Noble, Gilbert Edward “Gil”
1932-2012 · Contribution: 1968-2011
Television host and documentarian
Created and hosted WABC-TV’s Like It Is for 43 years, the longest-running Black public affairs program in New York television history, producing landmark documentaries on Malcolm X, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King Jr.
Portraits are AI-generated interpretations, not photographs.
Quick facts
- Born
- 1932, Harlem, New York
- Active since
- 1968
- Category
- Press & Photography
- Best known for
- Creating and hosting WABC-TV's Like It Is for 43 years
Impact on the world
Noble built what many consider the largest single body of television programming on African Americans ever produced in the U.S., preserving voices and perspectives mainstream broadcasting ignored.
An alternative history
What Would the World Look Like Without It?
One contribution. Many possible consequences. No single-person origin story.
Imagine this selected contribution absent, not the person or the entire field. The areas below are reflection prompts related to this discipline, not verified chains of direct dependency.
Sources
- Source lookupFind
New York Amsterdam News
Exact source links open the cited record. Source lookups help locate legacy references whose original records did not include a direct URL.
2 more sources and references are available to members.
Related visionaries
Tolliver, Melba
1939-present
Became the first Black person to anchor a network news program in the United States in 1967 when, as an ABC secretary, she filled in on air during a broadcasting strike, then spent nearly three decades as a New York City television reporter and anchor at WABC, WNBC, and News 12 Long Island
Lomax, Louis Emanuel
1922-1970
Became the first African American television journalist in 1958 when he joined New York’s WNTA-TV, then co-produced with Mike Wallace The Hate That Hate Produced (1959), the influential documentary that introduced most white Americans to the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, and Elijah Muhammad
Martin, Roland Sebastian
1968-present
Built Roland Martin Unfiltered into one of the most-watched independent Black-owned news programs in the country, growing it from a 2018 web series into the flagship of the Black Star Network after a career as executive editor of the Chicago Defender and a longtime CNN political contributor
Clayton, Xernona
1930-present
Became the first Black person in the American South to host a regularly scheduled prime-time television talk show when Themes and Variations (later The Xernona Clayton Show) premiered on Atlanta’s WAGA-TV in 1967, then spent three decades as a pioneering Turner Broadcasting executive