Roberts, Robin Renée
1960-present · Contribution: 1983-present
Became the first Black woman to anchor ESPN’s flagship SportsCenter program in 1990, then, since 2005, has co-anchored ABC’s Good Morning America, leading it back to the No. 1 morning-show ranking and earning a 2012 Peabody Award for her on-air documentation of her own cancer treatment
Portraits are AI-generated interpretations, not photographs.
Impact on the world
The daughter of a Tuskegee Airman, Roberts worked her way through local sports-anchor jobs in Hattiesburg, Biloxi, Nashville, and Atlanta before ESPN hired her in 1990, where over 15 years she became the first Black woman to host SportsCenter and the first woman to co-host NFL Primetime, popularizing the catchphrase “Go on with your bad self!” She began contributing to Good Morning America in 1995 while still at ESPN, became full-time co-anchor in 2005, and led the broadcast’s emotional coverage of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of her native Mississippi Gulf Coast that same year; alongside co-anchor George Stephanopoulos beginning in 2009, she helped return GMA to the top of the morning-show ratings for the first time in sixteen years. Roberts’s 2007 breast cancer diagnosis and 2012 treatment for a related bone marrow disorder, both chronicled on air, drove an 1,800 percent spike in bone marrow donor registrations and earned the broadcast a Peabody Award, and she came out publicly as gay on GMA in January 2013; she has since been inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame (2012) and received ESPN’s Arthur Ashe Courage Award (2013).
Life & background
Born November 23, 1960, in Tuskegee, Alabama, and raised in Pass Christian, Mississippi, Roberts graduated cum laude from Southeastern Louisiana University in 1983 with a communications degree after a standout college basketball career, following her sister Sally-Ann Roberts into broadcast journalism. She worked as a local sports anchor from 1983 to 1990, at ESPN from 1990 to 2005, and has co-anchored Good Morning America since 2005, continuing in the role into her mid-60s while also running her own production company, Rock’n Robin Productions.
Sources
- ABC News; Mississippi Encyclopedia; Good Morning America
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