Background
Evelyn Cunningham was born Evelyn Elizabeth Long in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, one of two children of a taxicab driver and a dressmaker.
Evelyn Cunningham was born Evelyn Elizabeth Long in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, one of two children of a taxicab driver and a dressmaker.
The family moved to New York City when Evelyn was a child. She was educated in city schools and graduated from Hunter College High School in 1934 and from Long Island University in 1943, earning a bachelor"s degree.
Cunningham covered the early civil rights movement and was a reporter and editor for the
The largest black newsweekly at the time, the was an influential presence during and in the years preceding the civil rights movement. Cunningham joined the Courier in 1940 working from the Harlem office at 125th street. She earned the nickname the "lynching editor" due to her extensive coverage of lynchings in the deep south.
While at the Courier she attempted to interview Bulletin Connor, in Birmingham, Alabama, but he denied her, with a racial epithet.
She also met with a number of civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King, Junior. and Malcolm X. Cunningham wrote a three-part series on the King family from those meetings After leaving the Courier, in 1962, Cunningham hosted a radio show of her own on WLIB in New New York
She then joined Nelson Rockefeller in 1965 as a special assistant to the then governor. She maintained this title in Washington during his vice presidency.
She also served on Nixon"s Task Force on Women"s Rights and Responsibilities.
In 1970, Cunningham was one of the founders of the New York Coalition of One Hundred Black Women, a non-profit organization dedicated to bettering the lives of black women "and their families through implementing initiatives and services to address important social, political, economical cultural issues."
In the 2000s, Cunningham was appointed to the New York City Commission on Women"s Issues by Michael Bloomberg.