Max Robinson

Max Robinson began his broadcast career in Portsmouth, Virginia, in the early 1960s, where in one of his first television jobs he was made to read the news from behind a slide reading "studio," with station managers hiding the fact that he was Black from viewers until they eventually let him appear on camera.

Robinson went on to work for local Washington, D.C. stations, becoming the first Black news anchor in the city and earning a regional Emmy Award, before joining ABC News in 1978. That year he was named co-anchor of World News Tonight, reporting from Chicago while colleagues Frank Reynolds and Peter Jennings anchored from Washington and London — making Robinson the first Black journalist to anchor a nightly network newscast in American television history.

Throughout his career, Robinson was an outspoken advocate for greater diversity in newsrooms, criticising the media industry's coverage of Black communities and co-founding the National Association of Black Journalists in 1975 to support and advance Black media professionals. He left ABC in 1983 and later worked in local Chicago news until his death from complications of AIDS in 1988, one of the more prominent public figures of that era to disclose his illness.