Liz Walker

Three years after she arrived in Boston in 1980, Liz Walker was already regularly greeted on the streets. The headline of a 1983 Boston Magazine article profiling the first Black woman to co-anchor a Boston newscast boldly proclaimed, “Liz! Can a Six-Foot-One Black Woman Make It in Boston? You’re Looking at Her, Baby.”1 Almost four decades later, Reverend Liz Walker is still a well-known and highly respected figure in the Boston community.

Walker’s father was a Congregational minister and her stepmother was a schoolteacher (her birth mother died in childbirth).2 She grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, just a few blocks away from Little Rock Central High School, where the “Little Rock Nine” were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school after enrolling in 1957. The tensions eventually led to intervention by the Arkansas National Guard and U.S. Army. “The city I loved turned into a warzone,” Walker recalled in a speech at Emmanuel College in 2015. “I was raised to be part of the struggle.”3

After graduating from Olivet College in Michigan with a degree in communications, Walker took a job at KATV back home in Little Rock, working her way up from public affairs to an on-air position. She got into the TV business because she thought she could “make a difference, shed light on darkness, and change things,” she told the Boston Globe in 2007.4 After moving on to KMGH-TV in Denver and KRON in San Francisco, she thought WBZ, now CBS Boston, would just be a temporary stint. Instead, she ruled the Boston airwaves as one-half of WBZ’s star nighttime anchor team from 1981 to 1999, along with Jack Williams.

When Walker became Boston’s first black anchor weekdays, in 1981, none of the city’s TV stations had a Black general manager or employed more than five Black reporters, according to a Boston Globereport on Feb 1, 1981,⁵at the time. Boston’s Black anchors had “traditionally been confined to the weekend ghetto,” which is why the city lagged behind other markets across the country. So at 29, Walker broke a significant racial barrier in Boston at news channel 4, a CBS owned and operated station.

Boston was a “rough city” compared to San Francisco, where she had moved from. “Every weekend last summer, it seemed that some kid was getting beaten up because of his or her color. It was new to me. San Francisco has bizarre stuff like Jonestown and Patti Hearst — but not a racial beating a week,” Walker told the Globein the same 1981 article.⁵Also, “She has discovered that certain stories in hostile white neighborhoods are off limits for black reporters — for their own safety. She has been taken aback by the large number of racially motivated incidents,” according to the article.

Back when she was just starting out at WBZ, “I was the new girl on the block, and Boston is a very tough audience to please,” Walker said in the 1983 Boston magazine profile.¹“You really have to prove yourself for a long time. I almost didn’t last.” Initially, WBZ viewer focus groups complained the 6’1” anchor was too big and loud. But, by the time the profile was written a few years later, the same audiences would “applaud the generosity of her on-screen persona,” according to the 1983 story.

As a prominent anchor, Walker spent much of her time off-screen responding to guest appearance requests and story ideas.

She is particularly sensitive to requests from the black community. Until recently, Liz’s involvement had been peripheral (she donates fees for her speaking engagements to the Roxbury YMCA), and she has been working to change that. “But it’s so hard to get involved when you’re so busy, and especially because I live in Lexington.”

Her job, despite its high visibility, hasn’t helped much either. When racial issues come up on the news, the station management prefers not to send Liz to cover them.

“They [the station managers] say, ‘We can’t send Liz into a white neighborhood [for these stories],’ but they can’t send me to Roxbury either, because I’m media and people in Roxbury don’t trust media. It’s a double bind.”

— Liz Walker to Jill Bloom; “Liz! Can a Six-Foot-One Black Woman Make It in Boston? You’re Looking at Her, Baby” in Boston magazine, Sept. 1983¹

In 1987, Walker startled Boston by announcing she was pregnant while still single with no plans to marry. At a time where local television personalities were both celebrities and thought of as friends in traditional Boston, she dared to defy the norm. Her family took the news hard, but her biggest fear was that she would be fired. She was “arguably the town’s most popular anchor” at the time, and her decision might’ve affect Channel 4’s image, according to the 1989 Bostonprofile headlined “Private Matter, Public Affair.”²With her agent, the 36-year-old crafted the initial public announcement by handing the story to the Boston Globe. Though the story ran discreetly in the Living section with the headline, “Liz Walker Is Expecting,”⁶soon everyone from gossip columns to 60 Minuteswanted to get her story. Walker had no desire to speak more publicly than she already had, and turned down almost every appearance request. The most vocal reaction was negative, with some Black clergy arguing she had compromised her position as a local celebrity and responsibility as a role model for Black teenagers.

“Both as a person of color and as a local celebrity, Walker has always believed that she has a special responsibility to the Black community. Even as a youngster in 1963, she was one of a handful of students who helped desegregate the junior high schools in Little Rock. ‘In a way, you’re a kind of conduit for them. You’re a conduit for everybody, but particularly for the Black community,’ she says,” according to the Boston magazine story.²

Although Walker was being criticized in her community, she also found support. She gave an example of support from the black community that was not reported in the press, such as when the chairwoman of trustees for the Concord Baptist Church in the South End reached out to her.

“She called me and said, ‘Look, don’t you let these other people get to you.’ She was so warm, so nice, that I went to the church that Sunday on my own with a friend. And all the old sisters of the church were having a dinner. They took me under their wing and said, ‘Don’t you worry. It’s all right.’ So I didn’t really feel as though I had been betrayed by the black community. Those were the things that made me believe God brings people into your life just when you need them.”

— Liz Walker to Terry Ann Knopf; “Private Matter, Public Affair” in Boston magazine, Jan. 1989²

Nicholas Charles Walker was born on Sunday, November 29, 1987, and Liz Walker returned to work on January 25, 1988, giving the media no quotes or responses. Looking back, would she do it all again? “Are you kidding? Are you crazy? Have you seen my son? I have no regrets,” she told Bostonmagazine.²

In 2001, Walker joined a human rights organization on a trip to Sudan. Her experiences there participating in the liberation of enslaved women and children led to co-found My Sister’s Keeper, an organization to help Sudanese women and children.⁷

After 25 years at WBZ, the veteran achor stepped back from the grind of daily news and debuted “Sunday with Liz Walker,” a news magazine that highlighted local people and organizations in 2005. “We do stories about local people doing good and giving to their community and the rest of the world,” she said, according to a press release at the time.⁸

That same year, she graduated from Harvard Divinity School master’s degree focusing on religion and women’s issues, and was pursuing ordination in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. She went off air permanently in 2008 and began working at Bethel A.M.E. In 2011, Walker served as a transitional leader Roxbury Presbyterian Church temporarily, and was officially installed as reverend in 2014, where she still serves today.⁹

Student Biography:

Erica Yee (CIS’20) is a combined journalism and information science major. She is an active member of InterVarsity Multiethnic Christian Fellowship and editor at NU Sci, a student-run campus science magazine. Originally from Oakland, California, she enjoys exploring Boston and experiencing real seasons.

Richard Harris, the Assistant Dean of Academic Scholarship, Mentoring and Outreach and the Director of the NU Program in Multicultural Engineering (NUPRIME), was a student at Northeastern from 1984 to 1989, and remembers Jean McGuire’s impact on him, and other Black students on campus.

As a young man coming from Brooklyn, Dean Harris described feeling a “sense of connectedness” to the Black neighborhoods of Boston. At Northeastern, Dean Harris found community at the African American Institute, which he described as a “gathering place” where he would see Jean McGuire and other elders regularly. “I remember her being a presence on campus back in those days,” he recalled. “Jean McGuire, John D. O’Bryant, Ellen Jackson, Mel King, and others like that were always coming through and being a mainstay and helping us understand the political issues.”

It was from sitting at the feet of these leaders and activists, that Dean Harris and other Black students learned how to lead. “For many of us,” he explained, “I think we were the [beneficiaries] of individuals like her who were able to give us a sense of what it means to give back, what it means to be a servant leader and developing that servant leadership kind of mindset, and sometimes being unsung, underappreciated, and sometimes even questioned by your own…I think Jean really embodied that.” According to Dean Harris, their exposure to the organizing meetings held by elders at the Institute and guidance from those like Jean McGuire helped shape their own activism as they organized to protest apartheid and advocate for divestment from South Africa.

When asked about the continuing legacy of Jean McGuire and other elders from that time, Dean Harris spoke about the importance for today’s generation to understand their history, saying “I think we don’t do a great job of telling our stories, of identifying our heroes and sheroes, making the connections fully understood of the people who have come before you. So for me, it’s always important to make those connections for [students].” Dean Harris continues to carry out Jean McGuire’s legacy at Northeastern today, in his work as the dean of engineering minority admissions and in his mentorship of Black students in the Black Engineering Student Society.