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.
The broadcast received an award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for best local news program. Ms. Davis also won eight local Emmy Awards during her career.
Off the air, she was an advocate for racial visibility and opportunity. She was the national equal employment opportunities chair for AFTRA, the broadcast union now known as SAG-AFTRA.
In 2002, Mr. Brown, who was by then San Francisco’s mayor, recruited Ms. Davis to help create the Museum of the African Diaspora in the city. She raised millions of dollars for the project and became board president, drawing on her connections to the city’s wealthy cultural patrons. The museum opened in 2005.
Belvagene Melton was born on Oct. 13, 1932, in Monroe, La., during the Jim Crow era of segregation. Her mother, Florene Wood, who was 14 at the time and earned $4 a week in a commercial laundry. Her father, John Melton, was a sawmill worker whom she described in her autobiography as “a handsome, savvy but volatile man who swaggered his way through life, despite never having finished grammar school.”
Fleeing racism and hard times in the Deep South, her extended family moved to Oakland in the early 1940s. For a time, 11 relatives lived in a rented basement until they could relocate to a housing project in the West Oakland neighborhood. There, Belva slept on the kitchen floor.
“My home was overstuffed with people but lacking in affection,” Ms. Davis wrote.
She was in middle school when her mother abandoned the family. Belva, whose father largely ignored her, found escape in books and at the academically rigorous Berkeley High School, from which she earned a diploma in 1951. She was the first in her immediate family to graduate from high school.
Unable to afford college, she became a typist at Oakland’s Naval Supply Center. She also joined Black women’s organizations and began writing, without pay, about their activities for small publications. It led to work as a freelance stringer for the Chicago-based Black news and culture magazine Jet. The Bay Area Independent, a small Black weekly, hired her full-time at $40 a week.
Ms. Davis broke into radio in the early 1960s, hosting “The Belva Davis Show” on KDIA, spinning records and interviewing performers who visited Oakland or San Francisco, among them Frank Sinatra and Bill Cosby.
She pursued opportunities for a full-time TV job for years without success at a time when newsrooms were overwhelmingly white and male. But by the mid-1960s, some of the biggest news stories of the day — the civil rights movement, urban unrest and the evolving role of women in society — seemed to call for different perspectives in journalism.
The N.A.A.C.P. and local Black leaders demanded that Bay Area stations break the color barrier. In January 1966, KPIX hired its first Black reporter, Ben Williams of The San Francisco Examiner. A year later, after testing her on camera, KPIX brought Ms. Davis aboard as a general-assignment reporter, with one requirement: she needed to lose 10 pounds.
She was swiftly thrown into covering crime, clashes between the police and student protesters at Berkeley, and the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy before his assassination in Los Angeles in June 1968.
Reporting about the rise of the Black Panthers, whose co-founder Huey P. Newton dated an acquaintance of hers, Ms. Davis sought to explain to alarmed white viewers why those gun-toting militants enjoyed respect in the same neighborhoods where she grew up, in part because they set out to defend Black residents against brutality by the nearly all-white police department.
Ms. Davis moved to KQED in 1977 and to KRON-TV, San Francisco’s NBC affiliate, in 1984. She remained there for 18 years, including as a co-anchor covering national political conventions with Rollin Post.
“She’s Type A; I’m the type who likes to take naps,” Mr. Post told The San Francisco Chronicle. “Belva always seemed to have self-doubts about whether she was qualified to do this or that. But she’s never walked away from her past. She wants to prove, more to herself than to anybody else, that she cannot, and will not, let down the African American community.”
Ms. Davis later returned to KQED, where for many years she led a round table show, “This Week in Northern California,” until her retirement in 2012.
Her marriage to Frank Davis, whom she wed at 19, ended in divorce. In the mid-1960s, she married Bill Moore, who became a TV cameraman. In addition to her daughter, Darolyn, from her first marriage, she is survived by her husband; a son, Steven, also from her first marriage; and two granddaughters.
Over her career, Ms. Davis interviewed influential figures including James Baldwin, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Fidel Castro and Muhammad Ali.
One who turned her down, citing his dislike of media sit-downs, was Lenny Bruce, the taboo-breaking comedian, who opened a show in San Francisco in the early 1960s with a rat-a-tat repetition of the N-word. His explanation was that by freely using the slur, he would drain it of its racist sting.
Ms. Davis, who had been driven from the 1964 Republican Convention in a hail of N-words, didn’t buy it.
“I would argue,” she wrote in her memoir, “that a half-century after Lenny Bruce thought he was disarming the word, it has lost none of its lacerating power to wound.”
Trip Gabriel is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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