UPFRONT

relocated to Memphis—Jackson’s “first big market”—where, as a Black reporter in the South, he experienced racism first hand in ways he hadn’t before.

Especially when he crossed the border into Mississippi.

“In the 1980s, it was very frightening,” he recalled. “If I was doing a story [in Mississippi], I had to have a white photographer with me. Or if we were sending a Black photographer, he’d be with a white reporter. I mean, it was an unwritten rule. We just did not send two people into that part of our coverage.”

The decade ahead saw local networks scrambling to hire the same Black talent that larger networks, like ones in New York and Los Angeles, had. The same, Jackson said, was brewing in Cleveland, where, in 1983, Leon Bibb, Al Roker and Noah Nelson were developing chops at NBC-owned WKYC.

Jackson was brought in to the former station that year as a general broadcaster. He was only 26, NBC’s youngest person on air in 1983.

“It was interesting because at that time, I think there was awakening in the industry that there were not enough African Americans on TV,” Jackson said. “So to be a young, experienced African American reporter—it meant something.”