Remembering TV news pioneers Bob Teague and Mal Goode

In style and temperament, they couldn't have been more different. Mal Goode was self-effacing, with a gentlemanly demeanor. Bob Teague was forthright, with a tough guy, no-nonsense one.

Goode was a deeply religious family man, and father of six children. Teague was a hard-charger who demanded respect, and earned it. He had one son. 

Teague had been a star running back in college, later recruited by the Green Bay Packers. He knew how to run through barriers.

Goode had worked for years in the vast Homestead Works a few miles down the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh. He knew how to forge steel.

On Sept. 15, 1962, Goode, who was then 54, was hired by ABC News to become the first Black correspondent in network TV history. A few months later, Teague, then a sports reporter for The New York Times, became the first Black reporter on New York City television when he joined WNBC/4 as a freelancer during a newspaper strike.

Although bygone figures from another era of TV news, Goode (who died in 1995) and Teague (in 2013) remain heroes to those who remember them, and were guided by them.

"They were the Jackie Robinsons of journalism," says Pamela Newkirk, a professor of journalism at New York University and author of "Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media" (NYU Press, 2002).

"They were the ones who broke the color line in broadcast television. They paved the path for many journalists of color. Now you can take it for granted that when you turn on the evening news, [Black reporters and anchors] will be there. There is now an expectation that you will have diversity in television news or news writ large. But in their day that wasn't the case. That's their legacy and it's a huge one."

MAL GOODE: BREAKING TV's COLOR LINE

 In 2022, Blacks represent 13.2% of the TV news workforce, according to the Radio Television Digital News Association. In 1962, the head count stood at just a hair's width over zero. Robinson, the former Brooklyn Dodger, who broke baseball's color line 15 years earlier, was among the first to make this observation. He didn't need any RTDNA stat to prove it. Just his own two eyes.

That year, ABC wanted Robinson to be interviewed by Howard Cosell, who had just joined WABC/7 as sports anchor and who also had a long-running radio program. Robinson showed up at ABC headquarters in Manhattan, where the thought forcibly hit him: But why?

He went into the office of Jim Hagerty, vice president of news, and demanded change.

"Jim, whenever I come here, the only Black people I see are mopping the floor," according to the account of the meeting in Rob Ruck's 2012 history, "Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game."

"When are you going to do something about that?"

In Goode's own recollection years later, Hagerty then said that "we're thinking about it," to which Robinson replied, "well stop thinking and do something."

Hagerty had just joined ABC after a long run as former President Dwight D. Eisenhower's press secretary. He was about to get a crash course in power politics, TV-style. While some accounts of this meeting suggest that Robinson may have pointedly refused to appear on Cosell's show — or ABC's air — until its own color barrier was breached, the implication was clear enough.

The call went out: ABC News was looking for a Black male correspondent to be based in its New York headquarters. The network got 40 responses, all from people working in radio or in newspapers because the only Black reporter on TV at the time was Benjamin Holman, who had just joined the CBS-owned station in Chicago. Robinson put in a good word for one reporter in particular. His name was Malvin Goode.

 'WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN'

Goode had been a veteran reporter at the Black-owned Pittsburgh Courier, and moonlighted as a radio commentator with a special interest in desegregation. Whenever he wrapped a report about a battle won, he'd sign off with "and walls came tumbling down." They were about to come tumbling down for Goode.

His grandparents had been slaves, while his own father had spent most of his adult life standing in front of a blast furnace at Carnegie Steel's Homestead Works. Goodeworked years there, too, and also held jobs as a janitor and as a YMCA manager after graduating from the University of Pittsburgh. Goode had had a heart attack while managing a housing project and was told to stop working for a time. He and his wife Mary had six children to feed. Time off was out of the question.

Goode was also close friends with Robinson who visited with him whenever he came through town. As Goode later recalled, "every time he came to town, he'd go to my house or say, 'Mal, pick me up, I want to talk to you.' And he and I and Mary would go out and discuss problems that affected Negro people in this country. He was as interested as any person in the country in the welfare of [Black] people."

When Robinson told him about the ABC opportunity, he told him to go ahead and apply, but to expect a long wait. The network did take its time sorting through the candidates, but in a 1992 special called “Pioneer of Color,” Goode told Doris McMillon of WGBH: “I had made up my mind that if I didn’t get it, I’d had disappointments before.

 "You get accustomed to disappointments when you walk into a restaurant and they say 'we don't serve coloreds here' — and I'm not talking about Mississippi, but Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania."

COVERING THE UNITED NATIONS

ABC finally settled on Goode, who joined Sept. 10, 1962. The network was reluctant to put him in the main newsroom, so instead sent him to an office where he would be assured no airtime — the United Nations.

In 1962, the United Nations was a network TV news backwater. As far as the networks were concerned, nothing much ever seemed to happen there, except deliberations about independence for a new African nation. NBC News had needed to be convinced to open a "bureau" there in 1946 by its distinguished war correspondent, John MacVane, who had covered the London Blitz and the landings at Normandy. In 1953, MacVane became ABC News' United Nations bureau chief and only employee. When Goode joined, it was expected MacVane would continue to be the only one to get any airtime.

'A BEAUTIFUL SUNDAY MORNING'

A few weeks after joining,  on a quiet Sunday, Goode was getting ready to fly home to his family in Pittsburgh when he got an urgent call from the news desk telling him to get to the UN. MacVane had left on a hunting trip with his son. As Goode later recalled, "things work out for you sometimes."

When he got to the office, Hagerty told Goode to get ready to go before a live camera — the Cuban missile crisis was underway.

In a few minutes, Goode said the first words ever uttered by a Black correspondent on network television:

"It's a beautiful Sunday morning in October here in New York, but I can't tell you what's going to happen before the sun goes down."

Goode would appear on the air 17 times in the following days — eight reports on TV, nine on radio.

The reaction to Goode was immediate. Hagerty shared one letter that Goode remembered in particular, from a woman in South Carolina who wrote, "I think that was a colored man I saw on TV who kept me abreast of all the things that happened last Sunday. He did a great job and if he is [Black] then this is America and that's the way it ought to be."

Goode said — ruefully — that letters like this "convinced ABC they hadn't made a mistake."

He remained with ABC News another 10 years, often reporting far beyond the UN — on desegregation, Civil Rights, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and its aftermath. He also traveled to Africa for the network, covering some of those new nations that he had first reported on from Manhattan's East Side. According to the State Historical Society of Missouri, where his papers are stored, he was jailed many times while reporting on Civil Rights issues.

After retiring in 1973, he remained a consultant with ABC but focused most of his time on giving hundreds of speeches at churches, colleges and NAACP chapters.

As he told McMillon, "I'd really like to be remembered as someone who tried to make life better for somebody — not just for Black people or white people, but better for humanity."

BOB TEAGUE: NEW YORK TV'S PIONEERING REPORTER

Bob Teague was full of rage, but you would never know that from looking at his work on TV, as generations of New Yorkers did, starting in 1963.

"Ramrod straight" is how his longtime colleague, Felipe Luciano, now describes him. "Straight-shooting, straight-talking, laconic, but when he did say things, there was an import to them."

But Luciano — the activist and founder of the New York chapter of the Latino civil rights group, the Young Lords, also spent years as a reporter and anchor at Ch. 4 — adds another word when describing his former colleague: "Enraged."

For nearly 30 years, ending with his retirement in 1991, Teague was a constant presence on Ch. 4 — a survivor of various management changes, anchor shifts, and wholesale makeovers at the station's troubled news operation. Day after day, night after night, there was Teague, reporting from the field, or studio, his work invariably sharp and concise. There was no vacuous crosstalk with an anchor, no fluff. He was a deeply serious and committed journalist.

'LETTERS TO A BLACK BOY'

Then there was the private Teague — well-hidden from public view. He was married to Matt Turney, a principal dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company. They later divorced (she died in 2009) and they had one son, Adam, who now lives in upstate New York. In 1968, after Adam's birth, Teague wrote his first book, "Letters to a Black Boy," inspired by James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time," which begins with the essay "My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation." He intended for the "letters" to be read by Adam when he turned 13. ((In 1982, Teague —  who had a gift for writing and for invective —  also wrote a scalding account the local TV news business called "Live and Off Color" which began with a rant against newsroom executives who had screwed up one of his stories.) 

In its opening paragraphs, Teague got straight to his theme: "All Black men are insane and that includes your daddy. It is safe to say that there has never been a sane Black man in this society. Almost any living thing would quickly go mad under the unrelenting exposure to the climate created and reserved for Black men in a white, racist society."

In the book, Teague writes not just of workplace microaggressions, but of racist indignities large and small. Of the white man who pressed money into his hand at a restaurant because he was wearing a dinner jacket and the man assumed Teague was a server who could get him a better table. Of the guest at a party who told him, "Why doesn't a sensible Negro like you try to use his influence to calm things down in Brooklyn?"

Of the reporter from Newsweek who arrived at Ch. 4 to write a story about "the problems a Negro faces in television."

"I'll tell you the problem the Negro faces in television," Teague unloaded. "It's the same problem he faces everywhere else in this lousy, stupid country — the fact that 99% of the whites he comes up against think exactly like that stupid editor who sent you here with that stupid narrow-minded question. They can't think of an individual Black man in terms of what makes him the particular man he happens to be — that he might have some special talent, that he might have something to contribute. They look at a Black man as a 'problem.'

"I'm tired," he continued, "of being approached as a Black iceberg, with most of my real self submerged in a sea of white assumptions."

On Nov. 20, 1967, the magazine did publish a special edition titled "The Negro in America: What Must be Done." Teague demanded that he not be quoted.

In 1968, the year "Letters to a Black Boy '' was published, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission, published its report identifying causes of the 1967 riots that had resulted in the deaths of 43 people in Detroit and 23 in Newark. Among many conclusions, the Commission placed sharp blame on the news media for hiring so few Black reporters. It spurred stations and newspapers across the country to hire new recruits — many sent to the so-called "ghettos" to report on the riots.

That was another source of ire for Teague, who saw the hiring boom as disingenuous, writing that employers were "stepping up [their] search for clean-cut, safely married super Black men — the blacker the better, partly because [the employer] wants to advertise himself as a reformed sinner, partly because he is learning to regard black skin as anti-riot insurance."

FOOTBALL VS. JOURNALISM

Teague was born Jan. 2, 1929, and raised in Tennessee. After his mother died in childbirth, he was brought up by his Aunt Lettie "who taught me to dream beyond my blackness," he wrote. Teague later moved to Wisconsin where he attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison on a football scholarship and became a star running back on the football team.

Teague had little interest in continuing with football. Inspired by Carl Rowan, a fellow Tennessean, and then a columnist with the Minneapolis Tribune, journalism was his passion.

One afternoon, Teague came home to learn from his father that he had secured a verbal agreement to join the Packers, for a $5,700 salary the first season. Teague said he wanted to go into journalism, but his father said there were no more than half-a-dozen Black reporters in the white media. Teague recalls that the two had a physical altercation — "a fist fight" — over the matter. Teague left home, later joining the Army, and then, the Milwaukee Journal.

In the early 1950s, Teague moved to New York, where he got work as a news writer for CBS Radio, then joined The New York Times as a sports copy editor in the fall of 1956. He soon became a sports reporter — his first byline appeared Sept. 4, 1959, making him the first Black reporter at the paper, as he later told his son.

 'PERFECTIONIST' JOINS CH. 4 NEWS

During the 1962 strike by the New York Typographical Union, TV stations hired idled newspaper reporters on a freelance basis. Teague got picked up by Ch. 4, then early the following year became full time. 

Teague was sent to cover the "unrest" in Black communities because “they felt Black reporters would be invulnerable in a riot,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press in 1981. He anchored an NBC News network program — "Harlem: Test for the North'' — and soon had a weekly anchoring gig on "Sunday Afternoon Report."

As a reporter, Luciano recalled, Teague was "a perfectionist. He'd go over his scripts, and by the time you'd see him do his live shots, he'd have gone over it word by word until he had it straight. That's just the way he was. I thought you had to be human at some point — a flesh-and-blood human reporting the story. But his approach was, I just have to tell the news, and give it fact by fact."

Luciano also remembers that Teague had problems with his son, Adam, for whom his "Letters" had been written years earlier.

 A SON REMEMBERS HIS FATHER

In a recent phone interview, Adam confirms that "Yes, there was a two-year gap in my teens when I was too different from him — a punk rocker growing up on the Lower East Side."

He laughs, "my Mohawk was too much for him."

The friction would continue because "he was a Black Republican and I'm mister liberal artsy guy. He always had the best of intentions [but] it was not easy."

Adam Teague is not sure why his father became more conservative as he got older but recalls that "when he was on his deathbed, his prize possessions were a photo of his three grandkids on his night table alongside an autographed [picture] from Rush Limbaugh saying 'get well soon.' "

He was also aware of his father's rage.

"It's ironic that that's the focus of ['Letters'] because growing up my parents did everything they could to shield me from racial injustice."

And then he recalled an incident. "I was learning to drive and my dad was teaching me down at the South Street Seaport. As we were driving in circles, two cars cut us off — one in front and one behind — and cops got out with guns drawn. We were two Black guys looking suspicious and they told us to put our hands on the hood.

In that moment, "My dad pulled out his ID and said, 'Bob Teague, News Center 4.' The world stopped. They apologized while he was getting their badge numbers."

His father "was flawed, well-meaning and uncompromising. You know those giant heads on Easter Island? He was like that — an immovable force. You don't know where it came from but you sure knew where he was going, and it was difficult."

Teague softened in his later years. "I think the biggest thing that happened to him for whatever reason was having a granddaughter. The grandkids made a huge difference," Adam Teague said.

"I used to joke that my father taught me exactly what not to do in terms of raising kids. Then you have kids of your own, and the most interesting and hurtful thing that they ever said to me was that I did not prepare them for being Black."

Bob Teague also set "Letters to a Black Boy" to music, singing the album's tracks himself — the backup soundtrack improbably jaunty and upbeat, the vocals strong, unpolished and even buoyant. (Teague later posted it to YouTube.)

"Though they insult you or ignore you, it has nothing to do with who you are / They are responding to the color of your skin / That's their own hang-up, their own special madness / So relax. You are not the target, my son / They don't even know you are there."

Adam Teague often listens to the record. "My favorite album of all time," he says.