Belva Davis, hailed as the first Black woman hired as a television reporter on the West Coast, died Sept. 24 at her home in Oakland, California. She was 92. Her daughter, Darolyn Davis, confirmed her passing. Overcoming early hostility and career roadblocks, Davis became a respected figure in broadcast news in the Bay Area for nearly 50 years.
Davis first went on the air in February 1967 at KPIX, the CBS affiliate in San Francisco. Earlier, she worked as a DJ playing jazz and rhythm-and-blues records for Black-oriented Bay Area radio stations. In 1964, while reporting for KDIA-AM from the Republican National Convention at the Cow Palace arena south of San Francisco, Davis and a Black male reporter were hounded from the hall by supporters of the nominee, Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona. The crowd hurled racial epithets and tossed garbage at them, she recalled in her 2010 memoir, *Never In My Wildest Dreams: A Black Woman’s Life in Journalism*, written with Vicki Haddock. A hurled soda bottle narrowly missed her head.
“All too many white Americans refused to believe the harsh truth about race relations in their own country,” Davis wrote, explaining her motivation to become a journalist. Though she had no formal training in news gathering, she resolved to report the realities of life for many Black Americans during an era of de facto segregation.
Raised and then abandoned by a teenage mother who worked as a laundress, Davis overcame severe obstacles of poverty and prejudice. She wrestled with self-doubt about not having a college degree. She recalled a TV station manager who rejected her in an early job interview saying bluntly, “I’m sorry, we’re just not hiring any Negresses.”
Despite these challenges, Davis became a popular news anchor for three Bay Area TV stations—KPIX, KRON, and KQED—for more than 46 years before retiring in 2012 at age 80.
Her formative years in television coincided with the tumultuous 1960s and ’70s in the Bay Area. She reported on violent unrest at the University of California, Berkeley; the rise of the Black Panther Party; and the assassinations of San Francisco Mayor George R. Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk on Nov. 27, 1978.
On that day, Davis anchored a prime-time newscast on KQED, the city’s PBS station. She interviewed Willie Brown, the future San Francisco mayor who was then a state assemblyman and had been in the mayor’s office minutes before Moscone was shot, and Dianne Feinstein, the future California senator then serving as a supervisor who found Milk’s body. The broadcast received an award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for best local news program. Throughout her career, Davis also won eight local Emmy Awards.
Off the air, Davis was an advocate for racial visibility and opportunity. She served as the national equal employment opportunities chair for AFTRA, the broadcast union now known as SAG-AFTRA. In 2002, Mayor Willie Brown enlisted her assistance to help create the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. Davis raised millions of dollars for the project and became board president, leveraging her connections to the city’s wealthy cultural patrons. The museum opened in 2005.
Belvagene Melton was born Oct. 13, 1932, in Monroe, Louisiana, during the Jim Crow era of segregation. Her mother, Florene Wood, was 14 and earned just $4 a week working in a commercial laundry. Her father, John Melton, was a sawmill worker described in her autobiography as “a handsome, savvy but volatile man who swaggered his way through life,” despite never finishing grammar school.
Fleeing racism and hard times in the Deep South, her extended family moved to Oakland in the early 1940s. For a time, 11 relatives lived in a rented basement before relocating to a housing project in West Oakland. There, young Belva slept on the kitchen floor.
“My home was overstuffed with people but lacking in affection,” Davis wrote. She was in middle school when her mother abandoned the family. With her father largely absent, Davis found escape in books and at Berkeley High School, an academically rigorous institution from which she graduated in 1951—the first in her immediate family to do so.
Unable to afford college, Davis became a typist at Oakland’s Naval Supply Center. She also joined Black women’s organizations and began writing, without pay, about their activities for small publications. This led to freelance work as a stringer for *Jet* magazine, a Chicago-based Black news and culture publication. She was later hired full-time by the *Bay Area Independent*, a small Black weekly, earning $40 a week.
In the early 1960s, Davis broke into radio, hosting “The Belva Davis Show” on KDIA, spinning records and interviewing visiting performers such as Frank Sinatra and Bill Cosby. For years, she pursued full-time TV opportunities without success, as newsrooms remained overwhelmingly white and male.
By the mid-1960s, major news stories—the Civil Rights Movement, urban unrest, and evolving gender roles—highlighted the need for diverse perspectives in journalism. The NAACP and local Black leaders demanded Bay Area stations break the color barrier. In January 1966, KPIX hired its first Black reporter, Ben Williams of *The San Francisco Examiner*. A year later, after testing her on camera, KPIX hired Davis as a general-assignment reporter, with one condition: she needed to lose 10 pounds.
She was quickly tasked with covering crime, clashes between police and student protesters at Berkeley, and the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy before his assassination in June 1968. Reporting on the Black Panthers, whose co-founder Huey P. Newton dated an acquaintance of hers, Davis aimed to explain to alarmed white viewers why these gun-toting militants were respected in the same neighborhoods where she grew up—partly because they sought to defend Black residents from nearly all-white police department brutality.
Davis moved to KQED in 1977, then to KRON-TV, San Francisco’s NBC affiliate, in 1984, where she stayed for 18 years. At KRON, she worked as a co-anchor, covering national political conventions alongside Rollin Post. “She’s Type A; I’m the type who likes to take naps,” Post told *The San Francisco Chronicle*. “Belva always seemed to have self-doubts about whether she was qualified to do this or that. But she’s never walked away from her past. She wants to prove, more to herself than to anybody else, that she cannot, and will not, let down the African American community.”
Later, Davis returned to KQED, hosting the roundtable show *This Week in Northern California* until retiring in 2012.
Davis married Frank Davis at 19; the marriage ended in divorce. In the mid-1960s, she married Bill Moore, a TV camera operator. In addition to her daughter Darolyn from her first marriage, she is survived by her husband, a son Steven also from her first marriage, and two granddaughters.
Throughout her career, Davis interviewed influential figures including James Baldwin, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Fidel Castro, and Muhammad Ali. One notable exception was comedian Lenny Bruce, who declined an interview, citing his dislike of media sit-downs. Bruce had opened a San Francisco show in the early 1960s by repeatedly using the N-word, believing that by freely using it, he could drain it of its racist sting. Given her own experience of being driven from the 1964 Republican convention by a hail of racial slurs, Davis disagreed.
“I would argue,” she wrote in her memoir, “that a half-century after Lenny Bruce thought he was disarming the word, it has lost none of its lacerating power to wound.”
Belva Davis’s trailblazing career and steadfast commitment to truth-telling leave a lasting legacy in journalism and the fight for racial equality.
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