Posts Tagged ‘Belva Davis’

KQED anchor Belva Davis will retire this fall after nearly half a century on the air in San Francisco, she announced yesterday.

Davis, the winner of eight Emmys, has anchored at CBS O&O KPIX and MyNetworkTV-affiliate KRON in addition to KQED, the Bay Area public television station. The San Francisco Chronicle calls her “an icon of Bay Area journalism.”

“I have enjoyed a unique and long career here in the Bay Area and have been witness to some of the most explosive stories in the last half century,” Davis said in a statement. “I began my career with the coverage of the 1964 elections, and I’m thrilled that I will be devoting my last months on the air to the elections of 2012.”

For the past 14 years, Davis has been host of “This Week in Northern California,” KQED’s public affairs show. Her final broadcast will be November 9. Read more

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Rollin Post, who spent 40 years as a political reporter in San Francisco, died yesterday at his home in Marin County. He was 81.

Post began his television career as a morning producer and assignment editor for KPIX, the CBS O&O in San Francisco, in 1961. He was also a political reporter for KQED, the PBS station in the market, before eventually settling at KRON, where he spent 20 years.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Post played “an integral role” in helping Belva Davis, his broadcast partner, become the first black woman on television in California. “He never talked about the roadblocks that he had to remove, most of them based on race and gender,” Davis told the Times. “It was only possible to get the kind of inside stuff I did because of his willingness to share. He was an absolutely marvelous partner.”

Belva Davis, a television pioneer who has worked for 43 years in the Bay Area, reflects on her career in a new memoir titled “Never in My Wildest Dream: A Black Woman’s Life in Journalism.”

In 1966, Davis became the first female African-American TV reporter on the West Coast when she was hired by CBS-affiliate KPIX.  With KPIX, she exposed social injustice while also trying to fight for her own civil rights.

Davis, 78, currently hosts a public affairs show for PBS station KQED. She spoke with the San Francisco Chronicle recently about her unlikely rise from poverty and abuse as a child to a storied career as a journalist:

I dreamed of a different life for myself, something a long way from what I knew. There is a phrase I use: Don’t be afraid of the space between your dreams and reality. I was going to do whatever it took–I say this in the best sense–to get to this other life, this other side.