Biography of Gilliam

I was an insecure, 16-year-old college freshman when I became hooked on journalism. Hired to do secretarial work after classes at the black weekly Louisville Defender, the editor asked me one day to substitute for a sick reporter. My budding journalistic interest was concretized that day, and I never returned to secretarial work.

That was more than 35 years ago. It's time to graduate from daily journalism and begin a new phase in the profession. Ending this current labor of love -- writing a regular column for the past 18 years -- ties the loop on one circle of my career. It is a bittersweet time, which few previous experiences in my life can match.

You, dear reader, have been the object of my most intense professional relationship. I regarded it as a sacred trust. So in my two final columns, I want to share some of my journey, an African American woman's progress against the odds.

Undergirding my early journey in the racially segregated South were my parents, teachers and community. They taught me the three R's and basic values.

I came of age during two revolutions -- civil rights for African Americans and liberation for women. As one of the first black women to break into the predominantly white, male-controlled media, I lived through those same revolutions in the newsroom.

Washington was little more than a sleepy Southern town when I came here to take my first daily newspaper job in the 1960s, having served my apprenticeship in the black press and having graduated from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. I joined only two other blacks among scores of white reporters at The Post.

Retired Post reporter and editor Elsie Carper, who is white, remembered taking me out to lunch one day. The only place we could be assured of service was the YWCA, then located at 17th and K streets NW. We black reporters -- Wallace Terry, Luther Jackson Jr. and I -- had trouble getting cabs to pick us up in front of The Post building and after assignments. We endured the crotchety editor who ignored black murders, which he called "cheap deaths," and colleagues who expected us to fail.

Routinely, fellow reporters avoided speaking to me on the street, averting their eyes or meeting my smile and hello with a stony stare. A few exceptionally warm and welcoming persons, such as city editor Ben Gilbert and his wife, Maureen, took away some of the sting of the broader rejection that tugged relentlessly at my self-esteem. I fought to write good stories and tried not to complain about professional or personal obstacles that I felt could be interpreted as whining to mask incompetence. Only occasionally was I moved to tears of frustration as the deadline neared and another cab rolled by.

One of my most unforgettable assignments was covering James Meredith's entry into the University of Mississippi. My white Post colleague stayed at the Sand and Sea Motel while I stayed in private homes and even in a funeral home one night.

Twenty-five years ago, most newspaperwomen worked on women's pages -- a fate I considered equal to death. By this time, I had married, and we had begun our family. Absent flex-time and other perks of women's liberation, my husband and I decided I should spend more time with our three daughters. I became one of the first wave of blacks hired in television, working part time for Channel 5 as colleagues helped crack the color line, such as the late Max Robinson, who was the first black to anchor a local news program here.

The stimulus partly was the burning cities and urban riots of the '60s and '70s. A presidential commission said the media had to hire and promote more blacks because its mostly segregated coverage was helping create two separate, unequal societies.

Yet, print remained my first love and I was happy to be rehired seven years later by Ben Bradlee as an assistant editor in The Post's Style section. Thanks to the women's movement, I was able as a young mother to work part time. More blacks and women were on board and the newsroom felt warmer and friendlier.

I had left a good newspaper. When I returned -- with Katharine Graham`s and Bradlee's leadership, with Watergate and the Pentagon Papers -- it was becoming a great one.

Restless with editing after a few years, I approached Bradlee in 1979 with a list of several possible new assignments, including a column. "We had nobody talking for that segment of our audience," he once told an author. "We were becoming aware of shortcomings in local coverage, but none of us were as prescient as we should have been." To this day, I'm grateful to The Post for the opportunity to find my voice, to grow and develop as a writer and thinker.

One of the early challenges of column writing was having my work taken seriously. I wanted to gain the respect of people of all colors, of oppressed people, as well as senators or congressmen. I wanted the black man to think I'd finally "got it," by articulating his reality, or to express for the older church lady feelings she couldn't find words for on a heavy issue.

As this city has gone through its political transformations, much of it, unfortunately, focused on Mayor Marion Barry, I've tried to be fair. I praised him when he did well. I also was the first to demand that he resign in 1990, even before The Post editorial board did so. I've also criticized The Post coverage, when, for example, I felt the paper based stories about Barry's drug use and womanizing on hearsay and rumor.

It's been important to hold on to the sense of who I am, to respect my community, to be a voice for the underdog and to be a self-respecting African American woman. This wasn't easy in a media industry that rewards black conservatives and black reporters who hold their communities' problems up to view without so much as a nod to the context of racism and poverty in which pathology flourishes.

I've tried to approach issues and problems with an eye to the basic humanity that unites us all -- writing not only as an African American woman, but also as a middle-class, longtime resident who loves this city, and as a mother. I've tried to relate to every level of society with boldness and honesty, take the lumps and the kudos, even as I've grown personally and professionally.

Writing more than 1,500 columns over 18 years is growing up in public. It's a tough and vulnerable position. It's also been a rewarding, victorious journey.