![In this file photo, White House principal deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre enters the briefing room. On Wednesday, she will become the first Black woman in decades to brief reporters there. [Alex Wong / Getty Images]](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/f81aa23/2147483647/strip/true/crop/6299x4724+0+0/resize/840x630!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Flegacy%2Fimages%2Fnews%2Fnpr%2F2021%2F05%2F1000531539_60651169.jpg)
When Karine Jean-Pierre steps behind the lectern to take reporters' questions in the briefing room on Wednesday, she will be the first Black woman to speak for the White House in that capacity in three decades.
Jean-Pierre, the principal deputy press secretary for the Biden White House, is a long time Democratic political hand who was the top public affairs staffer for the progressive group Moveon.org before she joined Biden's presidential campaign.
It has been a long time since the last Black woman in Jean-Pierre's position made her debut in the briefing room. It was 1991 and the woman was Judy Smith.
Hairstyles have changed. The internet is much faster and you can get it on smartphones, which didn't even exist back then.
To put it in perspective, Smith was deputy press secretary for then-president George H.W. Bush — the first Bush president.
Enough time passed that Smith was the inspiration for the Olivia Pope character on ABC's hit show Scandal, that ran for seven seasons and ended in 2018.
And in all that time, there has not been another Black woman to take the lectern as White House spokeswoman — until now.
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.