Goode, Malvin Russell “Mal”
1908-1995 · Contribution: 1962-1973
Became the first African American correspondent for a U.S. television news network when ABC News hired him in 1962, making his on-air debut with breaking coverage of the Cuban Missile Crisis from the United Nations
Portraits are AI-generated interpretations, not photographs.
Impact on the world
A steel-mill laborer for over a decade before entering journalism, Goode joined the Pittsburgh Courier in 1948 and built a parallel radio career at Pittsburgh stations KQV and WHOD, becoming the first Black member of the Radio-Television News Directors Association; at his friend Jackie Robinson’s urging, ABC News director Jim Hagerty interviewed and hired the 54-year-old Goode from among nearly 40 candidates in 1962, initially assigning him to the network’s minor United Nations beat. Just weeks into the job, ABC put Goode on television for the first time to report the unfolding Cuban Missile Crisis on October 28, 1962, telling viewers, “I can’t tell you what’s going to happen before the sun goes down” — a debut that established him as a network fixture for the next decade. Goode went on to cover the civil rights movement and interview Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, was the only reporter organizers allowed inside a 1967 Black Power conference in Newark, and pushed ABC internally to feature more diverse Black voices and communities beyond protest coverage before his mandatory retirement in 1973; at his retirement dinner, Hagerty called him “the Jackie Robinson of broadcasters,” and he was inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame in 1990.
Life & background
Born February 13, 1908, in White Plains, Virginia, the grandson of enslaved people, Goode was raised in Homestead, Pennsylvania, worked twelve years in steel mills through and after his 1931 University of Pittsburgh graduation, and later worked in juvenile probation and public housing before joining the Pittsburgh Courier in 1948 and Pittsburgh radio in 1949. ABC News hired him as its first Black correspondent in 1962, assigning him to the United Nations bureau for eleven years until his 1973 retirement; he continued lecturing and consulting afterward, and died following a stroke in Pittsburgh on September 12, 1995, at age 87.
Sources
- NPR; Pittsburgh Quarterly; University of Pittsburgh Department of History
More in Press & Photography
Abbott, Robert Sengstacke
1870-1940
Founded the Chicago Defender in 1905 with a 25-cent investment, building it into the most influential Black newspaper in the country and a primary catalyst of the Great Migration of roughly 1.5 million Black Southerners northward
Alcindor, Yamiche Léone
1986-present
Served as PBS NewsHour’s White House correspondent from 2018 to 2022, becoming a leading chronicler of the Trump and early Biden presidencies before succeeding her mentor Gwen Ifill, also profiled in this collection, as moderator of PBS’s Washington Week
Ball, James Presley
1825-1904
Built one of the first successful African American-owned photography studios in the country, operating “Ball’s Great Daguerrean Gallery of the West” in Cincinnati from 1849 and photographing subjects from Frederick Douglass to Queen Victoria over a 50-year, coast-to-coast career
Barboza, Anthony
1944-present
Built a five-decade commercial and fine-art photography career after joining the Kamoinge Workshop in 1963 as its youngest member, later serving as the collective’s president from 2005 to 2016 and co-editing its landmark 2015 history, Timeless: Photographs by Kamoinge