The groundbreaking local TV journalist and for 19 years the host of KQED’s “This Week in Northern California” is retiring after almost a half-century in Bay Area broadcasting. Her last broadcast will be Nov. 9. No indication yet about a replacement.
Add: As the first black TV reporter on the West Coast, she was a fixture for years at KPIX (CBS 5) and KRON 4, covering the Free Speech movement at UC Berkeley, the birth of the Black Panthers, the People’s Temple cult, and a host of other stories from the ‘60s through the ‘80s. Her autobiography, “Never in My Wildest Dreams: A Black Woman’s Life in Journalism” was published last year.
Noted: The book retraces her being born into poverty in Depression-era Louisiana and her growing up in Oakland and Berkeley. And it also serves as a primer on how times have changed. In an opening scene, Davis, then a young radio reporter, and her news director, Louis Freeman, are chased from the Cow Palace by an angry crowd screaming racial slurs at the 1964 Republican National Convention. Chronicle; Mercury News
