Joan Murray (journalist)

Murray was born November 6, 1937, in Ithaca, New York. She began her professional life as a court reporter, then becoming a secretary in the Press Department of CBS-TV in New York City, and a secretary to Allen Funt of Candid Camera. She has also worked as a writer for "Women on the Move", an NBC daytime program hosted by television personality Kitty Carlisle. Joan and her twin sister appeared in both print and television commercials targeting the African-American consumer. In her life, Joan accomplished many firsts as a professional African-American woman. In April 1965, she became the first African-American newswoman employed by a major television station – WCBS (Channel 2, New York City). She was the first, and only, African-American woman to ever sit on the panel for the classic CBS program What's My Line?. An accomplished aviator, she was the first African-American woman pilot to participate in the famed Woman's Air Derby, a grueling and dangerous 9-day air race from Santa Monica, California, to Cleveland, Ohio. She has won many awards, including the Mademoiselle Award for Outstanding Achievement, the Urban League’s Certificate of Merit, and the Mary McLeod Bethune Achievement Award from the National Council of Negro Women. In 1969 she left WCBS to co-found one of the first African-American advertising agencies, the Zebra Agency, which had numerous national advertisers. In 1967, Pepsi Cola, determined to open a market that had been largely overlooked by rival Coca-Cola, sponsored "The Joan Murray" radio series, which was produced and nationally syndicated in the U.S. by Hartwest Productions, Inc.[2]

Murray has been mentioned in Ebony magazine several times. She was featured in an article for Ebony in 1966 about black women who were breaking into television reporting. The article was called "TV News Hens". The three women included Murray of WCBS-TV, Trudy Haynes of KYW-TV, and Edith Huggins of WCAU-TV.[3]

In her retirement, Murray lived in upstate New York; she has donated her archival materials to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in Harlem, New York City. She died on December 18, 2021, at the age of 84.[4]