Evelyn Cunningham papers

Evelyn Cunningham, columnist, editor, and journalist; feminist, community and civil rights activist; and political aide. Her reporting coverage started in the early days of the Civil Rights Movement.

Evelyn Elizabeth Long was born on January 25, 1916 in the small town of Elizabeth City, North Carolina toMary and Clyde Long, a dressmaker and a taxicab driver, respectively. At age four, her family moved to Harlem to pursue better educational, job, and living opportunities. Cunningham, educated in the New York City public school system, graduated in 1934 from Hunter College High School and attended Long Island University to study social sciences, earning her Bachelor of Science degree in 1939. Following her studies at Long Island University, she attended Columbia University in 1944 and studied journalism for one semester.

Cunningham started her career with the Pittsburgh Courier in early 1939 and within a year covered the burgeoning modern Civil Rights Movement. She reported on the Groveland, Florida murders, the South Carolina lynching of Isaiah Nixon, the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, and the Birmingham, Alabama Autherine Lucy school desegregation case. During her time in Montgomery covering the bus boycott, Cunningham wrote a three-part series on the life and family of Martin Luther King, Jr., based on her meetings and interviews with King and his family. She was the first African American woman to report on Eisenhower's presidential campaign and traveled extensively to cover stories dealing with race relations and women's issues in Nevada, California, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba. After five years with the Pittsburgh Courier, she attained the position of editor of the New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis editions (1945-1950), became a feature writer and columnist (1950-1955), and the city editor for the New York edition (1955-1962). Cunningham's column, The Woman chronicled African American social life in Harlem.

Following her work at the Pittsburg Courier, Cunningham hosted a daily radio show At Home with Evelyn Cunningham on New York’s WLIB until 1966. In addition to this show, Cunningham spent time as a communications consultant (1961-1966) to various organizations including the Rockefeller Center, Inc., Black Odyssey Magazine, American Women for Economic Development, Philip Morris, USA, the New York Department of Civil Service, and the Jackie Robinson Foundation. In 1967, she entered government service as the administrative assistant to Jackie Robinson (1967-1969), a special assistant to New York governors Nelson A. Rockefeller and Malcolm Wilson, and Director of the Women's Unit, Office of the Governor (1969-1974). In 1975, she moved onto to the federal government as a special assistant to President Gerald Ford and was assigned to Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller (1975-1976). Cunningham also received appointments to a number of federal government committees and commissions including the Committee to Find a Permanent Home for the Schomburg, the Temporary State Commission on Voting Machine Equipment and Registration Systems, the Task Force on Encouraging Electoral participation, and the Advisory Committee to the New York State Office of the Aging.

Cunningham was a founding member of the Coalition of 100 Black Women and served on a number of civic organizational boards, including the Apollo Theatre Foundation, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Harlem Congregation for Community Improvement, the Citizens Committee for New York City, and the Louis Armstrong Education Foundation, among others.

Even though Cunningham, a dedicated career woman, expressed the opinion that "marriage isn't much good for a career woman," she nevertheless married four times: James F. Sherrer (1939-1946), Gerald Cunningham (1948-1957), Cameron C. Hanes (1957-1962), and Austin H. Brown (1988-2003). None of these marriages produced children; yet, when Cunningham’s brother, Clyde Whitehurst Long died in 1983, she raised his daughter.