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Dorothy Butler – getty
Perhaps the first black journalist in American history knows where America is going: Dorothy Butler. The first African-American reporter in an exclusively white press until the early 1960s began writing at age 23 for the Washington Post and responds today from the land of the stars and stripes, at the dawn of the American elections and during the pandemic. .
“It’s a disaster. I only think about when President Trump said the pandemic would go away or announced drugs that scientists had determined were not the cure for Covid-19. With it, people’s lives have worsened, the economy is collapsed. These are very difficult times ”.
President Trump appointed me. So I say, “fake news.” After 35 years as a reporter, how do you think the American media ecosystem is changing?
“Calling it fake news is an understatement, it’s a cheating expression. However, today’s press is different, the media is visual. When I started working you had the opportunity to excavate and explain the events with your writing, this is another era, purely technological. There are still excellent journalists, but I think the public is not interested in reading print as before ”.
In the past, the American press was divided between the white and black press.
“Black press reporters went where white reporters didn’t and didn’t even want to go. Disguised, or in old clothes that did not make them look professional, or with Bibles under their arms to pose as priests to document the lynchings. If the bailiffs found out their true identity, they would have been killed. Those reporters felt they still had a mission to make those stories public, to write about those black deaths that white reporters called out. cheap kills, dead out of nowhere. “
Since then we have come this far, to George Floyd.
“This country is not what it should be and we still have to fight for change, but something has happened since George Floyd died. When I covered the history of the civil movement, there was a clear leadership: a leader, whose name was Martin Luther King. There is no guide in the Black Lives Matter movement, but there are more and more non-black Americans who have realized that they have benefited from white supremacy, who have understood that things must change. In the United States, white poverty is also increasing, welfare is concentrated in a few hands. Young people protest for a reason: They are concerned about “the soul of America.”
You said and wrote: “I never thought I would see a black president.” What legacy did Obama leave behind?
“The health system. He didn’t do everything he had to do, it was a difficult and significant presidency, but, after 400 years of slavery, he proved that a black person can become president – he opened the door for people like Harris, who, as a couple. with Biden, he has what it takes to win. “
Not just racism, also sexism.
“I started working in 1961, before the expansion of the feminist movement in the United States. Of course things have changed, not as much as they should ”.
Obama was the first black president in history. She is the first black woman in American journalism. Did you know that history was changing at the time?
“I didn’t feel the weight on my shoulders. Washington was a very segregated and divided city in those years, I was a black journalist often sent to cover stories white areas, white neighborhoods. Sometimes people didn’t believe that I was a journalist. Once I had to count the birthday of a centenary, but when I got to their door they told me that I had to go through the back: they were convinced that I was part of the servants ”.
The Washington Post via Getty Images
His newly published bio has this title: Trailbrazer, the trailblazer.
“I knew I was the first black journalist in the white press and I knew there were things I shouldn’t do: I didn’t complain to the editor-in-chief because I couldn’t find taxis to get there on time because the drivers didn’t pick up blacks. Don’t complain because I didn’t eat because the restaurant didn’t serve black people. Don’t complain if I wasn’t staying at a hotel in Mississippi, where to follow the history of the civil movement, I went to sleep in a morgue. Some of my colleagues at the Washington Post, if they saw me on the street or in public, they would not greet me. But I kept doing what they asked me without complaining and I did it for the next black woman who would come, to leave the door open for her. I didn’t say it wasn’t hard for me, it cost me a lot ”.
How did you endure all this?
“I knew it was not what people said it was. For example, on the way to school, white children threw rocks at me and my teacher wasted so much time convincing me that I shouldn’t be like them, but just ignore them. My greatest achievement was not having hated. I am who I am because someone loved me growing up. My father loved me, my community, the church I attended. So I always had faith: in God, but, above all, in me ”.
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