Dorothy Butler Gilliam is a journalist, editor, media educator, feminist, author, and former president of the National Association of Black Journalists. She was the first African American female reporter hired by The Washington Post. Born in the Dixie Homes Project in Memphis, Tennessee, Gilliam was the eighth child of Jessie Mae and Adee Conklin Butler, a minister for the African Methodist Episcopal (AME). Raised in a working-class black neighborhood in Louisville, Kentucky, she got her first job at the age of seventeen at the black-owned Louisville Defender where she quickly rose from typist to society editor.
