?
?
December 1, 2003
?
HAL WALKER, AWARD-WINNING JOURNALIST
AND THE FIRST AFRICAN AMERICAN TO BE A CORRESPONDENT FOR CBS NEWS, IS DEAD AT 70
?
???????????? Award-winning journalist Hal Walker, the first African American to be a correspondent for CBS News, died Nov. 25 at his home in Reston, Va. He was 70 and had been suffering from prostate cancer. ?
???????????? Walker was one of the first black faces viewers saw on national television news in the 1960s, helping to pave the way for more African Americans who came to network television news in the 1970s and '80s. ?
???????????? Walker's career at CBS News spanned 12 years and was, at the time, the longest tenure an African American held as national television correspondent. He covered foreign and domestic stories from Washington, including the inaugurations of Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.? He also distinguished himself reporting from Capitol Hill, on campus disorders at Cornell University and for reporting a memorable "One Year Later" segment on the riot-torn areas of the nation's capital -- all for the "CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite." He also reported on two broadcasts of the seven-part "Of Black America" series in the summer of 1968, right after joining the Network. ?
?It was Walker's award-winning coverage of race relations while he worked at the CBS local Washington television affiliate WTOP (now WUSA) that attracted network executives to him. Walker won a local Emmy and the Capitol Press Club's "Journalist of the Year" award for anchoring a one-hour WTOP Special Report, "A Dialogue with Whitey," about the Washington riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King in April 1968. ?
The next month, Walker was hired by CBS News in the Washington Bureau as a reporter. One of his first assignments was to cover the funeral of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. He covered his first political convention in Miami at the Republican National Convention that August.? He was promoted to correspondent in September 1969. ?
He continued his assignments from Washington, including covering the White House with Dan Rather and Bob Pierpoint, until 1977, when he was assigned to the CBS News bureau in Bonn, West Germany. ?
He left CBS News in 1980 to become the Bonn bureau chief for ABC News.? He reported on European and Middle Eastern stories for ABC from Frankfurt, where he served as bureau chief, and then London. He retired from the London Bureau of ABC News in 1995.

?(More)

CBS News...2
?
?
Harold Walker was born in Darlington, S.C. and raised in New York City. He was graduated from Denison University in Ohio with a B.A. in 1954, studying English and theater. Shortly after graduation, he tried his hand at acting in New York City, but abandoned that to enlist in the Army, serving from November 1954 until January1958. ????????????
???????????? Walker worked as a writer and editor for the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene beginning in 1959, and then for the New York State Department of Education until joining the staff of WTOP Television News in Washington in April of 1963. ?
???????????? He is survived by his wife, Diane, and daughters Alison, Sarah and a son, Stephen, all by a previous marriage, and four grandchildren. ?
*??? *??? *
?
Press Contact Kevin Tedesco 212/975-2329 kev@cbsnews.com ?
?
?