Tony Brown, legendary host and executive producer of television’s pioneering “Black Journal,” later “Tony Brown’s Journal,” and founding dean of the journalism school at Howard University, died June 17 at his home in Newport News, Va., his office announced Friday. He was 93 and died of coronary heart disease.
An obituary prepared by his office said “Tony Brown’s Journal” was the longest-running series in the history of the PBS network. “Black Journal” ran from 1968 until 2008, when it changed its name to “Tony Brown’s Journal.” The show was part of a wave of Black news and public affairs programs that followed the uprisings of the 1960s and the Kerner Commission’s [PDF] 1968 admonition that almost all media reporting on the Black community “reflects the biases, the paternalism, the indifference of white America.”
When “Tony Brown’s Journal” was revived in 2018, the promotional material said, “For over 50 years, Brown has a pioneer among African-American broadcasters and educators. Never shying away from controversy, his program was one of the first to report nationally on the infamous ‘Tuskegee Experiments,’ (video) he shined a spotlight on the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921 and offered a platform for a galaxy of African-American luminaries.
“Brown has won numerous industry awards and served as Founding Dean of Howard University’s School of Communication and later Dean of Hampton University’s School of Journalism and Communications. . . . ”
A video of this journalist interviewing psychiatrist Francis Cress Welsing on Brown’s show in 1976 is still circulating on the internet. Hearing that, another journalism veteran exclaimed, “Every Black person I knew watched the Tony Brown show.”
Brown’s cremation is listed on the website of the Neptune Society of Virginia Beach, Va. The official obituary says, “No memorial or public service has been planned at this time.”