Davis, Belva

1932—

Journalist

Belva Davis made broadcast journalism history in 1966 when she became the first African-American woman news reporter on the West Coast. Over the next 30-odd years, Davis covered scores of major news stories in the San Francisco Bay area. Her incisive reporting and fearless demeanor helped her land interviews with prominent names on the world stage, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Fidel Castro, and Robert F. Kennedy. A respected local figure in her community, she was also a committed labor activist in her profession.

Davis spent her first years in Louisiana, where she was born Belvagene Melton on October 13, 1932, to a mother who was still in her early teens. Within a few years, her carpenter father moved the family to Oakland, California. "I lived in the housing projects as a child, where my first years in California were spent with my entire family of eleven people who shared two rooms together, where the biggest deal that happened to us was that I graduated high school," she told Shirley Biagi in a Washington Press Club Foundation interview for its oral history archives.

Fled Troubled First Marriage

Davis's childhood and teens were marked by poverty and violence. Her parents both worked but when they were together they fought bitterly. They eventually divorced one another only to enter into equally unstable second marriages. Once, Davis's brother threw a pan of hot grease at her, which left a permanent scar on her arm. She sought solace at the home of a childless aunt and uncle, and she found guidance from the mother of her childhood best friend. During World War II, job shortages meant that even blacks in Oakland and the San Francisco Bay area prospered, and when she graduated from Berkeley High School in 1951, she hoped to continue her studies at San Francisco State University. Yet she lacked funds. "My dad had always earned a good salary as a carpenter," she recalled in the interview with Biagi, "and I had gone to my dad to see if he could give me the five-hundred bucks or whatever it cost to get your fees, and he couldn't see his way to do it."

Davis instead took a job at the U.S. Naval Supply Center in Oakland as a typist and married her next- door neighbor, Frank Davis, who was in the Air Force. They moved to Washington, DC, had a son in 1953, then moved to Hawaii for a time but were back in Oakland by 1959, where her second child, a daughter, was born. Davis was able to find a good government job again, and also began writing a social diary column for a black newspaper in the Bay Area. She did it for free, but it led to a job as a stringer for Jet, the national publication. Her husband was unhappy with her working, and she eventually left him, taking the children with her. For a few months that summer, Davis drove up and down the California coast with them, staying in different motels to hide from her estranged spouse and the detectives he had hired to find her. Eventually she returned to the Bay Area and to a job at another local newspaper aimed at an African-American readership.

An admittedly poor speller, Davis sought another kind of job in journalism that did not involve writing. She began reading the news on a local black station, KSAN, which led to a job on another outlet, KDIA, where she hosted her own two-hour radio show on Saturdays. She started on KPIX, the CBS television affiliate in San Francisco, in late 1966 as one of four reporters; the station had recently made a daring move by hiring Ben Williams, another African-American journalist, and she became the first black woman member of a West Coast news team. On KPIX she also hosted All Together Now, one of first public-affairs shows on television to focus on a changing urban community.

Harassed by Law Enforcement

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Bay Area was the site of some of the most turbulent events in 20th-century American history: there were large-scale student protests at the Berkeley campus of the University of California, while Davis's first hometown, Oakland, had spawned the black militant group known as the Black Panthers. She had even known a few of its founders, and her connections helped her land an interview with Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver from his jail cell that was picked up for national broadcast. Though she was covering events as a journalist, and was supposed to remain neutral, Davis often found herself treated as poorly as the demonstrators or militants on the other side of the law. "When I was dealing with the Alameda County Sheriff's Department, I was always afraid," she told Biagi. "They were really, really vicious."

At a Glance …

Born Belvagene Melton on October 13, 1932, in Monroe, LA; daughter of John (a carpenter) and Florence (a railroad employee; maiden name, Howard) Melton; married Frank Davis (an Air Force officer and government worker), 1952 (divorced, 1959[?]); married Bill Moore (a photographer), 1963; children: (first marriage) Steven, Darolyn.

Career:

U.S. Naval Supply Center, Oakland, CA, typist, 1951-?; U.S. naval base, Treasure Island, CA, document clerk, late 1950s; Bay Area Independent, a black newspaper, social column, early 1960s; Jet magazine, stringer, early 1960s; KSAN-AM, news reader, early 1960s; KDIA-AM, host of weekly show; Sun Reporter newspaper, San Francisco CA, women's editor, 1963-68; KPIX-TV, San Francisco, anchor and program host, 1966-77; KQED-TV, San Francisco, anchor and reporter, 1977-81; KRON-TV, news anchor, urban affairs specialist, and program host, 1981-99; KRON-TV, special reporter, 2000-; KQED-TV, This Week in Northern California, host, 1993-.

Memberships:

American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, vice president, 1984-; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, board of trustees; Fort Mason Foundation, board of trustees; Glide Church Foundation, board of trustees; Blue Shield of California Foundation, board of trustees.

Awards:

Seven local Emmy Awards; American Women in Radio and Television, Golden Gate Chapter, established Belva Davis Diversity Scholarship, 1999; American Women in Radio and Television, Lifetime Achievement Award, 1999; International Women's Media Foundation, Lifetime Achievement Award, 2004; John F. Kennedy University, honorary doctorate; Golden Gate University, honorary doctorate; Sonoma State University, honorary doctorate.

Addresses:

Office—c/o American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, National Office, 5757 Wilshire Boulevard, 9th Fl, Los Angeles, CA 90036-0800.

On one occasion at the Berkeley campus, a line of officers was blocking one entrance gate to the University of California school grounds, and while other journalists had been going back and forth freely, when she approached the security cordon "somebody thought it was a great idea to just fool around with me. There must have been fifteen cops, and they just took me by my shoulders and just spun me all the way down the whole line of cops to the end," she recalled in the Washington Press Club Foundation oral history. When she arrived at the last officer, "I just stopped and I knew I had to stand still for a minute and not move, because any move I made could have been the wrong move, because my inclination was to slap him, and I knew that striking an officer, I'd be really done for. I just stopped, and the kids started yelling and screaming, so I didn't have to do anything."

Inspired by the civil rights movement, Davis, herself, worked to improve opportunities for blacks. She became the producer of the Miss Bronze California pageant in the 1960s. "It was more than just a beauty contest. Black girls were not welcomed in the Miss California pageant so Miss Bronze was for us. Blacks were trying to break into Hollywood back then, so the prize was a trip to Los Angeles and a meeting with Warner Bros. executives," she explained to the Sun Reporter.

By 1974 Davis was anchoring the noon newscast on KPIX, and was a well-known local celebrity. In the midst of another major Bay Area event—the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst by a group of militant leftists—Davis's own daughter became the target of a kidnapping threat, which resulted in round-the-clock police protection for a time. In 1977, she moved on to KQED, the local public broadcasting affiliate, and anchored its evening newscast from 1977 to 1981. Again, she inadvertently found herself inside a news story itself after the 1978 Jonestown Massacre in Guyana, the South American nation to which a Bay Area preacher, Jim Jones, had relocated his entire congregation. When he was still based in California, Jones came to know Davis from her reporting and tried to interest her in joining his cult-like church, the People's Temple. Jones often pretended to be psychic and had indeed known many unusual facts about her. She later learned, however, that her housekeeper, a People's Temple member who probably died in the Guyana mass suicide, had been turning over her household garbage to church officials.

Doyenne of Bay Area News

In 1981, Davis left KQED to take a job at the local NBC affiliate, KRON, and spent the final 18 years of her career there as a news anchor and urban affairs reporter. Her reports on racial profiling by the Oakland police department incited a major local controversy in the mid-1980s, and because of this, she received death threats and her adult son was harassed by police officers as well. She served as the host of KRON's long-running Sunday morning news and public affairs program, California This Week, and continued to be active in the local chapter of her labor union, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA), and was continually reelected as a national vice president after 1984.

The news business, even at the local level, had changed immensely since she made history as the West Coast's first black female news reporter. First came the input of outside consultants, and then shifts in the industry occurred as news stations became affiliates of distant corporations. "I've always felt that you can't have a thriving democracy without a free press and a flow of information in an understandable way," she reflected in the interview with Biagi about the evolution of the nightly newscast. "I worry that people who manage what I do tend to be more those who look at its commercial value versus its value to this nation as an instrument, another arm of making government operate properly." More than just concerned about reporting content, Davis was outspoken about the special role she felt minority journalists should play in encouraging citizens to engage in democracy, to get out the vote.

Davis's retirement from daily news reporting on KRON in 1999 was marked by a party at San Francisco's City Hall, where her friend Nancy Wilson sang, and the mayor, Willie Brown, toasted her. The American Women in Radio and Television, Golden Gate Chapter, doubly honored Davis in 1999 with a Lifetime Achievement Award and the establishment of the Belva Davis Diversity Scholarship. Yet that year did not mark the end of Davis's career; she only semi-retired. She continued to do special project reporting for KRON and serve as host of This Week in Northern California on KQED-TV. When not busy with a project, she relaxed on her ranch in Petaluma, which she shares with her husband Bill Moore, a television photographer whom she married in 1963. The legacy of Davis's groundbreaking career has been preserved in the Newseum: The Interactive Museum of News.