Davis, Belvagene “Belva”

Impact on the world

After breaking into journalism as a 1957 freelance writer for Jet magazine and Black-owned Bay Area papers including the Sun-Reporter, Davis became the first Black woman on air at radio station KSAN before KPIX-TV hired her as one of four reporters in late 1966, making her the first Black woman on a West Coast television news team. Over the following decades at KPIX, KRON-TV, and PBS station KQED, she covered the Free Speech Movement and Berkeley riots, the rise and fall of the Black Panther Party (including an exclusive jailhouse interview with Eldridge Cleaver), the Jonestown massacre, the assassinations of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, and the AIDS and crack epidemics, while co-hosting the long-running public affairs programs California This Week and This Week in Northern California. She won eight regional Emmy Awards, lifetime achievement honors from the National Association of Black Journalists and the International Women’s Media Foundation, and published a well-received 2010 memoir, Never in My Wildest Dreams, before retiring from daily broadcasting in 2012.

Life & background

Born Belvagene Melton on October 13, 1932, in Monroe, Louisiana, to a teenage mother, Davis moved with her family to Oakland, California, as a child, graduated from Berkeley High School in 1951 as the first in her family to earn a diploma, and began her journalism career in 1957 writing freelance for Jet magazine after financial constraints kept her from attending college. She worked in Bay Area radio and television from the early 1960s until her 2012 retirement, remained active in civic and philanthropic life afterward, including raising $5 million for San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora, and died in Oakland on September 24, 2025, at age 92.

Sources

1. KQED; BlackPast.org; Encyclopedia.com