Belva Davis found no opportunities for black, female reporters. So she created her own.
She broke barriers and inspired a new generation by becoming the first black female TV reporter on the West Coast
Belva Davis and her colleague had been spotted. The pair sat at the top of the bleachers in San Francisco’s Cow Palace, where they’d been sent to cover the 1964 Republican National Convention. “Nigger! What are you doing up there?” someone in the crowd yelled. As the two gathered their belongings, the mob grew angrier, hurling repeated “nigger” epithets, throwing trash as they walked down the bleacher stairs. As cans and bottles flew around them, Davis was so terrified her lips began to quiver. “If you cry, I’ll break your legs,” her co-worker said to her through clenched teeth.
Once safely in their car, she reflected on how powerless she had felt. Those with the microphones, she believed, held all the power. Because those journalists would tell the world what happened at the GOP Convention that night. Their accounts, she knew, would not tell the story of the racial harassment she’d experienced. So it was then and there she decided she wanted the kind of power that centered the stories of those underrepresented, misrepresented and overlooked altogether.
Davis landed her first paid media job as a stringer for Jet in the late 1950s, earning five dollars a week. Back then, black reporters had to rely on black press both for opportunities and to tell the real stories of black communities with integrity. “There were no examples,” she told PBS’s Judy Woodruff. “Well, I shouldn’t say that. There were examples if you wrote for the black press or if you did radio for a black-owned program, radio stations. But there was no opportunities for women of my color to see themselves in the broader society performing in those kinds of arenas.”
When Davis began writing her memoir, Never in My Wildest Dreams: A Black Woman’s Life in Journalism (2011), she “didn’t want it to become a poor-little-black-girl story.” When SFGate asked why she had glossed over the details of her childhood molestation, she explained that she’d set out to write a book about her professional life, not her personal life. But it is precisely her upbringing that makes her career all the more remarkable.
In 1932, Belvagene Melton was born to a 15-year-old mom in Monroe, Louisiana. As the eldest of four, she spent her early childhood with relatives in Louisiana, then Arkansas, and finally Oakland, California. At one point, 11 people lived in the family’s two-bedroom apartment. Eventually her mother moved them to the new projects in Oakland, where Belva had her own room, but only briefly. Her uncle and his family moved in, making it a full apartment once again. “I learned to survive,” she said of her childhood. “And, as I moved from place to place, I learned to adapt. When I got older, I just figured I could become whatever it was that I needed to become.”
She was the first in her family to graduate from high school. As a bright student who’d scored high on her SATs, she was accepted to San Francisco State University, but she didn’t have the $300 for tuition. Poverty meant she had to ditch her higher-education dreams to find a job. The Naval Supply Center hired her as a typist, and by 19 she was married.
When she stumbled upon a journalism career by accident she started off as a writer. Writing for Jet led to writing gigs with other black papers, like the Bay Area Independent and the San Francisco Sun-Reporter. Next she tackled radio at KSAN, in San Francisco, where she read newspaper clips on the air and was reportedly the first black female at the station. She left KSAN for another radio station, KDIA, where she had a two-hour radio show covering everything from politics to music. Her television debut came in 1963, on the Bay Area’s KTVU, covering a black beauty pageant. But it was the 1964 GOP Convention that changed everything. Once she realized the storyteller’s power that would become her life’s purpose — to be the one telling the story — she was more determined than ever to focus on impactful stories of the era.
“Every person who claims to be a journalist ought to have something within them that sparks something called passion,” she said during a book tour stop at Strand Bookstore, in New York, in 2011.
Two years later, she had a taste of that power. In 1966 she was hired by KPIX-TV, San Francisco’s CBS affiliate, to replace news anchor Nancy Reynolds. This position made her the first black woman television reporter on the West Coast. She also hosted and created All Together Now, the first prime-time public affairs program to focus on marginalized communities. For the next 50 years, she covered controversial topics including the birth of the Black Panther Party, Berkeley student protests, the Peoples Temple cult that ended in the mass suicides at Jonestown, the assassination of San Francisco mayor George Moscone, and the onset of the AIDS epidemic. She flew to Kenya when the American Embassy was bombed in the terrorist attack that first put Osama bin Laden on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.
Davis accomplished these feats at a time when overt racism was accepted. A San Francisco station manager dismissed her from an interview because he wasn’t “hiring any Negresses.” This was a time when “news directors preposterously claimed that blacks couldn’t pronounce long words because their lips were too thick to enunciate properly,” according to Davis.
In the five decades she worked as a television news reporter, Davis championed black stories and encountered many giants along the way: Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Huey Newton, Frank Sinatra, Fidel Castro, Condoleezza Rice. Belva Davis may be one of the many black female unsung heroes in media, but her work didn’t go completely unnoticed. She’s won eight local Emmys as well as a number of Lifetime Achievement Awards. Famed feminist Gloria Steinem raved about Davis’s bravery in a blurb about Never in My Wildest Dreams.
“Belva Davis has lived this country’s history as only a brave black woman could and has witnessed it as a journalist with a world-class head and heart,” Steinem said. “I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to read her words in Never in My Wildest Dreams without becoming a better and braver person.”
Even with a published memoir, Davis has managed to keep her personal life private. She and Frank Davis, her first husband, whom she married young, had two children. In 1967, she met her second husband, Bill Moore, while working at KPIX. The couple currently lives in Petaluma, California. “He really is the best gift God has given me,” she said of Moore. “We can still sit after 40 years of marriage and find so much to talk about.” Davis also enjoys cooking — one year she had 50 guests for Thanksgiving and made all the food herself — and hanging out at Grace Cathedral, her favorite spot in San Francisco.
Nothing about her life and accomplishments fit the “poor-little-black-girl story” she feared. Belva Davis changed the face of TV news. As all first-and-onlys know, the burden is heavy, but she carried it with grace. She walked so other women in broadcast journalism could fly. Without her shattering the glass ceiling first, popular female news reporters of today — Robin Roberts, Tamron Hall, Soledad O’Brien — may have never become household names. TV news is better, slightly more inclusive, because Davis recognized the power of being the one with the microphone.
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