Francine Cheeks was a member of the first Executive Board of ABJ. She served as vice president in 1976. She was interviewed in 2003 by Sherry L. Howard.

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“I worked at WCAU-TV, which was a CBS-owned-and-operated station from the time it was bought by Willian Paley in the 1930s until deregulation in the 1990s. I arrived in 1972 and left in 1977 to go to graduate school at Columbia.

Some of my strongest memories involve our annual dinners: one year, Sen. Hubert Humphrey came and gave remarks; another year we had Teddy Pendergrass as featured entertainment. Both were stars at the time. We drew around 1,000 people.

We really earned respect, and showed our strength to the media owners and the general public. We recruited our members early on, but later people were coming to us asking to join and be a part.

There had been many attempts to organize communicators, PR people and various other collections. Our organization in 1974 was the first time a Black organization composed only of working journalists was established in Philadelphia. We had a good mix of broadcast and print members (reporters, editors, producers, anchors) from both Black and white newspapers.

I returned to WCAU in 1981 as manager of news administration (comparable to assistant news director) and worked there until 1987. Although the total numbers of Blacks in the media were smaller then, it was an exciting and important time to be a Black journalist. Acel Moore and Reggie Bryant had a weekly program on WHYY-TV called “Black Perspective on the News,” like a Black “Meet the Press” that was seen nationwide. We interviewed many policy and opinion-makers.”

Watch a video interview with Cheeks.