In a time when blacks were beaten and killed in some parts of the United States, one woman did something that seemed impossible. She became the first black female television news reporter in the West Coast.
Racial tensions amongst black and white citizens in California reached peaks in 1964 and 1966, with the riots in Watts, a neighborhood in Los Angeles and Hunter’s Point, a neighborhood in San Francisco. Both riots were caused by arrests and killings of black men. Never in my wildest dreams, mixing autobiography and lessons on recent American history – in which she was also an active participant – chronicles Davis’s struggles to overcome poverty, racism, and sexism and earn the respect of her peers.
Davis says she endeavors to tell her life story in a manner that does not evolve into self-pity, though at times her narrative slips into retelling her struggles with her oppressors. The task is not an easy one: she was born to a teenage laundress in Louisiana, and sleeps on the kitchen floor of her parents’ overcrowded house. She looks for affection where she cannot find it. And she struggles to overcome racism in a time when the victory of the Civil Rights Movement was far from reality.
The book begins with a single moment of despair during the 1964 Republican National Convention, and moves forward to the election of Barack Obama, America’s first African American president. During the convention, she and her boss are attacked by the people who attend the Convention. The attack was caused by a series of speeches. First, President Eisenhower, without uttering the word, spoke derogatorily about blacks: “Let us not be guilty of maudlin sympathy for the criminal who, roaming the streets with a switchblade knife…suddenly becomes a poor underprivileged person who counts upon the compassion of our society.” Then, New York governor Nelson Rockerfeller spoke condemning the KKK only to be drowned by boos and noise-makers from the crowd. Davis and her boss are then seen by the crowd, who being to shout insults at them.
She describes how they are forced to abandon the conference amidst a wave of insults and objects hurled at them, including food and a glass bottle that almost hit her in the head. Davis’s narrative then chronicles her personal experiences during milestone moments of the civil rights movement, such as the protests in Berkeley Campus, the death of Harvey Milk and George Moscone and the rise of the Black Panthers.
In a chapter titled, “Ringside at the racial revolution,” Davis meets the creators of the Black Panther Party, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, who created the movement in response, they said, to what Oakland black residents regarded as widespread police oppression. The name of the movement came from a quote from Newton, “The Black Panther is a fierce animal, but he will not attack until he is backed into a corner, then he will strike out.”
On May 2, 1967, a group of Panthers showed up at the State Assembly Chamber in Sacramento and took out their guns, pointing them at the sky. Davis is sent to cover this event. She fears that she will let her emotions get in the way of her reporting, as she has lived a life similar to the members of the Party and being black put her in a position where she could be accused of biased reporting: “I would be uniquely scrutinized for any sign of pro-Panther favoritism. Yet I also knew the hopes of black viewers that at long last someone with their experiences would be more simpatico to their version of the truth.”
Throughout this chapter, Davis struggles to report in depth, not just going after hot topics. She becomes emotionally detached from her own experiences and follows the instinct of the reporter. This is clear when she interviews one of the members of the party before he goes into jail, and he says that the FBI had crafted a plan to eliminate the Black Panthers. Her producers refuse to let the interview air, and she fights back, sure of her journalistic skills. Within a year, COINTELPRO is exposed. This was the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program that spied on and covertly interfered with dissident groups.
Journalism is a central part in Davis’ life, a role she took by chance after she married, moved to Oakland and began freelancing for black-oriented publications such as Jet and Ebony. From then on, she moves through newspapers, entering the Bay Area Independent in 1960. Then she moves into radio, becoming the first black woman to have her own radio show, The Belva Davis Show, in 1962. Her career breakthrough came when she became a prominent figure on San Francisco television stations, first at KPIX and then at KQED, the PBS station.
Through her work on television, she covers stories that touch a fiber in the general public: breast cancer, heart surgery, and education, along with political and social topics of the time. And she changes her community along the way: she organizes a pageant for black women, which becomes the stepping stone for the election of the first African American Miss America. She joins AFTRA, the American Federation of Radio and Television Artists and helped minorities join media in a way that had not been conceived before.
The book offers insights into her personal journalist code of conduct, which she says is “to tell stories in an unemotional, factual and fair manner.” She lets the reader in on her interior debates about when she was going too far with her narrative. And she discusses her method of writing a story by letting people into the story, giving details about the events that happened before her eyes.
The narrative is direct and honest, with occasional excursions into story telling from a strong woman’s point of view. In organizing a beauty pageant for black women, she acts as a surrogate mother for the contestants, worried about necklines and escorts who would want to take advantage of the girls. She frets about decorations, but also becomes interested in developing racial conscience and pride amongst the participants, chronicling their success stories within the black community.
It is a book that focuses on the racial struggles of a woman, and more importantly, on the struggles of a generation.
The different sides of Davis’ persona interact in the writing of this book. The reader sees her evolve from a small girl in Louisiana into a determined and seasoned journalist reporting on Oakland. The people she meets are interesting, and every one of them gives advice to the woman, the journalist, and even to the reader at some point. Frank Sinatra tells Davis, after seeing her reduced to tears because she is so nervous, that “the day I walk out on stage and I’m not nervous is the day I quit. So don’t you ever have to apologize to me about nerves.”
The book engages the reader constantly, through personal anecdotes and visions about public characters, giving a fair portrait on what it means to be black, a woman, and a journalist–all in the same person.
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