The first in her immediate family to graduate high school, Belva Davis was elated at receiving a letter of acceptance in the 1950s from what was then San Francisco State College. But she couldn’t afford tuition, therefore, she never enrolled.
Instead, Davis unexpectedly became a pioneering, award-winning, television journalist. Recently, she and San Francisco State University officials have discussed the possibility of the institution housing a digital archive of her papers, documenting not only her five-decade career in northern California, but also the struggles accompanying racial integration of the news industry.
Davis’s distinctions include becoming the first Black, female, TV reporter in the western United States when she joined the CBS affiliate in San Francisco in 1967.
This weekend, newsmakers and Davis’s colleagues and friends are paying tribute to her at a fundraising event to finance the archive, as well as to start a journalism scholarship in her name. Barbara Rodgers, a long-time TV news anchor and reporter in San Francisco who’s one of the event organizers, values Davis as a mentor. “She always offered good advice, whether it’s professional guidance or fashion or how to resolve a workplace issue,” Rodgers says. “She would call me after watching newscasts and offer suggestions of how to improve.” Now retired, Rodgers joined the CBS affiliate in 1979.
Regarded in the broadcast industry as “the Walter Cronkite” of northern California, Davis was an anchor, reporter and host of public affairs programs for three network TV affiliates until retiring last year. Among thousands of assignments, she interviewed U.S. presidents, reported on Vietnam War protests and covered the rise of the Black Panthers. Her specialties included politics and racial and gender issues. The winner of eight local Emmys, Davis has been inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame.
Bill Cosby, who penned the forward of Davis’s memoir, Never in my Wildest Dreams: A Black Woman’s Life in Journalism, has likened her to educator Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune in terms of appeal among White audiences. Cosby initially met Davis in the early 1960s when she was a fledgling journalist covering his comedy club performances. “When we had a houseboat in San Francisco Bay in the late 1960s, Mrs. Cosby and I, we would watch the news on TV,” Cosby wrote. “And there would be Belva Davis, out reporting stories and anchoring the newscasts. [She] was someone who sustained us, who made us proud. She was the first woman of color that many viewers came to know and trust, and she met that challenge with integrity and dignity and grace.”
But Davis’s early life and career weren’t smooth. Born to a teenage laundress and raised in Oakland, Calif. housing projects, she and her family were strangers to college financial aid applications and deadlines. Unable to cover the tuition, her college hopes dissolved.
