04/26/2026
From Black History Stories
A station logo covered Max Robinson's face every night he read the news in Portsmouth, Virginia in 1959.One night he had the slide taken down so his folks back home could see him on TV.
He was fired the next morning.The station manager said Portsmouth wasn't ready for color television.
In a Portsmouth television station in 1959, a station logo slide covered the screen every night Max Robinson read the news. His face never appeared.
The arrangement was clear. They would let him read, and they would not let the audience see him doing it.
He was twenty years old. He had beaten out four white applicants for the job.
His voice came through every weeknight, deep and Virginia-trained, while a flat graphic of the station's call letters sat where his face should have been.
One night, he asked them to take it down. He wanted his folks back home to see who was reading their news.
The slide came down. His face appeared.
He read the news the way he always had, with the same diction and the same care. For one broadcast the people of Portsmouth saw a young Black man telling them what had happened in the world.
He was fired the next morning. The station manager explained the decision in plain language.
Portsmouth, he said, was not ready for color television.
Max Robinson was born May 1, 1939, in Jackson Ward in Richmond, the oldest son of Maxie and Doris Robinson, both schoolteachers. His father coached on the side, and his mother kept the house heavy with discipline and books.
The four children walked to the back of the bus when they boarded. The Chinese restaurant on the corner served Black families through a back door.
Years later, his younger brother Randall, who would grow up to found TransAfrica Forum and lead the American campaign to free Nelson Mandela, remembered those instructions plainly. When you board a bus, you walk to the back.
When you want food, you go around to the rear of the building. The lessons were not philosophical, they were directions, repeated until the children no longer needed to be told.
Max went to Oberlin on a scholarship and was elected freshman class president. He left after a year and a half.
The pull of broadcasting had already gotten into him, and he had heard about the Portsmouth job from a friend who told him the station had a whites-only hiring policy. In 1959 that policy was perfectly legal.
He applied anyway. He auditioned alongside the four white men.
He won the job. They put him behind the slide.
After Portsmouth fired him, he kept moving. He took a job at WTOP-TV in Washington as a cameraman and reporter, and he discovered he was being paid twenty-five dollars a week less than the white men doing the same work.
He took the cut and the camera and learned the city. By 1965 he was at WRC, walking neighborhoods other reporters would not enter.
In April of 1968, when Dr. King was killed and Washington went up in smoke, Robinson was already on the streets when most of his colleagues were still calling in from their homes. He won six journalism awards in three years, and two regional Emmys for a documentary on Black Anacostia called The Other Washington.
In 1969, WTOP brought him back. They paired him with a white anchor named Gordon Peterson and put their evening newscast in his hands.
He became the first Black man in the country to anchor a local television news broadcast. Washington began to recognize his face the way it had once recognized the slide.
In December of 1975, in a meeting room in the same city, he sat down with forty-three other Black journalists and helped found the National Association of Black Journalists. He had not forgotten Portsmouth.
He knew that the careful stagecraft of voice without face would happen again somewhere else, in a different shape, if Black journalists did not stand together and name it. He was right.
Two Marches later, on the morning of March 9, 1977, twelve Hanafi gunmen seized three buildings in downtown Washington, including the B'nai B'rith headquarters on Rhode Island Avenue, and took 149 hostages at gunpoint. They killed a young radio reporter named Maurice Williams in the District Building.
Their leader, Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, would not negotiate with police on the phone. He would speak with one journalist on television.
The phone in the WTOP newsroom rang in the middle of the afternoon. Max Robinson picked up.
Khaalis was on the line, calling from inside B'nai B'rith. He talked, and Robinson listened.
Robinson knew this man already. He had covered the 1973 massacre of Khaalis's family at the Hanafi house on Sixteenth Street, when men associated with the Nation of Islam had broken in and killed five of Khaalis's children, his nine-day-old grandson, and another man.
That coverage was why the phone was ringing now. Khaalis trusted the voice he had heard reporting on the worst day of his life.
For thirty-nine hours the standoff held. Through some of those hours, while sharpshooters lay flat on Washington rooftops and Israeli ambassadors waited for word, the voice on the other side of Khaalis's phone was the voice of the Black anchor on Channel 9.
The hostages came out alive. Robinson went home, sat on the edge of his bed, and went on the air for the late show.
A year later, Roone Arledge of ABC News watched a 60 Minutes piece featuring Robinson and made his decision. He wanted to relaunch the network's evening news with three anchors, and he wanted Robinson on the desk.
Frank Reynolds would broadcast from Washington. Peter Jennings would broadcast from London.
Robinson would be sent to Chicago.
The arrangement made him the first Black journalist to anchor a nightly network news broadcast in American history. It also placed him a thousand miles from the New York rooms where the actual decisions about World News Tonight were made.
Carl Bernstein, who would later run the ABC News Washington bureau, said openly what others said quietly. Robinson, he confirmed, was deliberately excluded from any decision-making about the broadcast he co-anchored.
The slide had changed shape. It was no longer a piece of opaque graphic art covering a face, it was a city.
It was Chicago.
On a Sunday afternoon in February of 1981, Robinson stood at a podium at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. He had been asked to give the kind of polite speech a Black "first" was expected to give.
He looked out at the audience and decided not to. He told them, instead, that the news media were a crooked mirror through which white America viewed itself.
He said ABC wanted him to speak like, in his own words, any old white boy. He said the network did not want his history, his culture, or his views on the page.
He said he and every other Black journalist had been deliberately kept off the coverage of the inauguration of Ronald Reagan that January. He said the same thing had happened with the return of the American hostages from Iran.
The audience listened. The wire services in the back of the room listened too.
By Monday morning the speech was on the front pages, and his bosses at ABC were on the phone to Chicago demanding he come to New York. He flew east and sat through the meeting.
He did not retract a word.
Asked about it afterward by a reporter from the Christian Science Monitor, he said the speech at Smith had been honest, perhaps more honest than he would ever again be able to afford. It was true that he earned a fine salary, he added, but nobody had given him anything.
In another interview around the same time, he tried to name the weight of the seat he occupied. He was, he said, the only Black person in this country expected to be a monument twenty-four hours a day.
If he tripped, if he stuttered, if he failed to land the right inflection, it was not just Max Robinson who had failed. It was every Black person in America.
In April of 1983, Frank Reynolds died of cancer. The three-anchor experiment ended with him.
Peter Jennings was named sole anchor of World News Tonight. Robinson was moved to weekend duties and short hourly news briefs.
He left ABC the next year and went to WMAQ in Chicago. He was drinking heavily by then, missing shifts, fighting a depression he had carried since boyhood, and by 1985 he was out of the anchor chair for good.
In June of that year he checked into a hospital for what was publicly called emotional and physical exhaustion. He had AIDS.
He kept the diagnosis private for the remaining three and a half years of his life. Only when he knew the end was near did he ask that his death be used to push for AIDS education in Black communities.
He died on December 20, 1988, at the age of forty-nine.
Jesse Jackson preached the eulogy. Gordon Peterson, the white anchor who had once shared a desk with him in Washington, stood up and spoke about the friend he had lost.
The voice that the Hanafi gunmen had trusted, that had walked into the smoke of 1968, that had stood at a Smith College podium and called the American news a crooked mirror, was gone before the country had even paused to learn his name.
In Portsmouth, in 1959, a station logo slide came down for one broadcast and a young Black man's face appeared on the screen. The next day they fired him.
He spent the rest of his life pulling slides off screens that other people had carefully positioned, and he never agreed to read the news from behind one again.
I put a lot of effort into researching and sharing stories that matter. If you'd like to support the work, here's the link:
https://ko-fi.com/blackhistorystories
Every coffee helps me keep creating.
NOTE: This post is shared for historical and educational awareness about Max Robinson and the racial barriers Black journalists faced in American broadcast news, not to glorify violence, hate, or harm.
*****
Stay in the KNOW... 🔍
