Ifill, Gwendolyn L.
1955-2016 · Contribution: 1984-2016
Became, in 1999, the first African American woman to host a nationally televised U.S. public affairs program, moderating PBS's “Washington Week,” and in 2013 formed the first all-female co-anchor team in network news history alongside Judy Woodruff on the PBS NewsHour
Portraits are AI-generated interpretations, not photographs.
Impact on the world
After being told at the Washington Post that she wasn't ready to cover Capitol Hill, Ifill moved to the New York Times, where she became White House correspondent from 1991 to 1994, then to NBC News as chief congressional correspondent before joining PBS in 1999 as moderator of “Washington Week,” becoming the first Black woman to host a national political talk show on American television; she went on to become the first African American to moderate a U.S. vice-presidential debate in 2004 (Cheney-Edwards) and again in 2008 (Biden-Palin), and in 2013 partnered with Judy Woodruff to co-anchor the PBS NewsHour as the first all-female anchor team in network news history. Her 2009 book, “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama,” became a New York Times bestseller, and after her 2016 death the Committee to Protect Journalists renamed its press freedom honor the Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award; she was posthumously awarded the Dunnigan-Payne Prize in 2023, named for Alice Allison Dunnigan and Ethel Payne, both already profiled in this collection, and honored on a U.S. postage stamp in 2020.
Life & background
Born September 29, 1955, in Jamaica, Queens, New York City, the fifth of six children of Panamanian-born African Methodist Episcopal minister O. Urcille Ifill Sr. and Barbadian-born Eleanor Husbands Ifill, Gwen Ifill grew up in AME parsonages across New England, developing an early interest in politics from watching her father navigate church governance and in journalism from her family's nightly news-watching ritual. She graduated from Simmons College in Boston in 1977 with a communications degree, began her career at the Boston Herald American, and worked at the Baltimore Evening Sun before the Washington Post and New York Times; a cousin, Sherrilyn Ifill, later became president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. She never married and had no children, chaired the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Journalism Awards, and died of cancer on November 14, 2016, in Washington, D.C., at age 61, ten days after that year's presidential election; Simmons University established the Gwen Ifill College of Media, Arts and Humanities in her honor in 2018.
Sources
- The HistoryMakers; PBS NewsHour; Encyclopedia.com
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