"I came in, it was accidental. I wasn't aiming to be a news reporter or an anchor. But I became an anchorwoman. I started at the very top. Then I went back to being a secretary and then a news trainee."An ongoing illustrative history study
This piece originally posted on 03/30/2026,
Women's History Month 2026
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"I came in, it was accidental. I wasn't aiming to be a news reporter or an anchor. But I became an anchorwoman. I started at the very top. Then I went back to being a secretary and then a news trainee."
One more pioneering journalist whose contributions should not be overlooked during Women's History Month, is Melba Tolliver, the first Black woman to anchor a regularly-scheduled news program on a major television network (in this case, New York's WABC-TV). Born in 1938 Rome, Georgia and raised in Akron, Ohio, Melba originally pursued a career as a nurse but pivoted to a secretarial job at ABC news in 1966. A year later the timing of a strike by the American Federation of Television and Radio, presented an opportunity for Melba to be able to occasionally fill in for anchor Marlene Sanders --who was herself the the first woman to anchor an evening news broadcast for a major network (also ABC).
A Black woman's face being a rarity on network television news at the time, Melba quickly proved her capability and competence in the role and projected an air of competent trustworthiness, even as she was completing her degree in journalism at SUNY Empire State College. In very short order she became a full-time anchor for WABC, a position she would hold for the next ten years --one of her earliest assignments was to cover the funeral of Robert Kennedy, Sr. Not insulated from racial stereotyping, Melba famously ran afoul of television standards in 1971 when she insisted on wearing her hair in a natural afro --disdaining the then-accepted practice of wearing a wig or a scarf-- when covering the White House wedding of Presidential daughter Tricia Nixon. In 1976 she took a job with competing WNBC, at one point becoming one half of television's first all-women co-anchor news team with Pia Lindstrom and Carol Jenkins. She later joined News 12 Long Island but was fired from that role in 1994, at a time when the realities of cable news were forcing the more traditional networks to rethink their entire models.
Today Melba continues to actively educate the upcoming next generation of Black journalists; one of her particular passions is fighting back against instances of book censorship and outright book banning. The late Gwen Ifill (an extraordinary journalist in her own right) once recounted in a 2014 interview that Tolliver was one of her greatest inspirations; "when we turned on our black and white set, there she was. I believe she worked for CBS at the time. And I've never met her. All I know is that she left a very big impression upon me because I didn't want to be in television, but here was a Black woman asking the questions. I liked that. I could see that."
Pick up a copy of Tolliver's memoir, Accidental Anchorwoman: A Memoir of Chance, Choice, Change, and Connection, winner of the NABJ Outstanding Book Award of 2024. And dive deeper into the age-old "controversy" surrounding the societal demands that have forever been made upon Black women's hair in the 2012 film In Our Heads About Our Hair, which showcases Tolliver's 1971 run-in with ABC management. (And then go look up the phrase "Tignon Law" to get a sense of just how long Black women have had to deal with that that particular indignity...)
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