Dorothy Butler Gilliam: 'I am not a maid, I am a reporter'

Dorothy Butler Gilliam began her career as a black female journalist on a major US newspaper at a time when society was still largely segregated. The BBC's Farhana Haider asked her how being a black woman in a white man's world had shaped her career.

When Dorothy Butler Gilliam arrived at a wealthy Washington woman's 100th birthday party the doorman told her she couldn't enter via the front door. "The maid's entrance is around the back," he explained.

"I am not a maid, I am a reporter for the Washington Post," she replied.

Dorothy was the first African American woman to report for the newspaper. She started there in 1961, and went on to work as an editor and columnist over the next three decades, witnessing seismic changes in US society, and in the media.

Dorothy got into journalism by accident when she was in her first year of college and worked as a secretary at the Louisville Defender, a weekly black newspaper. One day the society editor was unwell and she was asked to fill in. Suddenly, with no experience, she was sent out to file a report on the black middle class, still then quite small, of Kentucky's largest city.

"It was an eye-opening experience and I saw that journalism was a profession that, if I learnt to do it and learnt to do it well, it could open me up and expose me to new worlds," she says.