Pitts, Byron A.

Impact on the world

Functionally illiterate until about age twelve and afflicted with a debilitating stutter he worked for years to manage, Pitts set a goal at eighteen to become a 60 Minutes correspondent and pursued it through more than a decade of local television jobs in North Carolina, Virginia, Florida, Massachusetts, and Georgia before CBS News hired him as a correspondent in 1998; he became one of CBS’s lead reporters at Ground Zero on September 11, 2001, winning a national Emmy Award for the coverage, and later reported as an embedded journalist during the fall of Baghdad in the Iraq War. Named chief national correspondent for The CBS Evening News and a regular 60 Minutes contributor, Pitts covered Hurricane Katrina, the Afghanistan war, and the Haiti earthquake before joining ABC News in 2013 as chief national correspondent and becoming Nightline co-anchor in 2014, where he has reported on the Boston Marathon bombing, the deaths of Freddie Gray and Michael Brown, and Nelson Mandela’s funeral in South Africa. The National Association of Black Journalists named him Journalist of the Year in 2002, and his 2009 memoir, Step Out on Nothing, chronicled his path from illiteracy to network journalism; he later helped establish a diversity, equity, and inclusion advisory council for the Walt Disney Company.

Life & background

Born October 21, 1960, in Baltimore, Maryland, and raised by a single mother in a working-class neighborhood, Pitts graduated from Archbishop Curley High School in 1978 and earned a journalism and speech communication degree from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1982 despite early academic struggles. He worked at local television stations across the East Coast from 1983 to 1997, spent 15 years at CBS News from 1998 to 2013, and has served as an ABC News chief national correspondent and Nightline co-anchor since 2013, continuing to report and write books from New York City.

Sources

1. ABC News; Horatio Alger Association; The HistoryMakers