Background
Winifred Sweet was born on October 14, 1869 in Chilton, Wisconsin, United States. She was the daughter of General Benjamin Jeffery and Lovisa (Denslow) Sweet. She grew up from 1869 on a farm near Chicago.
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Winifred Sweet was born on October 14, 1869 in Chilton, Wisconsin, United States. She was the daughter of General Benjamin Jeffery and Lovisa (Denslow) Sweet. She grew up from 1869 on a farm near Chicago.
Winifred attended private schools in Chicago, in Lake Forest, Illinois, and in Northampton, Massachusetts.
After an unsuccessful attempt to establish herself in the theatre she turned to journalism.
On a western trip on family business in 1890, she won a position as a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner, William Randolph Hearst’s first newspaper. The era of yellow journalism was just dawning, and the example of Elizabeth Seaman (whose nom de plume was Nellie Bly) had helped set the style for woman reporters. Taking the pseudonym Annie Laurie, Sweet scored a number of exposés, scoops, and circulation-building publicity stunts. A “fainting spell” on a downtown street led to an exposé of San Francisco’s receiving hospital and the purchase of a city ambulance. She secured by a ruse an exclusive interview with President Benjamin Harrison aboard his campaign train in 1892; in the same year, she investigated the leper colony on Molokai, Hawaiian Islands. She was also active in organizing various charities and public benefactions, using her column in the Examiner to mobilize public concern; among these was the California Children’s Excursion to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.
In 1895 Hearst sent her to New York City to help his newly acquired New York Journal battle Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, but she found that city uncongenial and in 1897 settled in Denver, Colorado, where she joined the staff of Harry H. Tammen and Frederick G. Bonfils’s boisterous Denver Post. She continued to contribute feature articles to Hearst’s chain as well.
When Hearst launched a newspaper campaign against Mormon polygamy in 1898, she went to Utah and reported from the scene. In 1900 she disguised herself as a boy and slipped through a police cordon to become the first outside reporter and only woman journalist to enter Galveston, Texas, in the aftermath of the disastrous flood of September 8. She opened a temporary hospital in the city and administered relief funds collected through the Hearst papers.
In 1906 she reported from San Francisco following the great earthquake of April 18, and in 1907 she observed the trial of Harry K. Thaw for his June 1906 murder of architect Stanford White. She continued to travel widely as a reporter in her later years.
On the night of May 25, 1936, she died at her home, on San Francisco's Marina after an illness of many weeks.
Writing as "Annie Laurie," Winifred Black was a journalistic champion of society's underdogs. In the course of her prolific career - (she published some sixteen thousand articles) - Black interviewed just about everyone from presidents to prizefighters, and took up crusades for causes that ranged from women's rights to health care reform. Her personalized prose style directly engaged the emotions of her readers, ultimately earning her, along with a handful of other female journalists of her era, the sobriquet "sob sister."
Winifred was married in June 1891 to Orlow Black, a fellow worker on a morning San Francisco newspaper. They had one son in 1892, Jeffrey Black, who died young. On September 13, 1897, she filed for divorce, charging Black with cruelty.
After the divorce she moved to Denver. In the late 1920s she was back to California, living in San Francisco, California, and married to Charles A. Bonfils. They had two children, Winifred Bonfils Barker and Eugene Napoleon Bonfils.
