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White House group honors pioneering black journalist

WASHINGTON — Harry McAlpin was standing outside the Oval Office, moments away from becoming the first black reporter to attend a presidential news conference, when one of his contemporaries approached with a deal.

Stay out here, the reporter told McAlpin. The other White House correspondents would share their notes, and McAlpin would have a chance to become an official member of the correspondents association. McAlpin marched into the Oval Office anyway. Afterward, President Franklin Roosevelt shook McAlpin’s hand and said, ‘‘I’m glad to see you, McAlpin, and very happy to have you here.’’

McAlpin, who became a fixture at the White House during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, never got a White House Correspondents’ Association membership. But now, in its centennial year, the association is honoring him with a scholarship bearing his name.

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The scholarship was being presented Saturday night during the association’s annual dinner with President Obama.

McAlpin eventually left Washington to practice law in Louisville, Ky., and later became the president of the local NAACP chapter. He died in 1985.

‘‘Harry McAlpin is someone who should be recognized and shouldn’t be forgotten,’’ National Journal correspondent George Condon, the association’s unofficial historian, said last week during a panel discussion about diversity and the White House press corps.

Steven Thomma, the association president, noted that the correspondents group is much more diverse now than in the days when it refused membership to blacks, thus excluding them from presidential press conferences.

‘‘Not quite where this press corps probably ought to be to have the kind of voices and questions we want to hear, but I think we’ve made some progress,’’ Thomma said.

Before McAlpin, minority reporters had been excluded from many official Washington news conferences.

That changed after the creation of the National Negro Publishers Association in 1941. John Sengstacke, the publisher of the Chicago Defender and one of the creators of the NNPA, opened a Washington bureau for the Defender and hired McAlpin, a lawyer, as a part-time correspondent.

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