“When I was traveling with the president there were a couple of times I forgot my White House badge and I was stopped because they didn't believe I was with the president’s traveling party,” Smith said. While Smith said she was never treated any differently by her colleagues in the West Wing, there were instances in which she faced discrimination outside the White House.
Smith conferring with President George H.W. “I am always aware of that in any situation and every single day of my life.” “Coming into the White House, I was very much aware that I was coming into an institution, like so many others, where there was a lack of diversity. “We should be very, very clear about that.” “Being a Black woman is never a time where you’re not a Black woman. Still, it was an ever-present part of her reality. Smith similarly suggested her status as one of the few Black staffers in the Bush White House - and the only one who represented the administration at briefings - wasn’t something she or her colleagues fixated on. … I had a couple of deputy press secretaries who were women so that really wasn't new,” Fitzwater said. I’m a farm boy from Kansas and she was the city girl from Washington in addition to being a Black woman. “She came from a different culture than me. Marlin Fitzwater, who as Bush’s press secretary hired Smith, said he “just didn't think of it in those terms.” Smith’s pioneering role also drew less notice than it might have because Bush and his team didn’t focus on her race. “I didn’t understand the significance of what that was, getting up briefing at that moment, seeing a Black woman behind the podium, speaking on behalf of the president to the American public.”Īfter her time in the White House, Smith became one of the country’s foremost crisis communications specialists, and her work inspired the hit television show “Scandal.” Despite this renown, Smith’s role as the first Black woman to lead a White House briefing has rarely been acknowledged and there are few available photos or videos of her time behind the podium. … It was a dream come true,” Smith said in an interview with Yahoo News last month. … What I thought about at the time was that going to work in the White House was … just such an incredible opportunity. However, Biden’s briefings will not be the first time a Black woman served as the main voice of the presidency that moment came in 1991, when Judy Smith stepped behind the podium as a deputy press secretary for President George H.W. It was a milestone for a nascent administration that has prided itself on diversity. A few weeks after his election in November, Biden named the first all-female White House communications staff, which includes multiple women of color.
WASHINGTON - The podium in the White House Press Briefing Room is the public face of the presidency, and when Joe Biden takes office on Jan.
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