Catching up with Carol Jenkins: From WNBC anchor to civil rights activist

From 1973 to 1996, WNBC/4's Carol Jenkins was one of the best-known reporters and anchors on New York TV. By 1997, local news and the anchor desk were in her rearview mirror.

Jenkins went on to become president and a co-founder of the influential Women's Media Center — to improve media coverage and the careers of women. She also cofounded the ERA Coalition, which wants a constitutional amendment to end discrimination based on gender. 

But Jenkins — who turns 80 in November — was just beginning. After the Ch. 4 years, she also became chair of the African Medical and Research Foundation, or AMREF — the famed "Flying Doctors" of Africa; led various civil rights initiatives; taught college seminars; wrote a book, and now hosts a weekly public affairs show, "Black America," for CUNY TV and a podcast on child poverty, "Invisible Americans " 

Did I mention that she was also a farmer? (Yep, a farmer.)

In a recent interview at Starbucks in the Empire State Building, Jenkins discussed a life that could have taken any number of turns. Hers has taken a few, each as remarkable — or improbable — as the next.

After a hardscrabble childhood on a farm in Lowndes County, Alabama, Jenkins moved with her mother and stepfather to Queens, where they settled on Merrick Boulevard in Jamaica. Jenkins later attended Boston University to become a teacher, then ditched that for a postgraduate degree in speech pathology at New York University. It's then that a long-shot idea started to form.

Black women didn't exactly anchor TV news in the mid-'60s because TV stations didn't exactly hire them. And then providentially, Jenkins had a bona fide role model — Melba Tolliver, who had joined WABC/7 in 1967. By 1968, Jenkins was an editorial secretary at CBS News, which led to a reporter's gig at WOR/9. She then joined Ch. 4 where she became a prominent reporter, weekend and "Live at 5" anchor, co-host of "Positively Black," and in 1993, co-anchor of the 6 p.m. news with Chuck Scarborough. She left to host her own short-lived talk show for WNYW/5 in 1996.

During those years, Jenkins also discovered her life's mission, but didn't know it just yet — to redress the inequalities facing women, Black women in particular, in the workplace.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Let's start at the beginning. Lowndes County?

Well, Lowndes County was then, and still is, one of the poorest counties in the entire country [but] my grandfather and grandmother were farmers. They had 15 children. My mother was one of those 15, and I wound up living there in the little house with my [mother and] grandparents. There was no indoor plumbing, but I don't want to set the scene as tragic because that's what farms were like. [My grandparents] raised 15 children there who went on to successful lives. We call my grandfather the first feminist in our family, because he sent all nine of his daughters to college while the boys stayed to work on the farm. When he was interviewed for the white newspaper, [the story] had a line that read, "when most Negro men are in the paper for having a leather strap around their neck" — meaning being lynched — "Billy Gardner is in the newspaper for having sent all nine of his daughters to college."

Your memories of the civil rights movement during that time?

When I went to college, my relatives who still lived in Alabama couldn't vote. It was that movement that allowed my family in Alabama to vote. My cousins sat at lunch counters, and rode buses — they were beaten — but I was in college at Boston University and spent more time marching over civil rights and Vietnam than going to class.

How did you get all the way from Lowndes to Queens?

My stepfather, Ed Jenkins, was a printer [who] created the very first pictorial magazine for Black soldiers [during World War II] called 'News Pic,' which detailed not only what soldiers were doing but also what was happening back home in Black America of the 1940s. So that's how I got my grounding in the news business — from my biological father, who was a reporter for the Black press and from my stepfather.

He had been working in a printing company where he created the magazine and then he and my mother opened a printing school — which they ran on Park Avenue South for 45 years and where they trained thousands of printers. I do remember the day the first computer was delivered to the school, and that's the day I [thought], "Well, that's the end of [printing]!"

What was the plan at BU?

Teaching, but my initial instinct was to go into the Foreign Service [except] there was that drumbeat [from her parents] — how are you going to earn a living? — so I majored in speech pathology and later got an advanced degree at NYU where I realized I was really interested in journalism. When I began to see women of color in the news I realized it was a possibility.

First job?

As a secretary at CBS News, in the department of editorials. Then I met Lem Tucker [one of network TV's first Black reporters] who was starting a news operation at WOR and I was hired there as a reporter. I remember my boss at CBS said, "Carol, you have a great job here and if you leave I'm not sure we'll be able to let you back into the secretarial pool." I said: "I think I'll take that chance."

What'd you do there?

Tony Guida and I were Bill Ryan's [Ch. 9's first anchor] sidekicks on the air but before the show went on the air, there were several months of preparation, and Lem taught me how to write and by the time the show debuted, I had a [on-air] reporting role. Ch. 9 was the best training ever — we did three, four stories a day. It was a real reporter's workout, and Lem was a great boss.

The career track then goes sideways, right?

Marlene Sanders [one of network TV's pioneering female anchors] suggested that I get to ABC News and I had only been at WOR briefly — certainly not long enough to do that. I thought it was possible to have a fast trajectory, but it was too early in my career so I went back to Ch. 4 [where Jenkins had earlier interviewed] and said I still want to work here. They hired me and I stayed for 23 years.

What was it like during those early years?

All we [female reporters] wanted to do, you know, was go to City Hall or the presidential conventions, but all that was very slow in coming. There was always that deference to male reporters and anchors, and some of that was baked into seniority. We all love Gabe [Pressman, Ch. 4's legendary political reporter who died in 2017], but he was always the guy who closed off the news conference by saying "thank you, Mr. Mayor" — and us kids were just getting ready to ask our questions . . .

What was your personal goal at Ch. 4?

I started as a reporter and wanted to anchor, and I did get to do that a lot on weekends — a lot of midnight, 3 a.m. shifts. I did a show that aired after Tom Snyder's. Otherwise, I followed the script, so to speak, because that's what you did in those days — a bit of everything. I did weekends, nights, whatever and loved it. But when I got to cover the [1990] release of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, that was the culmination of my reporting career and I knew there'd never be another story that would top that. From that point on, I was really ready to leave and look for something else.

Yet there were still six years to go and some of your best ones — including the 6 p.m. show that became a top-rated one. Why leave all that behind?

I went to Ch. 5 to start a talk show — "Carol Jenkins Live" — and the intent was to syndicate it. I wanted it to be a daily place for more serious conversation than what else was being offered [but] we had great fun and I loved it. When that was over, it was literally like, what else? There’s got to be another life, another world. What should I do? And that’s how I ended up in Virginia herding turkeys.

Herding, umm, turkeys? 

After Ch. 5, I realized that was probably the end of that full-fledged broadcasting career while my mother was in the midst of Alzheimer's and living in Virginia and I needed to take care of her. Fortunately, a friend of mine had a farm in Virginia, and she said come and help me — that was Sandy Lerner who along with her husband [Leonard Bosack] had cofounded Cisco. So I went to Virginia to work on her 4,000-acre farm . . . She had an ice-cream parlor there where I also worked, and every now and then, someone would come up and give me a close look, then say, "Don't you do the news?" And I'd say, "Yes — one scoop or two?"

Scooping ice cream and turkey-herding can get old pretty fast. I'm guessing that at this point, you got an offer you couldn't refuse?

I got a call from Gloria [Steinem], and she said, "Carol, what are you doing?" And I said right at this minute, I'm herding turkeys. She said, "Carol, come up! We're gathering women to talk about this emergency we have, which is not getting better unless we do something." We had known each other for years — I had interviewed her — and so I go and Jane Fonda is in the room, [along with former PBS and CNN Productions president] Pat Mitchell and at the end of the meeting, they said, "Carol, you have to come back to New York to do this." My mother had died by this point, so I was able to.

Was inequality in pay and opportunity something that bugged you during the NBC years?

We would have conversations about the pay — the differential and the opportunity and promotion differential, too. That was always the case throughout those years where [a male anchor] sitting next to you would be making 10 times more than you. That discrepancy still exists today in this country — equal pay for Black and Latino women. It drives me crazy.

The Women's Media Center has been a leader in advocating for women's workplace equality — notably in the media — since its founding in 2005, but how did it all start?

After I left [Ch. 4, the founders], Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda and [the poet and novelist] Robin Morgan decided that things were not getting better, and that stories [about women in the media] were always secondary, and how do we grapple with this problem?

And the core idea was?

Gloria always said that the reason we're not in the history books is that we're not in the daily media, and that's where the history is gathered, so it's essential we have to deal with the media, to make certain there's an ongoing record of what's happening to women . . . But it wasn't simply remediation of media coverage but also to train women: How do you tell your story, and how do you manage the news media?

What's the picture right now?

We started this in the hope that we'd go out of business, but there is even some regression, especially with the stories being told about women of color. That was the whole concept of the Women's Media Center — [media] participation and representation, and how to fix that. What we're seeing now is that there are a lot of women of color losing their positions or leaving the [media] industry because of an anti-DEI [diversity, equity, inclusion] backlash. The Women's Media Center has its work cut out for it, almost in perpetuity.

Meanwhile, you also found time to pick up the cause launched by Alice Paul and Crystal Eastman all the way back in 1923 — the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment] Coalition and Fund for Women's Equality.

I've been doing that for 10 years, and was part of the founding board. The Constitution does not include equality for women, and until you fix that there's going to be all sorts of discrimination against women. There's a great deal of work to be done [but] we are getting closer than we have ever been and we have met all the requirements to amend the Constitution. When we started this, people thought we were insane and now we're extremely close. Will it happen in our lifetimes? Yes.

I did want to ask about your uncle, A.G. Gaston, a multimillionaire in a fully segregated south, whom you wrote about with your daughter [Elizabeth Gardner Hines] — "Black Titan," in 2005, and who sounds like a major influence on you. 

He was a multimillionaire in Birmingham, Alabama, and still could not go in the front door of any restaurant there — but he owned funeral homes, banks, real estate, a business college, radio stations, everything — and he was doing it for Black consumers at the time. He was a huge contributor to the life of Birmingham then later sold [the company] to his employees — which made his grandchildren a little angry [laughs] — and died at the age of 103 [in 1996].

You're nearly 80 — any regrets, or to rephrase this, do you wish you'd spent your entire career doing what seems to come to you so naturally right now, as a civil rights activist?

Fortunately, I don't regret anything. I mean, there are things that I wish had not happened, or I had done or wished I'd done better. But in terms of major regrets, no. I'm extremely grateful for my news career — for still doing "Black America."