he started Lincoln High School, where her father taught, and she wrote for the school newspaper and graduated first in her class in 1928. She wanted to be a journalist, but she knew she couldn’t attend the University of Missouri in Columbia, and the historically black college, Lincoln University, in Jefferson City, did not have a journalism program. So Lucile attended the University of Kansas in Lawrence instead and graduated in 1932 with high honors. She began her journalism career in Atlanta, Georgia as a reporter for the Daily World. Shw would return home and work at the Kansas City American and then the Kansas City Call. In 1939, Bluford applied to the University of Missouri School of Journalism to do graduate work. She was accepted into the program, but when she went to Columbia to enroll, she was turned away because University officials had not known that she was Black. She tried eleven times to enter the University of Missouri and with the help of the NAACP, she filed a lawsuit. In 1941 the state supreme court ruled in Bluford’s favor(?). The University of Missouri had to admit her because no equal program existed at Lincoln. In response, the School of Journalism closed its graduate program, claiming the majority of its professors and students were serving in World War II. Bluford would continue to fight racism, becoming a leading voice in the civil rights movement in Kansas City. In 1984, the University of Missouri honored her. She received an Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism from the School of Journalism, and in 1989 the university gave her an honorary doctorate. Bluford said that she accepted the degree “not only for myself, but for the thousands of black students” the university had discriminated against over the years. She died in Kansas City on June 13, 2003, at the age of 91, having worked at the Call for seventy years. She is buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Kansas City. Also Guion Bluford, the first African American man to become an astronaut and orbit the earth in the NASA program, is her nephew!