Ruby Aurora Black (1896–1957)

Ruby Aurora Black was born in Thornton, Texas. After high school, she attended the University of Colorado, then in 1913 entered the University of Texas, from which she graduated Phi Beta Kappa. She reported for the student newspaper, the Daily Texan, and later became its first female editor-in-chief. Her first professional journalism job was as an undergraduate, working for the Thornton Hustler in 1917, for which she set type, sold advertising, addressed delivery wrappers, and wrote news stories, editorials, and columns. After graduating from college, she moved to Chicago to manage the Women's National Journalistic Register, a placement bureau sponsored by the journalism society Theta Sigma Phi. From 1921 to 1923, she taught journalism and completed two years of graduate study in economics and related fields at the University of Wisconsin. In 1922, she married Herbert Little, a reporter for the United Press Syndicate (UPS), with whom she had a daughter, and they moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where Ruby became the labor editor of the St. Louis Times. Her husband's work then took them to Washington, D.C., where Ruby found it difficult as a female journalist to get a job. Eventually, she established her own Ruby A. Black News Bureau, a groundbreaking organization that with fewer than five reporters provided news service to approximately 20 newspapers in Puerto Rico and seven states, including Texas. She edited Equal Rights Magazine and received national attention for her dispute with the U.S. State Department over permission to use her birth name on her passport -- she won that one. She joined the National Woman's Party, the Birth Control League, the Society of Women Geographers, and the Woman's National Press Club, which she later served as president. In 1933, she became a White House correspondent for UPS and covered Eleanor Roosevelt's activities for the next seven years. She wrote the first biography of Mrs. Roosevelt, which was published in 1940 and won the National Headliner award from Theta Sigma Phi in 1941. She then worked as an information specialist for the Office of Inter-American Affairs and served as a liaison to the White House. In 1947, she retired in ill health, perhaps suffering from epilepsy.