Tony Brown was a television journalist, broadcaster, and educator who spent more than five decades building Black American media and who is best remembered as the host of Tony Brown's Journal, the public affairs programme that became the longest-running Black-produced television series in American history. He died on 17 June 2026 in Newport News, Virginia, from coronary heart disease at the age of 93.
He was born William Anthony Brown on 11 April 1933 in Charleston, West Virginia, into a household that reflected the constraints and the possibilities of Black working-class life in the segregated South.