Dorothy Gilliam is the former president of the National Association of Black Journalists, where she served from 1993-95. She also is a former fellow of the Freedom Forum at the Media Studies Center at Columbia University as well as at the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Gilliam is most well-known as the first Black reporter at the Washington Post, where she started working in 1961. After leaving the newspaper later that decade to spend time with her family, she returned to the Post in 1972, ultimately working there for more than 30 years and eventually starting a column that focused on issues involving education, politics and race.

In recent years, Gilliam has been honored for her life’s work, earning a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Post in 2010 and the Foremother Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Center for Health Research in 2019, which goes to “women who expanded women’s horizons, improved our communities and made remarkable contributions to our country,” according to a NCHR release. Gilliam also wrote a memoir, “Trailblazer: A Pioneering Journalist's Fight to Make the Media Look More Like America,” which was published in January 2019.