Evelyn Cunningham | Award-winning reporter, 94

Evelyn Cunningham, 94, a pioneering journalist who covered the birth of the 1960s civil rights movement and later served as an aide to New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, died of natural causes Wednesday in Manhattan.

Ms. Cunningham was a reporter and editor for the Pittsburgh Courier, an influential black newspaper, from the 1940s through the early 1960s. She earned the nickname "the lynching editor" for her reporting on lynchings in the segregated South. In 1998, she and other Courier staff members accepted a George Polk Award for the paper's civil rights coverage.

She interviewed prominent civil rights figures, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, and produced a three-part series on the King family.

Ms. Cunningham served as a special assistant to Rockefeller for community relations and was named director of the Women's Unit of the State of New York in 1969. She followed Rockefeller to Washington when he became Gerald Ford's vice president in 1974.

A Harlem fixture for decades, Ms. Cunningham supported cultural institutions including the Apollo Theater and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Mayor Michael Bloomberg named her to the New York City Commission on Women's Issues in 2002.

- AP