By Gertrude Wilson: Dispatches of the 1960s from a White Writer in a Black World

In the 1960s women journlists were just beinning to make their way into America's newsrooms. Very few women were involved in covering the civil rights struggles of those years. And only one white woman wrote for the most influential black newpaper of the day. Writing under the name Gertrude Wilson, the author, a white, Upper East Side New York mother of four, spent a decade writing a column for the New York Amsterdam News, covering pivotal events in one of the most tumultuous periods of America's history. She was with Malcolm X's widow hours after the radical black leader was assassinated, and was at Coretta Scott King's shoulder in the Memphis protest march two days after Dr. Martin Luther King was killed. She rode on Bobby Kennedy's funeral train, and was beaten by a policeman at the 1968 Democratic Convention. She interpreted both the black and white world for America at a time when the country was literally at war with itself, providing a voice that was fresh, clear-spoken and controversial. "A lot of people both black and white thought I didn't have a right to be doing this kind of thing," she said later. "So I explained in a column one time, 'This is my country, and this is my fight, too.'"