Belva Davis, West Coast Trailblazer in TV News, Dies at 92
Overcoming poverty and prejudice, she was the first Black woman to be hired as a television reporter in the region and later became a popular anchor.
Belva Davis on the set of a round-table discussion program she hosted on the TV station KQED in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Belva Davis, who was hailed as the first Black woman hired as a television reporter on the West Coast and who overcame early hostility and career roadblocks on the way to becoming a respected figure in broadcast news in the Bay Area for nearly 50 years, died on Sept. 24 at her home in Oakland, Calif. She was 92.
Her daughter, Darolyn Davis, confirmed the death.
Ms. Davis first went on the air in February 1967 at KPIX, the CBS affiliate in San Francisco. Earlier, she had worked as a D.J. playing jazz and rhythm-and-blues records for Black-oriented Bay Area radio stations.
In 1964, while reporting for one of those stations, KDIA-AM, from the Republican National Convention at the Cow Palace arena south of San Francisco, Ms. Davis and a Black male reporter were hounded from the hall by fans of the nominee, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. The crowd snarled racial epithets and tossed garbage at them, she recalled in a 2010 memoir, “Never In My Wildest Dreams: A Black Woman’s Life in Journalism,” written with Vicki Haddock. A hurled soda bottle narrowly missed her head.
“All too many white Americans refused to believe the harsh truth about race relations in their own country,” Ms. Davis wrote, explaining her motivation to become a journalist.
Though she had no formal training in news gathering, she resolved to report the realities of life for many Black Americans in an era when much of the country lived amid de facto segregation.
Raised and then abandoned by a teenage mother who worked as a laundress, Ms. Davis overcame enfeebling obstacles of poverty and prejudice. She wrestled with self-doubt about not having a college degree. As she recalled, a TV station manager who rejected her in an early job interview told her, “I’m sorry, we’re just not hiring any Negresses.”
She went on to become a popular news anchor for three Bay Area TV stations — KPIX, KRON and KQED — for more than 46 years before she retired in 2012 at age 80.
Her formative years in TV coincided with the tumultuous 1960s and ’70s in the Bay Area. She reported on violent unrest at the University of California, Berkeley; the rise of the Black Panther Party; and the assassinations of Mayor George R. Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk of San Francisco on Nov. 27, 1978.
That day, Ms. Davis was the anchor of a prime-time newscast on KQED, the city’s PBS station. She interviewed Willie Brown, the future San Francisco mayor who was then a state assemblyman and who had been in the mayor’s office minutes before Mr. Moscone was shot, and Dianne Feinstein, the future California senator who was then a supervisor and had found Mr. Milk’s body.
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