Mary Lou Forbes
Mary Lou "Ludie" Forbes ( Werner; June 21, 1926 – June 27, 2009) was an American journalist and commentator. She spent six decades at the Washington Evening Star and The Washington Times, serving as the Times commentary editor until weeks before her death. As Mary Lou Werner she won the annual Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting (Edition Time) for her Evening Star coverage of the 1958 school integration crisis in Virginia in the aftermath of the 1954 Supreme Court of the United States decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Life Mary Lou Werner was born in Alexandria, Virginia, and raised by her widowed mother. She graduated from George Washington High School (later one of the constituent schools of T. C. Williams High School) and briefly attended the University of Maryland, College Park, where she majored in math but was forced to drop out due to financial considerations. Werner had applied for a position at the Washington Evening Star because it was located in Washington, D.C., along a bus route that ran to her home in Alexandria. She had seen a newspaper ad for an accounting position, but accepted a position as a copy girl after finding out that the