Mal Goode, Pioneering Reporter, Receives His Due In New Book

Jackie Robinson had been pressuring his contacts at ABC to hire a Black reporter, and his pressure resulted in Goode being hired as the company's UN bureau reporter.

Mal Goode, the Pittsburgh reporter who broke barriers in broadcast journalism as the first Black television reporter for a national network is finally getting his just due nearly 30 years after his death in 1995.

WESA reports, a new documentary, Mal Goode Reporting, sheds light on the reporter’s forgotten achievements. Goode, who was good friends with Jackie Robinson, who broke baseball’s color line, has not had the same posthumous honor as Robinson, but that does not mean his accomplishment is any less relevant.

Goode broke into journalism after surviving a heart attack at 40-years-old. Goode was looking for lighter work and he was hired by The Pittsburgh Courier. At the time, the Courier was the most widely circulated Black newspaper in the country. Shortly after KQV radio offered the paper airtime to produce news segments, Goode, who was a devoted advocate for integration, became the voice of Black Pittsburgh.

It was due to Jackie Robinson’s advocacy that Goode was given the opportunity to break the broadcast color barrier a decade and a half after his friend. Robinson pressured his contacts at ABC to hire a Black reporter, and that pressure resulted in Goode being hired as the company’s UN bureau reporter. Goode may have had an uneventful tenure with ABC, were it not for the Cuban Missile Crisis, which occurred while the UN bureau chief was on vacation, giving Goode his opportunity to make history.

Goode later recalled his words in an interview, “I said, ‘It’s a beautiful Sunday morning in October here in New York, but I can’t tell you what’s going to happen before the sun goes down. But the Secretary-General U Thant is going to meet with the principals … and we’ll keep you posted all day long.”

As news reports go, it seemed fairly unremarkable, but for his family, it represented an opportunity to celebrate him. Rosalia Parker, Goode’s daughter, told the outlet that she remembers being excited that her father was on television.

“Oh my goodness, we were screaming!” Parker recalled. “We were calling relatives, and you know, ‘Daddy’s on TV!’ People were calling the house and [saying], ‘Is that Mal on TV?’”

Goode and his wife, Mary, were both buried in Pittsburgh, and upon obtaining a copy of the biography, their eldest daughter, Roberta Goode Wilburn took a copy to their gravesite and told NPR that her father’s work still brings her back to ABC News. She also told WESA that she recognizes his legacy whenever she sees a Black reporter on their network. “I say, ‘Well, I know whose shoulders you stand on. He was my father, he was the first!”

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