998 George Polk Award and a 2008 Legacy Award from the National Association of Black Journalists, Cunningham viewed her extraordinary life as ordinary. Perhaps that’s what made her so down to earth and made it easy for her to tell the stories of others.

“I would like to be remembered as a person who was rich in friends,” she once told me. “I have had a lifetime full of friends—good people, wonderful people, famous people, poor people, productive people. Just people. Wonderful, wonderful people. That’s why journalism was so easy for me. I loved it so much!”

Yanick Rice Lamb is associate publisher and editorial director of Heart & Soul magazine. She also teaches journalism at Howard University.