Some of you longtime San Franciscans will remember Belva Davis. She was a fixture on the local television news scene, coming to San Francisco’s KPIX (Channel 5) in 1966. She was the first female African-American reporter on the West Coast.
Davis has a new autobiography out entitled Never in My Wildest Dreams: A Black Woman’s Life in Journalism, chronicling her career in the challenging world of local television news reporting.
This Wednesday, she’ll be speaking at a free event at the Institute on Aging at 3575 Geary from 3:30pm until 5pm. Belva will share stories from her years covering news in the Bay Area, and read excerpts from her book.
More about her book from Amazon.com:
In five decades as an award-winning reporter, Davis witnessed changes in news gathering and the politics of race and sex. Born to a poor black laundress in a hardscrabble Louisiana town, she migrated with her family to California during the Depression. Poverty and an unstable family life caused her to miss an opportunity to go to college and to take refuge in early marriage. As a young wife and mother, she stumbled into freelance reporting for Jet and Ebony. Taking every random assignment and learning all she could, she moved on to radio and television, along the way meeting and interviewing celebrities, including Bill Cosby, Nancy Wilson, James Brown, Martin Luther King Jr., Huey Newton, Angela Davis, Michael Jackson, and Alex Haley.
Her strong connections to the black community made her an asset as the media covered the social unrest, riots, and cultural revolutions of the 1960s. Davis chronicles her own struggles and political awakening as she pushed against the boundaries for women and minorities in journalism to become the first black female news anchor on the West Coast.
“I was not asked to write a blurb for Up from Slavery, War and Peace, or The Fire Next Time, but gladly I can say Never in My Wildest Dreams is a very important book. No people can say they understand the times in which they have lived unless they have read this book.”
— Dr. Maya Angelou
“Never in My Wildest Dreams is the fascinating account of a pioneering black woman and her tumultuous but triumphal march through a turbulent era. Overcoming one obstacle after another, Belva Davis covered some of the most explosive stories of our era—and became one of most trusted news professionals in the business. Her story is a unique version of the American Dream, and her book is an honest, insightful, and utterly riveting memoir of a shared and personal journey.”
— Senator Dianne Feinstein
Sarah B.
Belva Davis is a TRUE trail-blazer. We forget how very different things were when she started. I can’t imagine how she did it (I should read her book!) I remember watching her when I was a little girl growing up on the Peninsula — about 45 years ago (gasp!) I remember looking at the TV and being amazed and confused that a “colored” woman would could be on TV, working as a journalist (it was the lunchtime news, as I recall). This was about the same time that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was marching in Selma, etc. — and it is hard to tell you how shocking it really was to see a “woman of color” in that role. In my mind, Belva Davis is right up there with Helen Thomas, Barbara Walters and other women who kicked down the door barring journalism to women.