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Robin Roberts
After Hurricane Katrina slammed into the U.S. Gulf Coast, in 2005,
the ABC-TV newscaster Robin Roberts reported on the disaster at the
site of the devastated Mississippi town where she had spent much of
her youth. Katrina struck only a few months after Roberts was named
co-anchor of the long-running ABC News program Good Morning
America and three and a half years after she left her dream job,
as an anchor for the sports network ESPN. Referring to her repeated
visits to her hometown, both as a journalist and as a volunteer in
rebuilding efforts, she told Gary Pettus for the Jackson,
Mississippi, Clarion-Ledger (April 4, 2006), “Personally and
professionally, this has been the defining moment for me. I had
struggled, I had wondered if I should move from sports to news. When
Katrina hit, I looked to the heavens and said, ‘Now I get it.’”
“Once you've done sports, you can do anything,” she told Mike Lacy
for the Biloxi, Mississippi, Sun Herald (April 25, 2002).
“The subject matter has changed, but I have the same journalistic
approach whether I'm talking about the Yankees or Osama bin Laden.”
Currently, Roberts is the only female African-American anchor on
morning network television. She began her career in broadcasting
during her years as a student at Southeastern Louisiana University,
with jobs at local radio stations. For seven years after her college
graduation, having resolved to gain experience and hone her skills
“in the minors,” as she explained to Hal Karp for Black
Enterprise (April, 1997), she worked for a series of television
stations in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Georgia. In 1990, two years
after she had rejected a job offer from ESPN because she felt that
she was not yet sufficiently prepared, she joined the network as a
host and reporter. During the next dozen years, she appeared on
programs including NFL Prime Time, SportsCenter, and In
the SportsLight and concurrently, for four years, hosted Wide
World of Sports on ABC (which, like ESPN, is owned by the Walt
Disney Co.). For Good Morning America, Roberts has reported
from war-torn or otherwise troubled places in the Persian Gulf
region and Africa. In March 2007 she hosted a town-hall–style
meeting with U.S. senator and Democratic presidential hopeful
Hillary Rodham Clinton. Several months later Roberts disclosed
on-air that she had been diagnosed with an early stage of breast
cancer. Since she underwent surgery and started treatments, she has
continued to work whenever possible, including in her broadcasts
updates about her treatments and her physical and emotional
reactions to them. She is the author of the memoir cum
inspirational/advice book From the Heart: Seven Rules to Live By
(2007).
The youngest of four children, Robin Rene Roberts was born to
Lawrence Roberts Sr. and Lucy Marion (Tolliver) Roberts on November
23, 1960. Her brother, Lawrence Jr., is a teacher; her sister
Sally-Ann is a TV anchor in New Orleans, and her sister Dorothy is a
social worker. According to Gary Pettus, her mother (whose given
name appears as Lucimarian in some sources) was a member of the
Mississippi state board of education; Roberts has credited her
mother with teaching her the importance of speaking clearly and
grammatically. Her father, a career U.S. Air Force officer, served
during World War II with the Tuskegee Airmen, a now-celebrated
all-black fighter-pilot squadron. The Robertses lived on a series of
air-force bases until Robin was eight, when they settled in the
small town of Pass Christian, Mississippi, on the Gulf of Mexico
near the Keesler Air Force Base, in Biloxi. “My father taught me
that anything is possible . . . ,” Roberts told Kimberly C. Roberts
for the Philadelphia Tribune (June 15, 2007). “In the 1930s
he had the nerve to . . . dream about flying when Blacks in this
country had very little, if any rights. . . . And . . . not only
dream it, but make it a reality. . . . We would say, ‘I want to do
this. I want to do . . . that.' . . . He never looked at us and
said, ‘You can't do that!' or ‘That's impossible!' He was like, ‘If
that's what you want to do, you have my full support.’” In From
the Heart: Seven Rules to Live By, Roberts wrote that her
parents, who came of age in the 1930s, had experienced racism
firsthand but refused to let it hold them back. Her mother, for
example, knew that the wives of her husband's fellow air-force
officers “didn't want her at their coffee klatches,” as Roberts
wrote. “She showed up anyway--in a quiet way, asserting her right to
be there. My parents never let us use race as an excuse.”
Roberts's interest in sports began at an early age. “No matter what
sport it was I loved it, loved it, loved it. Loved every aspect of
it, seeing how fast I could run, competing against someone else,”
she told Beth Usewicz for the Women’s Sports Foundation Web site. At
10 (12 or 13, according to some sources) she won a Mississippi state
bowling competition. She later became proficient at tennis and in
the eighth grade, already five feet 10 inches in height, showed
unusual skill at basketball. She was the star player on her
high-school women's basketball team and drew the attention of
college scouts. She won a scholarship from Southeastern Louisiana
University, in Hammond, where she played on the Lady Lions
basketball team. By that time, as she told Usewicz, she had
concluded that her abilities on the court would never reach
professional levels. Retaining her desire to be involved with
sports, she took the advice of her sister Sally-Ann and decided to
make a career as a sportscaster. She appeared on a campus sports
show between classes and basketball practice, and, concurrently, got
a job as a disk jockey at a small Hammond radio station that
specialized in country-and-western music. She worked at the station
every day for an hour or so beginning at 6:00 a.m. and then returned
there at noon to write copy. “I scratched a lot of good ole Merle
Haggard records before the station let me host a sports show,” she
told Ylonda Gault Caviness for Essence (May 2007). In her
junior and senior years, she was named the basketball team's Most
Valuable Player. In the latter year her points-per-game average was
15.2, and she was one of only three members of the Lady Lions to
average 1,000 or more career points and rebounds. She graduated with
a B.A. in communications, cum laude, in 1983.
In the same year Roberts landed a position as a $5.50-per-hour
weekend sports anchor at WDAM-TV in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where
her sister had once worked. In taking that job, she had declined an
offer to report news for the local ABC affiliate, because she wanted
to gain experience in a less high-profile setting. The next year she
turned down the chance to serve as a news anchor for WLOX-TV, in
Biloxi, Mississippi, in favor of hosting--for a smaller salary--that
station's sports segment of the news; she felt, as she told Pettus,
that “news” was “a four letter word.” In 1986 she became a sports
anchor and reporter for WSMV-TV, in Nashville, Tennessee. She told
Beth Usewicz that some men expressed skepticism about any woman's
ability to cover sports. Among them was a viewer who called the
station before her on-air debut. “I told him to let me do a couple
of reports and call me back in six months,” she said to Usewicz. “In
less than half of that time, he called back and said, ‘Nah, you are
all right.’”
In 1988 Roberts turned down a chance to rise in the sportscasting
world, when ESPN asked her to host a show. Although when she was a
college student, her ambition had been to work for ESPN by 1990, she
felt that she did not have enough experience yet to make the most of
the opportunity and gain “staying power,” as she put it to Hal Karp.
Instead, in 1988 she moved to Atlanta, Georgia, to work at WAGA-TV
as a sports reporter, covering major-league games. With her co-host,
Mike Roberts (not a relative of hers), she also contributed to
Atlanta’s highest-rated morning radio show, on WVEE-FM. Her
popularity with listeners grew after she beat the National
Basketball Association star player Dominique Wilkins in a free-throw
shoot-out.
When ESPN again offered her a job, Roberts signed on as an
anchorwoman. On January 29, 1990 she became the first
African-American female anchor on that network, as the host of the
night edition of SportsCenter. Within a month she became the
first female host of an NFL pregame show, filling in during that
broadcast in the absence of the regular host. Soon afterward she
received primetime slots on Sunday SportsDay and NFL
PrimeTime, hosting both for the next five years. In addition,
she had her own series, In the Sportslight, which premiered
in 1995. On that show she conducted interviews and discussed the
effects of athletics on the lives of public figures. Also in 1995
Roberts signed a joint $3.9 million contract with ESPN and ABC. She
served as a host for ESPN's coverage of the Olympics, for Women’s
National Basketball Association games from 1997 to 2000, and, in
1999, for Vintage NBA, a weekly ESPN program that focused on
one sportsman or -woman per episode. Her job also included coverage
of professional football and basketball drafts, Ladies Pro Golfing
Association competitions, and world tennis events, and she was the
first female play-by-play announcer for men’s college-basketball
games. From 1995 to 2001 she hosted Wide World of Sports,
which airs on ABC. She also appeared on segments of Prime Time,
Good Morning America, and Good Morning America Sunday.
In April 2002 Roberts was elevated from contributor to news reader
on Good Morning America, where she had been serving as a
fill-in anchor for several months. Her reservations about making the
move from ESPN to Good Morning America evaporated after she
had a conversation with the retired tennis champion Billie Jean
King. “She said, ‘What, are you an idiot? . . . Go, go. It is a
bigger platform for you,'” as Roberts recalled to Usewicz.
Concurrently, for three years, she also served as an ABC News
correspondent and contributed to Sunday-morning shows on ESPN. In
March 2003 she traveled to Kuwait to report on preparations for the
impending U.S.-led war in Iraq. “I had no qualms about doing my job
and needing to be there [in Kuwait] for it,” she told Donna
Petrozzello for the New York Daily News (March 11, 2003). “If
you’re a journalist, this is the biggest story there is. To see it
for yourself and relay that information back to viewers is what the
job is meant to be.” Other news stories Roberts reported concerned
the effectiveness of sky marshals on airplanes; a controversial
custody battle involving an adolescent's biological father and the
youngster's longtime male caregiver; the effects of the September
11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the New York City suburb of Rockville
Center, on Long Island, more than 20 of whose residents died at the
World Trade Center that day; debates concerning stem-cell research;
and gentrification in the Harlem section of New York City.
In May 2005 Roberts was promoted to third anchor of Good Morning
America, alongside Diane Sawyer and Charles Gibson. Upon her
acceptance of that position, she officially left ESPN, ending her
15-year association with the network. The following August Hurricane
Katrina destroyed most of Pass Christian, along with large parts of
many other cities in the Gulf Coast states. In the aftermath of the
storm, Roberts traveled to Pass Christian with an ABC crew to report
on the disaster. Upon her arrival she attempted to find her family
before a live broadcast scheduled for 6:00 a.m. that morning. With
the help of local police, and with only 15 minutes to spare before
she was to face the cameras, she found members of her family alive
and unhurt in their home. When she appeared on the air, a question
from Gibson about the well-being of her family brought her to tears.
“I had just heard of a man who lost his wife in the storm,” Roberts
recalled for Pettus. “I was grateful my family was safe, but I knew
there were countless people waking up that morning not knowing if
their family was. That’s when everything caught up with me. I
believe when people saw me crying, they knew it was bad.” Viewer
sympathy led ABC to “adopt” Pass Christian, in collaboration with
the Salvation Army and the Corporation for National and Community
Service. With Roberts reporting, the rebuilding of the town by
residents and volunteers was chronicled on Good Morning America.
In August 2007 Roberts announced on the program that while progress
had been made, much restoration work remained.
Earlier, in 2006, Gibson had left Good Morning America to host the
evening program ABC World News with Charles Gibson. With his
departure, Roberts and Sawyer became the only all-female team to
anchor a morning network show. “For all the talk about competition
between women, Diane and Robin clearly like each other and work well
together,” the former broadcast journalist Carol Jenkins, currently
the president of the Women’s Media Center, an advocacy group, told
Felicia R. Lee for the New York Times (November 16, 2006).
Victor Neufeld, the senior executive producer of Paula Zahn Now
on CNN, told Lee that Roberts and Sawyer “are just so relaxed and
likeable together,” and said, “Robin has this tremendous force of
personality as well as being someone you feel you want to hang out
with.”
In her book, From the Heart: Seven Rules to Live By, Roberts
described some of what she has learned through her work and in her
private life. Kelli Bozeman, in a review of the book for
Mississippi Magazine (May 1, 2007), wrote, “Roberts’ ‘rules,’
sprinkled throughout From the Heart, inspire readers to ready
themselves for opportunities, focus on small goals, take chances, be
persistent, and keep faith and family close to the heart. But she
offers encouragement for breaking the rules as well. ‘There is no
playbook for your own unique, wonderful life,’ she writes.
‘Ultimately, you've got to live it for yourself.’” From the Heart
was published a few months before Roberts learned that she had
breast cancer. On July 31, 2007 she revealed that diagnosis on
Good Morning America. She underwent surgery in August and has
since undergone chemotherapy. In November 2007, after her hair began
to fall out--a common side effect of chemotherapy--she had her head
shaved, a process that was filmed and then shown on Good Morning
America. Although, by her own account, she often keeps her head
bare at home, or covers it with only a cap when she is outdoors, she
wears a wig on the Good Morning America set, so as not to
distract viewers from what she is saying.
Among Roberts's many honors are the Daughters of the American
Revolution T.V. Award of Merit (1990); the Women at Work Broadcast
Journalism Award (1992); the Excellence in Journalism Award,
Broadcast Media, from the Center for the Study of Sport in Society,
at Northeastern University (1993); and the President's Award from
the Women's Sports Foundation (2001). In 2002 she was named
Journalist of the Year by Ebony.
Speaking of Roberts, Diane Sawyer told Felicia R. Lee, “I think
there’s nothing more exciting than someone who has a truly good
heart and a completely wicked sense of humor.” Roberts, who is
single, lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in New York City,
with her dog, KJ, a Jack Russell terrier. Every morning, she told
Scott Ross and Renell Richardson during an interview for the
Christian Broadcasting Network (June 19, 2007, on-line), she repeats
what she called the “prayer of protection.” She also reads
selections from Streams in the Desert, by L. B. Cowman, a
1920s book of devotionals (passages that aim to enable readers to
get closer to God) that once belonged to her maternal grandmother.
She is a practitioner of the Pilates exercise system.
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