Trailblazer

Meet Angela P. Dodson, a 1973 Marshall alumna and the first Black female senior editor of the New York Times.

By Katherine Pyles

Journalist, editor and author Angela P. Dodson has led a storied career. She joined the New York Times as a copy editor in 1983, then worked as the style editor before becoming senior editor for administration in 1992 — the first Black female senior editor in NYT history. She’s the author of Remember the Ladies: Celebrating Those Who Fought for Freedom at the Ballot Box, with a bevy of other writing and editing projects to her name. Dodson has covered some of the nation’s most historic moments, while simultaneously making history herself.

“I’ve loved writing since I first learned to read,” said Dodson, a native of Beckley, West Virginia. “I told my parents when I was 11 that I wanted to be a journalist. I don’t even know where I learned the word, but that’s what I wanted to be.”

Her family lived in Pennsylvania for several years before returning to the Mountain State when Dodson was a teenager. Heavily recruited by schools like Brown and Michigan State, she chose to attend Marshall.

“My older brother went to Marshall the year before I did, and I had cousins who went there beginning in the 1960s,” said Dodson, who lived in Chesapeake, West Virginia, just outside of Charleston, through high school and college. “I loved Huntington as soon as I saw it.”

At least a dozen members of Dodson’s family have graduated from Marshall, some of whom she met for the first time in school. A chance encounter introduced her to a side of the family she hadn’t known: the Dotson family, spelled with a T.

“I might never have known some of my Dotson cousins had we not all met at Marshall and realized we were related,” Dodson said. “It’s a funny story — my brother was on the dance floor with a woman and had spent the greater part of the evening talking to her. When they introduced themselves, they realized they shared the same last name. He was dancing with our cousin, Paulette Dotson (Scott), from Williamson.”

The two families connected on campus and learned that their great-grandfathers were brothers who moved to West Virginia from southwestern Virginia, “but somewhere along the way the name spelling got changed for one of them,” Dodson said.

Dodson said her family’s ties to Marshall began with her cousin Marguerite Hairston Coleman, one of the first Black women to attend the university. Other members of the family soon followed in her footsteps.

“Once Marguerite started there, we all kind of just followed one another,” she said. “We all had a good experience at Marshall. We all got our degrees, and as a family we’ve been fairly successful in our careers and in our lives.”

They started attending reunions together and remain friends. In 2018, Dodson and her family established the Dodson, Dotson and Hairston Family Scholarship in Coleman’s memory. The scholarship benefits Marshall

students from southern West Virginia.

“Creating the scholarship was a way to give back to students like us,” she said. “We specifically picked the coal mining counties that our parents and grandparents came to from Virginia around 1920 or before. Each county named in the scholarship is one where someone in our family lived, either to farm or to work the mines.”

While at Marshall, Dodson was one of the first four members initiated into the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority in 1972. She helped found the university’s chapter of the sorority, an international organization founded by Black women at Howard University in 1908. Founding members of the Marshall chapter celebrated their 50th anniversary during last year’s homecoming.

Her junior year, Dodson’s professor and mentor Dr. Ralph J. Turner selected her for a summer internship at the Charleston Gazette. When classes resumed that fall, Dodson planned to focus only on her studies; but another local paper, the Huntington Advertiser, had its sights set on the J-School’s rising star.

“I heard they were looking to hire ‘a Black journalist,’” she recalled. “I was reluctant to go in for an interview if they were just looking for any Black journalist they could find. But what I didn’t know was that Editor Don Hatfield had been reading me for some time in the Parthenon. Ralph convinced me to go, and Don interviewed me the same day I called him. He gave me a writing test and hired me on the spot.”

As for being the paper’s first Black reporter, Dodson said prejudice was a non-issue in the Advertiser’s newsroom.

“The staff at the Advertiser was very small,” she said. “We were very close, and still are.”

Dodson continued to work at the Advertiser after graduating from Marshall in 1973. In 1974, her colleagues helped her land a job at Gannett News Service in Washington, D.C.

Dodson worked for Gannett Inc. (which owned the Huntington papers) for several years, taking a weekend editor position while completing her master’s degree, which she earned in 1979 from American University. While completing her M.A., she went to work for the Times Union, a Gannett newspaper in Rochester, New York, before returning to D.C. to work for the Washington Star. In

1981, she accepted a job in Louisville at the Courier-Journal.

There, Dodson married her Courier-Journal colleague, Michael I. Days, whom she had met in Rochester when they worked for competing papers. She was approached by the New York Times soon after. Dodson had been teaching editing in a program for minority journalists, and one of her colleagues in the program and a visiting speaker — both of whom worked at the Times — recommended her for a copyediting position. Times editors invited her for a tryout, telling her not to be discouraged if she didn’t hear back for months.

Less than two weeks after her tryout, she was offered the job.

But Dodson and Days had just bought a house in Louisville, and Dodson was “on the verge of turning it down,” she admitted. “My husband finally said, ‘Angela, no one turns down the New York Times.’”

Days had to find a job to be with her. He was hired at the Wall Street Journal’s Philadelphia bureau, and the couple relocated to New Jersey in 1983. They commuted in opposite directions for almost two decades. Days later joined the Philadelphia Daily News as a reporter and would go on to become editor, a position he held for 10 years.

At a time when diversity in journalism was immensely lacking and at a publication where competition was intense, Dodson experienced an element of culture shock when she started at the Times.

“I always say New York City is the place valedictorians go to kill each other off,” she said. “It’s a competitive atmosphere, and everyone’s vying for something. I wasn’t that kind of person. I just went in every day and did my job.”

Nevertheless, Dodson’s editorial talent and work ethic led to promotion after promotion. She was among few minority journalists at the Times, and the opportunity to be a “historic first” among Black journalists lay just on the horizon for her — a realization that didn’t sink in until she was promoted to style editor in 1991.

“When I got the promotion and walked back to my department, the staff gave me a standing ovation,” Dodson recalled.

“My office basically filled up with flowers, from journalists all over the country.”

Two years later, Dodson was promoted again, making her the publication’s first Black female senior editor. As senior editor for administration, she helped recruit and hire staff. She said while many of her colleagues were supportive, there remained an “undercurrent” of prejudice and classism.

“I remember editing a story earlier in my career there, and the reporter argued with me, saying, ‘If you had ever covered the Senate, you’d know this.’ I told him I had covered the Senate, of course,” she said. “Another time I had hired a woman as a copy editor who was Black, and a reporter disagreed with her editing. He said to her, ‘Well, I went to Yale.’ And she said, ‘I did, too.’ There was an assumption among some that you couldn’t possibly be better or smarter or more qualified than your white colleagues — or that you couldn’t be right, and they be wrong — as if the Times would hire incompetent people as editors.”

Dodson left the Times in 1995, going on to hold prestigious editorial positions for publications like Essence Magazine and Diverse: Issues in Higher Education. She worked as a writer and editor for Black Issues Book Review before being named the publication’s executive editor in 2003. Dodson took on side projects as well, including hosting the syndicated radio program Black Catholics, Yes! for nearly 20 years.

Dodson got into book writing “accidentally,” she said, after her former manager at Black Issues Book Review asked if she’d be interested in doing some editing and ghostwriting for her at a major publishing house. Today, Dodson takes on a wide range of projects, from ghostwriting memoirs for athletes to writing religious meditations. She’s the founder and CEO of Editorsoncall, a company that connects clients with freelance writers, editors, graphic designers and photographers. Dodson has worked with organizations like the National Black Writers Conference, the National Association of Black Journalists, the American Press Institute and the American Society of Newspaper Editors, often serving as a mentor to young Black journalists.

“When I was entering the profession, there weren’t many people I could go to for advice,” she said. “Mentoring is very important to me — just seeing young people come into the field and helping them the best I can.”

She continues to be a source of support for minority journalists making their way in a difficult profession.

“The things I hear from minority journalists today are like déjà vu in a lot of ways,” she said. “I have a lot of people that I’ve brought under my wing — people looking for advice or comfort or both.”

In her spare time, Dodson enjoys collecting art and antiques, cooking, reading and collaborating with her husband on writing projects. They have four sons, brothers they adopted in 1991, and they’ve been promoted to grandparents. One of their sons, Adrian, passed away in 2022.

Grateful for the mentorship she received at Marshall, Dodson often returns to the place she got her start. She served on the board for the Society of Yeager Scholars for several years, has addressed journalism classes at the university and has spoken at various events and conferences. While on a book tour in 2019 for Remember the Ladies, she spoke to the Huntington League of Women Voters and for an assembly at Huntington High School. In 2021, she did a virtual talk for the Dr. Carter G. Woodson Lyceum.

“I have a lot of really good memories at Marshall,” she said. “I’m always happy to come back.”

Reflecting on the future of journalism, she said it’s young and aspiring journalists who give her hope.

“I am concerned that the industry has segmented into camps of left-wing or right-wing opinion journalism, especially in broadcasting,” she said. “On the other hand, I am optimistic, because our young journalists seem well-prepared and multitalented. They are not only making existing media exciting and informative, but they are also creating new media outlets, nationally and locally, that meet the needs of diverse audiences.”